Julie Pippert: Using My Words

Right now, my career is going well. It has been a pretty good run but that's 95% nose to the grindstone and 5% luck. Or thereabouts. I do what I do and have what I have because I've made and seized opportunities, taken risks, sucked it up for a lot of years, and worked hard. When I moved to Texas five years ago I had to transition my career a bit. Not a huge demand for managing editors at major publishers here, unless you happen to be in educational publishing, which I wasn't (for good reason). So I had to parlay my skills into actual work, and it has been a five year journey. I hit a point of frustration not too long ago when I'd get some opportunities, but...without the concept of pay attached. For some reason, these people would schedule meetings with me and assume I'd do all this work and promotion for them just have content for my blog. What a joke. Like other bloggers, I do not lack for content on my blog. I lack for time to write up and publish all the conten...

When I sit back and think, I realize that I first began working in 1985. I took a job as a cashier at a local family-style restaurant. It was pure nepotism because my aunt knew the owners, but that also meant I had to be an exemplary employee or the family would hear about it and that would not bode well for me. I was always on time, diligent, and polite to customers. Back then, we were a fairly low tech society compared to now. For example, I had no cell phone with text messaging to distract myself with while I stood idle at the register between rushes of people. Instead, I'd reconcile my register or scrub down the counter. I also had no camera in my cell phone with which to photograph myself at work, nor did I have an online profile to which I could post that photo and some pithy commentary about how many times I'd had to dodge the pervy manager's grabby hands. It was more than a decade past that before I joined some rudimentary online sites and began building an online p...

On a Monday years ago I walked into the office at 8 a.m. like I did every day of the work week. Never mind how many years or which office because it doesn't really matter; it could be any office at almost any time in the last 20 years for almost anyone. I dropped my things at my desk, and shuffled to the break room for a cup of coffee. This is how we always started our days, especially Mondays, when you needed to ease back into the work "family" and work frame of mind. Everyone gathered near the coffeepot, always standing, never sitting, that way, if the boss walked in, you could pretend you'd only been there for a minute, just getting a cup of joe, not gabbing over cup number two 10 minutes later. That morning I walked in and two male colleagues were standing in front of the pot. They were, as usual, speaking in numbers, which meant sports. Then they said stroke, and I knew they meant golf. I didn't give it a second thought. As usual I had to walk up, pause and h...

Teaching my girls how to pull the rope for themselves. It was a pretty innocuous mother's club meeting, and we were talking about babysitters. I don't even recall why it came up, the talk about babysitters. Conversation unrolls so organically in these meetings, these times we get together, without children, and get to just talk. But sitters came up in conversation and the turn of that conversation surprised me. Greatly. Apparently around here it's bad manners to quote an hourly rate for one's babysitting services. "You know what gets me?" a mom said, "You know what sitters I prefer? Who I pay the most to? The ones who say 'oh just pay me whatever.'" She went on to explain that (and this is my paraphrase not her exact statement) to her, it came across as very forward, rude even, when these sitters said they charged X dollars per hour. My mind rolled that concept around for a minute: it's cheeky and rude to state upfront how much you charg...

When it comes to sexual harassment, everybody---especially lawyers and juries and panels and so forth---wants to hear about the big egregious examples. However, those big things are usually so obviously and clearly wrong that even a person in the middle of the situation knows it is wrong, not okay. That's not usually the part that hurts the most, although it's the part that gets the most attention. The problem with the big things, when you are in the situation, is figuring out how to handle it. We're all cautioned to be nice, but women especially are taught and reinforced to be kind and thoughtful, sometimes to their own detriment. I don't want to go off on a tangent and talk too much about what modern American and similar cultures tell women about who they are supposed to be and how that---as well-meaning as it usually is---can often be the very tool that abusers and harassers use. But I will say that we---culture, society and parent---can unintentionally teach our dau...