To be a successful manager, I think you need to feel a bit that you are pretending to do your job while everybody around you is very competent. However it is not enough because some people in that position go in for management by coverup. The successes are the ones who think “…so I’m not going to pretend to be omniscient and I’m going to encourage people to be proactive.”
On my first day in a school vacation job my new boss - a man who, by the way, wore a bespoke suit and would never dream of going out into the City of London without a bowler hat - explained what needed doing and then said “Mind you, that’s just what I think. If you’ve got a better idea, tell me.” I am a 16 year old kid, I have maths, English and French O level. I am now willing to follow this man to the end of the Earth (and he rose incredibly fast in the company, by the way).
I’ve encountered other people like this and I later realised that most of them had been commissioned in WW2, which meant that as inexperienced lieutenants they had to rely on experienced NCOs a great deal.
I think a definite factor in entitled white male culture is that this generation has never been in that position - of having to learn from and rely on older more experienced people from very different backgrounds.
You and me both. I was in that situation, and I felt like everybody hated me because I couldn’t handhold them through their work, or thought I was incompetent because I didn’t know all the nuts and bolts of some very specialized task. Apparently only a few people thought that, and they were the ones who were unpleasant to work with… But still, the idea that I was letting people down by not doing the lions share of the work had caused me so much stress.
Because I’ve rolled them too tightly, the middle pops up and out of one of the rolls.
So that’s why that happens!
Scribbles furiously on his cinnamon roll recipe
Seriously, though, if you’re going to include a cinnamon roll recipe (or any recipe) as part of an apology, it’d better be a damned good recipe. As opposed to using pizza dough as part of a cinnamon roll.
I agree with the author on all but one point:
The recipe calls for too much icing, and the result is that the rolls are drenched in it.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AND THERE HAS NEVER BEEN ANY SUCH THING AS “TOO MUCH ICING.”
(ETA: Wait, his icing is just water, icing sugar, and vanilla?! Cinnamon roll icing requires cream cheese! And lemon juice! If I had cause to doubt accusations that Mario Batali is a monster, this recipe would dispel them all)
This article is genius. Wow. He could not even give a proper recipe with his apology. Or an appropriate one. Could have been for Gingerbread Women that are cut into shapes showing they are super awesome, or aggressively getting out their anger on menz, or into Goddesses. Or perhaps some kind of woke comfort soup.
That was a great article all around. Hilarious and thought provoking at the same time. My only quibble is that paragraph where she called Trump a “sexual deviant” and went on about how great Hillary Clinton was. But I’ll let it slide.
I kinda get what that is. When I have extra pizza dough (is that a thing?) I coat the scraps in cinnamon and sugar, and pan fry in butter. However, this is not that, and anyone who has eaten either of those things knows it clearly. This is more a one trick pony type of thing. Like, someone who knows how to make pizza dough but didn’t want to learn a second kind of dough That, or the equally lazy, “we’re making A but with B instead, look how innovative!”
It’s something that looks like an erection, coated with insane amounts of sticky white stuff. Basically the opposite of:
There’s something of a generational split on #metoo. I doubt my mother is the only Boomer who doesn’t think casual sexism is a problem, but rather something women just have to put up with. She also thinks some of the outed predators are being unfairly persecuted. I had to get a little mean with her because it’s the constant, pervasive harassment that breeds an atmosphere where sexual assault and worse crimes are minimized resulting in the perpetrators almost never facing consequences. We’re at a watershed moment in history where men have been put on notice that there will be consequences, and their unearned privilege is running out.
The one thing she didn’t mention that I would have is the rolls look very nice, but they’re really not. Almost like they’re a metaphor for something.
ETA: I’m glad she commented about how the dough isn’t suitable for this kind of baking, because I’ve been wondering about that since they made the news.
My Mom was born in 1940, so technically pre-boom, but she still got lumped in with them all her life. (We lost her in '97) She always said she missed the sexual revolution because she was a housewife with a baby in 1960. That all said…
She would have LOVED this moment. She helped organize Toronto’s first feminist conference. And she called out sexism and harassment as much as she was able to as a single working mom. She laid a lot of groundwork for me and didn’t laugh at me when I was a teenage idiot “cool girl”. #notallboomers?
Here’s what I think is the real reason: I would say that, on average, women of her generation endured MORE sexual harassment, abuse, and assault than the current youngest adult generation. Back then, it was 100% normal, so they had to sublimate their feelings. They had to pretend it was OK. Showing support for #MeToo means finally facing a lot of pain and ugliness in their own past. It’s a lot easier to just keep doing what they’ve been doing for decades: pretend it isn’t a big deal.
My mum has to be, ah, reminded about the context, that most if not all of the women lodging complaints were not free to just walk away and ignore the perp without consequences. After a reminder or two she agrees.
My mom raised me on Ms. Magazine, and she was an award winning career teacher, but she always felt hampered by the limited career choices of her generation. She has her Masters degree and has always advocated for education.
Yet yet, it has taken me so long to see how damaging the 50’s mindset was. How she really bought into the good girls don’t thing, the walk down the aisle a virgin thing.
Because her social life was so restricted growing up, due to the terror of pregnancy and all the social structures around that, when she started dating after divorcing my dad, it was like watching teenager make all the wrong mistakes. (She married my dad right out of college - in some versions of her history she says this is because by that time she was considered in her day and age to be getting long in the tooth.)
From what I can tell, my mom never had a #metoo experience growing up (except some story about a strange guy trying to grope her in a movie theater) because she was never ever allowed to be alone with any man.
Here is my mother’s revealing story about going to college in the 50’s.
She went to Newcomb, the women’s college at Tulane University. Now, I also attended Newcomb but by the time I got there the classes of the men’s college and the women’s college were all mixed together and the only difference was the piece of paper you got at the end of the experience. But in Mom’s day, the women’s college was separate and restricted to a few specific buildings.
The main reason Mom attended Tulane, AKA “Jewlane”, is that it has about 40% Jewish population. Back then, the reason a Jewish woman attended a college with a medical school was to land herself a good doctor husband and earn her Mrs.
She told me that on Friday nights, you could tell which lucky girl had a date that night, because the girls with dates would come to class with their hair rolled up around juice cans.
So yeah, college was different then, and dating was different for sure.
That, or the equally lazy, “we’re making A but with B instead, look how innovative!”
