Five great posts from the HR Blogger Network for your reading enjoyment:

From Paul Hebert: Is HR Ready for Their Close-Up on May 23rd at 1:00 pm?

From Melissa Fairman: Who is Your Favorite HR Saboteur?

From Joan Ginsberg: HR and the Line Between Tolerance and Acceptance

From Lalli Reese: Passive Aggressive Notes: Lunch Room Thief

From John Nykolaiszyn: Accidentally Innovative

Have a fantastic weekend and follow us on Twitter to read more great posts!

If you’ve never seen the 1983 horror flick Of Unknown Origin, you’re probably a normal person who has better things to do than seek out obscure Canadian cinema. Regardless, you can still learn a thing or two from its protagonist’s plight.

In the film, Peter Weller plays Bart, an uber yuppie who thinks he is in control of his life. He’s got a promising job, a hot wife, a cute kid and a meticulously renovated brownstone decked out in the latest 1980s decor. But when his wife and kiddo leave to visit relatives, things get weird for Bart. While he’s trying to work on a project that he hopes will get him a promotion at work, he hears noises in the basement. Food in the pantry mysteriously disappears. The water and electricity start malfunctioning. Clearly, Bart is not alone.

Turns out, Bart has a ginormous rat in his pristine townhome. And he goes to great lengths to get the rodent out of his hair so he can focus on his career-changing project. He puts some hardcore rattraps in the basement. He puts out poison. He gets a cat. These things all fail. This rat has the resilience of a cockroach. It’s also pretty smart. Eventually (spoiler alert), Bart ends up destroying his house to kill this rat, and I don’t think he even gets his project finished. Talk about an epic life fail.

But don’t we all end up destroying our proverbial condos because of a proverbial giant rat?

What if Bart had just ignored the rat? Would it really have been that bad? What Bart should have done was check into a hotel and leave a few monster bags of Cheetos out in the kitchen. He could work in peace and the rat would eat itself into a coma. It would be beautiful.

Sometimes focusing on eradicating the distractions in our lives just makes them worse. Destroyed-brownstone worse. Sometimes, you just have to ignore the rat if you want to get shit done. Split town and leave it some Cheetos if you have to.

To quote Kevin MacArthur from The League: “Let everything else slide. Just do this one thing.” He was talking about fantasy football. Hopefully you’re trying to accomplish something slightly more extraordinary.

Advertising People Are Not Normal

May 15, 2012

Just in case you wondered, The Starr Conspiracy is not normal. We like to believe that we are avant-garde soothsayers but it turns out that we are just a bunch of nerds and geeks who really love technology and social media. It’s the future. We embrace it.  Normal = mediocrity. Mediocrity = irrelevancy. Irrelevancy = death [...]

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The Freaky and Sexed Up Digital Lives of American Moms

May 14, 2012

Yesterday was Mother’s Day here in America and it turns out that your mom is over her obsession with attachment parenting and likes to get a little freaky on her special day. According to Ashley Madison — a social network for married people who want to cheat on their spouses — mothers make up 69% [...]

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