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!

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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.

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 in this industry.

The one thing that’s right about this infographic? We do like to have fun. If Office Olympics is wrong, we don’t want to be right.

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% of the site’s users. And Mother’s Day is the second biggest day for female sign-ups and the biggest for married women to join.

Who knew? (Not your dad, apparently.)

It turns out that your Mom is just like everyone else. She is lonely, tired and sick of your crap. She needs a break. And she’s on Pinterest in her free time (if she has any). Check out this handy infographic about The Digital Lives of American Moms.

I know it’s wrong to blame yourself for your mom’s weird online habits — but maybe if you learned the lessons of Mother’s Day and did your own laundry, she wouldn’t be so weird and hang out on iVillage so often.

You owe mom a big apology for not going to med school, too. This is why she’s looking for her high school ex-boyfriends on Facebook.

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

From Ed Newman: Think You’re a Good Recruiter? Prove It!

From Tim Sackett: The Value of Returning Moms to Your Workforce

From Women of HR: How to Be More Confident at Work

From Charlie Judy: The Future of Work: A Manifesto

From Robin Schooling: From Personnel to Human Resources

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

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Everyone’s done been freaking out about content marketing. Well, with the rise of social media, you have to. As it says below, 90% of B2B marketers do some form of content marketing even if they don’t realize.

Check out the stats on content marketing:

Content marketing infographic via Mashable

Winning isn’t everything.

It counts for somethin’ though.

Friend of The Conspiracy George Larocque is looking for the next round of winners in HR Technology. George’s belief in innovation and its ability to change the space as we know it is driving his contest (#hrwins) for groundbreaking human resources vendors.

If you believe your technology is innovative and can change the working lives of HR professionals everywhere, schedule a 30-minute briefing and product demo with George to get your product on the #hrwins radar.

All HR Technology categories will be considered, including:

• Talent Management
• Recruiting
• Social HR
• Social Recruiting
• Compensation
• and More…

When HR Technology vendors are innovative, HR wins in a big way.

Get recognized for your contributions to innovation in HR today. 

If you ever visit The Starr Conspiracy, we will take you to lunch at Benito’s.

As you can see, it’s very fancy. Although there is no valet parking, Steve Smith will gladly take $20 from you and park your car in an abandoned lot.

Once Steve parks your car, we will go enjoy Benito’s for the ambiance.

Okay, fine, that’s a lie. We don’t care about ambiance. We will indulge in margaritas!

Come and visit our offices. We’ll treat you to a fabulous lunch!

We wanted to share five great posts from the HR Blogger Network for your weekend reading enjoyment!

1. From Trish McFarlane: 10 Easy Ways To Build Social Media Into Your HR Practice
2. From Paul Hebert: What Do You Need/Want? The Future of Incentive Intelligence – A Plea and A Survey
3. From Lance Haun: The LA Riots And How Sports Can Help Understand The World Beyond It
4. From Ben Eubanks: Human Resource Management Planning-The Micro Level
5. From Jennifer Miller: Killing Flies with Honey- How to Turn a Frustrating Colleague into an Asset 

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

My name is Katie Pool. I am an account executive here at The Starr Conspiracy.

Last week, I was summoned to jury duty. Just seeing the summons in my mailbox made my blood pressure rise.

1. I was called in San Antonio and got out of it because I don’t live there anymore. But the system said, “Screw you, Katie, you’re serving.” Seven days later, they called me in Fort Worth. Touché.
2. This is the third time I’ve been called since I turned 18. I’m 23. My 28-year-old brother has never been called.

Day 1

So I show up Monday morning at 8:30 to be crammed into a room with about 600 other people. There were no seats, so I was forced to sit on the floor between two water fountains at the back of the room.

After a 45-minute wait and some terrible excuses from folks trying to get out of serving, they began selecting people for specific cases. I couldn’t help but feel like I was back in college waiting for my name to be called to give a presentation to the class. You know the feeling I’m talking about … so nerve-racking!

I was finally selected with 49 other people to fill out a survey and report back the following day at 8:30 a.m.

Day 2

I show up early and all 50 of us are corralled in a hallway to wait for the bailiff. She finally comes out and asks a couple of questions.

“Does anyone have any doctor’s appointments this week?”

I’m sorry, did you say WEEK?

“Does anyone plan on going out of town this week?”

Should’ve booked that trip to anywhere.

“Does anyone have any reason not to be here the rest of the week?”

Sigh.

As I’m slowly sinking into depression that I’ll be locked up for a week in a courtroom, we file in to see the judge. He smiles at us and says, “Thank you all for your honest answers on the surveys yesterday. You scared the hell out of the defendant, so he settled out of court this morning. This was going to be a two-week murder trial, but instead you get to go home.”

I took my $40 check and skipped out of the courthouse.

My thoughts on the whole thing?

Just get over it and do it. I wasted a lot of energy by getting frustrated. It wasn’t the end of the world to miss a few hours of work, I met some interesting people, I got paid and if I did actually get picked to sit on the jury, it would have been intriguing to see how it all went down.