Category Archives: Baboon Achievers

Baboon Achievers, Business, Stories

Help Wanted

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I really like my job. I have never regretted choosing to spend my career as a psychologist in a very rural area. I work at a regional mental health center, one of eight in my state.  Every center has psychologists and other mental health professionals. At the present time, there are 12 openings for psychologists at these centers, and it is extremely hard to fill positions.  I find this hard to understand, as I can’t think of a better situation in which to practice. One has the support of colleagues, professional autonomy, people who do all the billing, good benefits, and the opportunity to treat just about every mental health condition in the DSM-5.  Heck, at many agencies you can even get your student loans repaid through a federal program to entice professionals to under served areas. We have one opening for a psychologist at my agency. I am the only full-time psychologist there.

Due to historical factors too complicated to go into, the supervisor of psychologists at my agency serves two agencies, my agency  and the one in Bismarck, necessitating that person drive 200 miles round trip once a week to oversee things out here, and spending one night in our town. Several other administrators do the same thing. My supervisor recently quit to move to another center, so my agency and the one in Bismarck are currently without a supervising psychologist. I applied for the supervisor’s job and interviewed for it last week.

The supervisor’s position is mainly administrative.  There are hours worth of administrative meetings at each agency and I would have to go to all of them at both places  if I were in the supervisor’s position. I would have to spend one night and two days a week in Bismarck, driving 200 miles round trip, often in poor weather. I would also not be able to see many, if any, clients, and would have no time to do psychological evaluations. The pay isn’t that much higher. Since I am the only full-time psychologist at my agency, there would be virtually no psychology services there. Why on earth did I apply for the supervisor’s position?

I am at the point where I don’t want someone younger and less experienced than I am telling me what to do. I want to be able to exercise some power in decision-making and policy.  I interviewed in Bismarck for the position last week. Everyone was kind and congenial, all people I knew and had worked with before. It struck me that I was the oldest person in the room.  I was the only applicant for the job.  After a weekend of thinking and discussion with Husband, I withdrew my application.

I decided that power and control are pretty illusory, that I can tolerate a supervisor younger than I am, even if they turn out to be a knucklehead, and that I would go bats sitting through endless meetings. I want to see clients and do evaluations.  The folks who interviewed me were very understanding. It would be endless headaches for  them to make sure that the services I provide now were continued if I had accepted the new position. I noticed an instant reduction in stress and heaviness after I made my decision to stay as I am.  Now if we can only convince young professionals that a rural practice can be even more satisfying than city life with its amenities.

What factors are important to you in making your work satisfying, or at least tolerable?

Baboon Achievers, Songs

Back In The Saddle Again

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My friend Mike Pengra is very good at his jobs. He has several, but for the most part they all boil down to doing the same thing – Mike makes other people sound better.

As a producer, editor, music-picker and scheduler, Mike supports classical music programming at Minnesota Public Radio, and is the lone human behind the robot-powered rootsy music stream, Radio Heartland.

He’s also the drummer in a band called City Mouse.  In the music world, the rock band drummer is a character who is both essential and undervalued, so the role suits Mike well. He makes everything OK and distributes the credit elsewhere. Somehow people feel more competent when Mike’s around, and he’s too kind to reveal that it’s his doing, not theirs.

This is why everybody likes Mike.

Mike and I worked on Radio Heartland a few years back, and for a good stretch before that we were teammates on the weird three-legged stool that was the MPR Morning Show, Mike playing the silent partner like the multi-talented Silvester Vicic and the saintly Nora McGillivray before him.

Mike contacted me a few weeks ago and said a group of demanding baboons had made a bunch of music requests, and he wanted some help feeding tunes to them.

I don’t host radio shows anymore, but I was happy to oblige this time, knowing that as soon as I walked into Mike Pengra’s studio I’d become two times funnier and at least ten times smarter.

And believe it or not, that Mike Pengra magic still works.

You can listen for yourself to a Baboonish Request show today at noon, and again on Sunday evening at 7.

 

 

Baboon Achievers, Poems, Science

Similar Simians Self-Select

44 Comments

Here’s how influential baboons can be – they have digital natives questioning the value of social media.

A recent study of baboon behavior found that baboons like to hang out with their own personality types.  Those identified as bold tended to hang out with like-minded baboons, while the meek ones prefer the company of their own sort.

As a result,  groups remain socially isolated and new information tends to stay within the group that discovered it.

Sound familiar?

No, not to me either.  No one in my circle cares much for animal studies.  Even if the creatures aren’t harmed, we tend to agree that they have a right to privacy.

But Trail Baboon poet laureate Schuyler Tyler Wyler, who, frankly, is not one of us, found the report inspiring.  So he penned the following few lines of deathless verse:

Those bold baboons are reckless beasts
They’re wild and fast and free.
So when I want to socialize,
they’re not my cup of tea.

I much prefer the timid ones.
Baboons who are demure.
If thoughtful and considerate,
I’ll hang with them for sure.

And when we convene a confab
to trade news and give reports,
we will screen for type and temperament
to weed out the wrong sorts.

So that when we all are gathered
we’ll stay focused, we’ll be tame.
All our thoughts and inspirations
will be pretty much the same.

Where do you get new ideas?

Baboon Achievers

Behind The Headlines

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Header Image by Shriram Rajagopalan – Gelada Baboon in Bronx Park South, NYC

From the Baboons in the News department – a recent article about baboon mating got some play on multiple news outlets.  Basically the story is that male baboons were found to be more discerning than expected when it comes to selecting their female partners.

Humans had assumed that the size and color of a female baboon’s backside would be the determining factor.

That turned out to be untrue, and Homo sapiens headline writers had something of a field day with it.

Admittedly, baboon sexuality is not a common topic of intense discussion among ordinary people.  But we can easily assign a certain shallowness to baboon habits, and so it doesn’t take long to come up with a theory of how the laws of baboon attraction might work.

But when that theory is suddenly turned bass-ackwards, there is a surprising amount uniformity in the creative response.

Hmm.  Somebody sounds disappointed.  Are our confounded expectations really The Story here?  Who’s the shallow one now?

Instead of discovering baboons mating in an orgy of butt-centric fascination, researchers found male baboons are drawn to females who take a longer time to start ovulating again after giving birth.  Why?  Perhaps the guys think their offspring have a better chance of survival when mom is unencumbered by additional suitors.

Granted, the co-parenting skills of male baboons are not put in a flattering light by this preference. He basically wants the girl who’s going to be tied to the youngsters for the longest stretch of uninterrupted time.

That, it seems to me, is the real story.  Yet I didn’t see this headline anywhere:

For Male Baboons, It’s All About When The Rearing Ends.

But seriously, would it kill you to take them for an afternoon so I can catch up on my sleep?

What attracts?

Baboon Achievers

Baboon Achievers: Trained Baboon Tracks Trains

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It hit me the other day I’ve been writing under the long face of our friend Blevins (the hairy fellow on the masthead trail) for nearly five years and yet I am still  thoroughly ignorant about baboons, their achievements and their history.

This is exactly the feeling I had in fifth grade when I was expected to know the difference between several white-wigged forefathers and on test day it occurred to me that Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison and Dolly Parton looked pretty much the same from the neck up.

So on a whim fifteen minutes ago I decided to do a google search for famous baboons and immediately stumbled across the strange tale of Jack the Signalman.

Jack was said to be a companion to James “Jumper” Wide, a railroad man in Uitenhage, South Africa, who had the unfortunate habit of leaping from car to car on moving trains.  This is the sort of show-off activity you can be good at until the one day when you’re not, and then you never do it again because both your legs have been cut off at the knees.

Handicapped by his injuries but determined to return to work, Wide formed a productive partnership with an actual baboon, Jack, who eventually learned to do the signalman’s job and wound up employed by the railroad for a number of years,  paid in brandy or beer depending on which account you believe.

The notion that a baboon can hold a job will surprise no one who has worked alongside such a creature in their daily tasks.   The feeling that your strangely unstable co-worker might suddenly do something wildly inappropriate is familiar to everyone, I imagine.

But in this case the biological baboon of Uitenhage was much more reliable in his work than the emotional baboons of our modern cubicle-rich employment landscape.

The story claims that Jack was flawless in his performance of his  duties, regularly receiving a whistled signal from the engineer of an oncoming train and properly moving levers to send that train down the appropriate track.

Too amazing to be true?  Even self-identified skeptics are mollified.

After thinking about this for a moment, I realized that I would have a hard time being successful at such a job, given that I’m a daydreamer and my mind is known to wander a bit.  I’m afraid that in the role of signalman, my train of thought would eventually get derailed and without delay much larger calamities would ensue.

Fired and replaced by a baboon, for the greater safety of all.  Good thing I just imagined that so none of us had to live through it.

So here’s a salute to Jack the Signalman, a baboon-achiever!

 How are you at performing mindless tasks?