‘Peace House Community Journal’ Archives
Stay Healthy
from Peace House Community A Place to Belong... By MARTI MALTBY I recently spent five days in the Hennepin County Medical Center, starting out in the Surgery Intensive Care Unit before moving to a regular patient bed. My experience reinforced one simple idea: take care of yourself and protect your health, because hospitals are lousy places to get healthy. This isn’t a criticism of HCMC. The staff were uniformly professional and caring, doing their best to make sure I knew what was happening and what to expect next. If you’re going to have a significant health crisis, HCMC is a pretty good place to wind up. The problem was simply that you can do most “healthy” activities in a hospital. All the advice on how to take care of your body and mind goes out the window when you are recovering in a hospital bed. For example: Get eight hours of sleep a night – This is almost impossible. Depending on what brought you to the hospital, the staff may be required to wake you [...]
History Lessons
from Peace House Community A Place to Belong... By MARTI MALTBY With this year being the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, my 16 year old daughter Amber took more interest than usual in the day’s significance. She asked what I remembered of that day, which led to a variety of stories. I told her of my own misguided reaction when my roommate (who had a tv) yelled to me that a plane had hit the Twin Towers, and I (who didn’t have a tv), thought, “That’s a strange accident.” Only when I arrived at work an hour later did I understand what was happening. I hope that when my daughter finally does face a catastrophe, she can draw on the strength and dignity of who have risen to the challenges they didn’t see coming. I told her about how different people processed what was happening, from David Letterman’s understated but inspiring comments on The Tonight Show to the morning radio host who demanded that, every 36 hours, the US launch a nuclear attack [...]
Unanswerable Questions
by MARTI MALTBY I’ve been a supervisor long enough to make lots of mistakes, and hopefully to learn from them. While I still make mistakes, they happen less often and aren’t as serious as they used to be. My skill in hiring staff has unquestionably improved over the years for one simple reason: when I realized I had hired the wrong person, I would go back to the interview questions I asked them to see what I should have asked instead. I thought of skills the employee lacked, and came up with a question that they would not have been able to answer well given their limitations. Over the years, I moved from the generic questions that you can find on LinkedIn and similar sites to questions that focused on the real world situations the employee might face. My favorite memory of asking better questions came from a young woman who wantedto work in a homeless shelter. I asked, “As you are doing your rounds, you notice thatwater is coming from under the laundry room door. When [...]
