[Hrgeeks] What the french toast?

[Erin]

Today at work, I recieved an interesting email at work from a Unix
administrator in India that left the company.  In the spirit of sharing, I'm
including a copy.  Does anyone else have any interesting stories of
departing employees?

I'm going to have my coffee and read this again to try and decipher it.

***
Hi,

Change is an integral part of life!!

Self-schema refers to the beliefs and ideas people have about themselves.
These beliefs are used to guide and organize information processing,
especially when the information is significant to the self. Self-schemas are
important to a person's overall self-concept.

Once we have developed a schema about ourselves there is a strong tendency
for that schema to be maintained by a bias in what we attend to, a bias in
what we remember, and a bias in what we are prepared to accept as true about
ourselves. In other words our self-schema becomes self-perpetuating. The
self-schema is then stored in long-term memory and both facilitates and
biases the processing of personally relevant information. Self-schemas vary
from person to person because each individual has very different social and
cultural life experiences. A few examples of self-schemas are; exciting/
dull, quiet/ loud, healthy/ sickly, athletic/ nonathletic, lazy/ active, and
geek/ jock. If a person has a schema for geek/ jock, for example, he might
think of himself as a bit of a computer geek and so he would possess a lot
of information about that
trait. Because of this he would probably interpret a lot of situations based
on their relevance to being a geek.

While every schema varies from cultural backgrounds, etc., there are
different ways of defining the schemas themselves. First, there is
schematic, which means having a particular schema for a particular
dimension. For instance, you could play in a rock band at night, and there
you would have your "rocker" schema. However, during the day, you work as a
tire salesman, so you have your "tire salesman" schema on during that period
of time.

Another good example of this are super heroes, such as the ones in comic
books. People like Rajinikanth, Superman, Spider-Man, The Hulk, etc., all
have their schema for when they are just doing their normal job during the
day. However, when duty calls, they adorn their superhero schema. Second,
there is a schematic, which is not having a schema for a particular
dimension. This usually occurs when we are not involved with or concerned
about a certain attribute. For instance, some of us will never be tire
salesmen, so some of us will never have to worry about it. This also
includes schoolwork to a particular level. If you plan on being a musician,
then having a schema in aeronautics will not attribute to you.

Since it has been defined that most people have multiple schemas does this
mean that we all have multiple personalities as well? The answer is no. At
least not in the pathological sense. Indeed, for the most part, multiple
self-schemas are extremely useful to us in our daily lives. Without our
conscious awareness, they help us make rapid decisions and to behave
efficiently and appropriately in different situations and with different
people. They guide what we attend to, and how we interpret and use incoming
information and they activate specific cognitive, verbal, and behavioral
action sequences—which in cognitive psychology are called scripts and action
plans—that help us meet our goals more efficiently.

As most of you know, today is my last day with the company. It is with a
heavy heart that I must say goodbye to all of my friends and colleagues
here, many of whom I have seen on a daily basis.

I’d like to thank all the guys at work for the great ride. It was great
getting to know you all and to get a chance to work with every single one of
you. I hope that we’ll get to carry our personal relationships well on into
the future.
***

E
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