By: GateHouse News Service

Tip of the Week

Valentine’s Day is coming, and that means there might be romance in the air at your workplace. Here are five tips from business etiquette expert Barbara Pachter, author of the book “NewRules@Work: 79 Etiquette Tips, Tools, and Techniques to Get Ahead and Stay Ahead,” to help you and your significant other share a copier by day and a bedroom by night without hurting your professional image:

1. Do not broadcast your relationship on any social media sites. Keep the relationship private. Your co-workers do not need to know the intimate details of your romance. No posting information or photos about your latest love interest on Facebook or sending tweets about it. You never know who will see them.

2. No giant billboards in Times Square! If the relationship fails, be professional and adult about it. A recent billboard in New York publicly announced the affair between Charles Phillips, co-president of Oracle Corporation, and his mistress. Even if you have been jilted and the relationship ends badly, you cannot vent your negative feelings in public. This is the risk of office relationships. They sometimes don’t work out and then you have to continue to see or work with the person.

3. No physical contact in the office. No romantic displays. No secret kissing, caressing, hand holding or sex in the office. This also includes your behavior at office parties.

4. Don’t e-mail X-rated Valentine’s Day cards. E-mail is not private. Do not mail an unsigned Valentine’s Day card to a co-worker. Being a secret admirer is not a corporate concept.

5. Your boss shouldn’t be your valentine. Relationships are tricky enough without your boss or subordinate being your valentine. If you are dating your boss, have your reporting relationship changed.

Source: McPhersonSentinel.com

By: Kirk Honeycutt

(Pic)-Cast member Meryl Streep arrives for the world premiere of ‘It’s Complicated’ in New York December 9, 2009. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - “It’s Complicated” is a middle-aged sex comedy but with more rom-com urges than farcical ones.

It’s from writer-director Nancy Meyers, who has found a comfort zone in gentle, even warm comedies about older adults facing complications that re-direct their lives into pleasantly unexpected emotional channels. “Complicated” forges ahead with these themes. Because no one else in Hollywood seemingly makes movies for middle-aged moviegoers, especially women, Meyers inevitably scores box-office successes, and this one should forge ahead in that area, too. Universal releases the film Christmas Day.

What Meyers doesn’t do is take chances. She sticks to formula and predictability. In “Complicated,” this is as much a matter of casting as writing.

Meryl Streep, apparently not wasting any cooking lessons she had for “Julie & Julia,” plays a divorced owner/pastry chef of a successful Santa Barbara bakery/restaurant. She is only now coming to terms with her divorce from Alec Baldwin, who dumped her 10 years earlier for a much younger woman. Even so, shopping for plastic surgery and building an extension to her rustic house indicate a certain restlessness despite her apparent equanimity.

The graduation of one of their three grown children on the East Coast throws her together with her ex at a time when his wife (Lake Bell) isn’t around. Wine flows, sparks fly and — you would never guess, but then again, you probably will — the two launch an unplanned, drunken affair. Suddenly, Streep is the “other” woman.

But the casting foreshadows most of the dramatic turns. Baldwin has developed a second career in films and television by more or less spoofing his macho image. So his character, a comic exaggeration of male befuddlement with womankind, is never a credible life choice for the restaurateur. Then, too, Steve Martin has just walked in: He’s the architect who is going to change her life with that home extension, and you know, even though he’s more subdued than you might expect, that he isn’t in the story to discuss the importance of retaining walls.

In the movie comedy world dominated by Judd Apatow, Meyer’s idea of naughtiness is charmingly quaint. The older adults — hide this from the kids — smoke pot! Yes, they do. Streep drops her bathrobe to expose her over-50-year-old body just as Diane Keaton did in Meyers’ “Something’s Gotta Give.” (No, of course you don’t see anything.) The film’s really racy moment comes when Baldwin’s private parts are accidentally Skyped to an unwilling viewer.

The near-farcical maneuvers by the parents in and around their kids (Caitlin Fitzgerald, Zoe Kazan and Hunter Parrish) and one prospective son-in-law (John Krasinski) and the shocked/delighted reactions to the affair by her gal pals (Rita Wilson, Mary Kay Place, Alexandra Wentworth, Nora Dunn) get milked for all possible laughs they will yield.

What Meyers has going for her in all the films she has directed from her scripts is her ability to evoke a fantasy world where grown men can cry and realize their mistakes while grown women love them for that. Cynicism — real cynicism, not the catty, superficial kind espoused by this First Wives Club chorus — is banished, and true love still is a possibility.

To whatever degree the writer-director is rewriting her own life story, crucially she is doing so for countless middle-aged women, and probably more than a few guys who need to swallow all the pills Baldwin’s character does to get through the day.

This is a comfort zone for such viewers even if the characters are no more real than the models in Vanity Fair ads. Streep is a vision of mature loveliness, a smart, sexy mom who always knows the right things to say to the kids and how to extricate herself from embarrassing situations. Far from the real world, she lives in a multimillion-dollar home, can — after a suitable number of comic mishaps — make sense of her life and even get Skype to work without having to consult younger family members.

Source: macondaily.com

Technological gains may render one person extinct in adultery: The blindsided dupe

By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Cheating scenario, 1989:

There were errant signs. Like the times you phoned the office and it rang and rang (”I was in the conference room,” he said), like the matchbooks from places with names like the Candlelight Inn, where you’d never been. There were always plausible explanations. Work lunches! Work trips! Work lipstick! You wondered if you were crazy. There was so much wondering. Months, maybe years of uncertainty.

Cheating scenario, 2009:

I found your text messages, Jerk boy. Pack your bags.

* * *

There are so many questions about Tiger Woods’s reported affairs. (A cocktail waitress? Really? Have you seen his wife? And who knew Swedes could get so angry?!) But perhaps what’s most vexing is related to the saucy missives waitress Jaimee Grubbs claims were sent to her by the professional golfer.

Specifically: What kind of nitwit celebrity would still leave an e-trail?

Did he not learn from Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), whose affair was apparently discovered because of a text message? Was he not convinced by the career annihilation of Kwame Kilpatrick after the revelation of naughty notes between the former Detroit mayor and his chief of staff? If only Woods had watched a recent episode of “Glee” — Quinn catches Puck sexting — he would have realized the technology that enables you can also destroy you.

This raises a question: In an age of iPhones, TMZ and standard-issue personal GPS devices, is technology killing the affair?

Here’s a potentially apocryphal anecdote, submitted via e-mail to game forum GoNintendo.com: The e-mailer, a soldier, came back from Iraq and settled down to play some Nintendo Wii. He found an unfamiliar avatar lurking in his console. It was the Mii created by his wife’s lover.

Schadenfreude-by-Google, as related in a column written by a London attorney: His client was apparently tooling around on the Google Maps Street View option and looked up a friend’s house. Parked outside was her husband’s Range Rover, identifiable by its custom rims. He was supposed to be on a business trip.

We’re not talking the end of cheating altogether. There will forever be opportunities for hook-ups in bars or incidents of ex-sex. The social scientists who research infidelity say that the Internet is good for adultery. Sites such as cheating portal AshleyMadison.com have made it easier than ever to find some sleazy person whose interests include long walks on the beach and home-wrecking.

And yet maybe technology is doing in the long-term dupe, the dangerous liaison where no one gets caught and no one pays.

Everyone pays these days, Tiger. Everyone pays.

“The first thing my partner and I said,” Mike Russell says. “We said, ‘Wait, he’s got all that money and he doesn’t have a bat phone?’ ” — the secret cell kept just for booty calls.

Russell is a private investigator in Alexandria. He uncovers cheating, or verifies what the wronged parties usually already know. “I just finished talking to a lady a few hours ago,” Russell says. “She sees 300 texts going to the same number on her husband’s phone, she knows what’s happening.”

Because the cheaters never have a bat phone. They never seem to realize how nakedly traceable their actions are. (It’s like sex tapes. Post-Paris Hilton, post-Eric Dane, post-Carrie Prejean, why do people still make sex tapes? Have they never heard of YouTube? Do they think they still have zones of privacy? Ha ha ha, that’s cute.)

But those who try to go bat phone, who try to be smart about their duplicity, still get tripped up in the end. Tasha Cunningham is the founder of DontDateHimGirl.com, a site on which women share their bad-relationship stories and talk about how they totally caught the cheating snakes disguised as boyfriends.

In one of Cunningham’s favorite stories from the site, a guy thought he was being crafty by creating a secret Facebook profile in addition to the one his significant other knew about. He used it to amass dozens of friends, most of them pretty women. Unfortunately, one of those friends turned out to also be a friend of his lady’s. “Or maybe it was a friend of a friend,” Cunningham says. “Often, it’s a friend of a friend,” but what’s the distinction, really? Do degrees of separation even exist anymore, when everyone is connected with everyone else?

“It’s amazing, the people we find are cheating because of their Facebook photos,” says Ed Hruneni, president of the Private Investigators Association of Virginia. “Or . . . we’ll go with Twitter stuff. The wife might be wondering, was he at work on Friday night?” and meanwhile there’s the phone number she’s noticed her husband calling all the time.

Hruneni can find a name to go with that phone number, and within minutes he has subscribed to a Twitter feed. It’ll say something like ” ‘I was with Bulldog on Friday night, and boy did we stay out late.’ There are no photos.” There’s no full name, but then we go back to the wife, and what was her husband’s nickname? Oh, it’s Bulldog? Hunh.

And what about “GPS trackers. We can stick them on cars, real time, and know where you are. . . . we can find passwords you deleted seven years ago,” and do everything legally, Hruneni says.

Let’s ring up Sandy Ain, one of the District’s most prominent divorce attorneys, and ask him how many of his adultery cases involve technology.

“It’s the majority,” Ain says.

And how many involve cheaters being caught by their own technology?

“It’s very often.”

Isn’t it so typical of the way we engage with technology? Always thinking of the benefits, of the way we could tappa-tappa notes to mistresses while sitting innocently next to the girlfriend — never thinking of the times when we’re in the shower and the girlfriend might glance at the BlackBerry.

UR busted.

Source: washingtonpost.com