职场不发威(双语)
Aside from Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day and occasional school-holiday visits, most of us rarely get to show our children how we behave at work. Instead, it's often athletes, politicians and others in the public eye who most visibly model workplace conduct. And several of them have done a lousy job of it in recent days. During President Barack Obama's Wednesday address to a joint session of Congress, Rep. Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, shouted 'You lie!' in response to one of Mr. Obama's statements. Setting aside one's political agreement or disagreement with the sentiment, it was a very public breach of decorum. The congressman has apologized to the president but has declined to apologize again to Congress, leading Democrats to plan a formal reprimand. There were a couple of other incidents this weekend, in the world of sports. New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi and star third-baseman Alex Rodriguez were tossed from a Sunday game against the Baltimore Orioles for loudly arguing a called third strike─admittedly a fairly common occurrence in baseball, but still a loss of cool that sets an unfortunate example. Setting an even poorer example was the tennis star Serena Williams, who was called for a foot fault late in her U.S. Open semifinal match against eventual champion Kim Clijsters Saturday and responded with a profane tirade directed at the line judge who made the call. The resulting point penalty (assessed because of a previous code-violation warning) cost Ms. Williams the match. Ms. Williams, who so far has been fined $10,500 for her behavior during the match, issued a statement Sunday that said in part, 'Last night everyone could truly see the passion I have for my job. Now that I have had time to gain my composure, I can see that while I don't agree with the unfair line call, in the heat of battle I let my passion and emotion get the better of me and as a result handled the situation poorly.' I'm just glad my children, who are big fans of both Serena Williams and her sister Venus, weren't watching the match. None of these incidents displayed the kind of job-related passion I'd like them to emulate. |