Alice In Corporate Wonderland

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Scanning the ever growing Business&Career blogroll,my eyes immediately feasted on the fourth one down: Alice In Corporate Wonderland: The Girl Made of Glass. Once I clicked, I discovered that Alice In Wonderland is actually a category on a much bigger blog-- Antonella Pavese.com ---that explores women, life, technology, usability and psychology.
One of her latest projects: helping her childhood friend find a market for her art in Ameria. If anyone has any ideas, Antonella would love to hear from you!

After college Ariela worked with Nobel Prize Rita Levi-Montalcini for a few years (yes, she is really smart. And pretty. And talented. And engaging. OK, I'll stop here.). She later decided an Academic career wasn't for her. She focused on art but never abandoned science. Water, life, and biological structures play a crucial part in her work.

I love what she does. ....Her work using the "shadows of light" technique is among the most fascinating. Ariela and a photographer friend started using a special transparent resin on glass. The final product is totally transparent, until one puts it under a spotlight. Magically, the resin reacts with light to create beautiful shadows on the wall. And the shadow is all you see. You must actually see it in person to understand the effect. It's beautiful

Recently, Antonella has also talked about the joy of shopping online and YvonneI immediately thought of you!

Via Caterina, I discovered Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade stuff where I bought a birthday present for my husband. It was a sushi candle making kit. As soon as I ordered the kit, Nikola Davidson from Sticky Wicket Crafts wrote me an e-mail. She actually wrote it. A real, personal, kind e-mail.

Antonella - thank you for your order! It shipped out today. Thanks for supporting Sticky Wicket Crafts!Nikola.

The e-mail did not say: "This is an automatically generated message. Do not reply to this message." So I wrote her back, like you do with a real person, thanking her and explaining why I bought the sushi candles.

Nikola,
thank you for the personal message. In this era of automated reply systems, it's so nice to get an e-mail from a person with first and last name!
The package arrived yesterday. I'll open it on March 1st, for my husband's birthday (when he leaves the corporate world, he wants to become a candle maker).
Antonella

Nikola replied:

Antonella - thanks for your nice email. I'm glad you liked the personal message. Thanks for encouraging my non-automated ways! I hope you and your husband like the kit! Thanks again, Nikola

If that seems like a lot of disparate things to be writing about...just read Antonella's About and you'll get a sense of why Antonella has so much to say about so much.

Italian-born, Antonella started studying agriculture in college, changed to psychology, earned a PH.D and now is a usability engineer.

On being a woman in corporate America Antonella writes that when she began her career she did not believe being a woman would make a differnce in an asexual work environment. She says she was wrong.

The true proof that I'm really a woman-rather than a man's mind trapped in a woman's body-comes from the errors I've made and continue to make in the workplace: I take things way too personally; I constantly look for outside rewards and recognitions because I don't feel good enough; I want others to discover my value rather than making the effort of making my value impossible to ignore; I hope that somebody will hand me my perfect job rather than making the effort of creating one myself; I bash myself mercilessly and then I complain that others don't recognize how good I am. Not always, but often enough to make me restless and make it hard for me to be happy at work.

Most important of all, I push only halfway because I don't completely believe in what I do. I care about my career, but I don't believe in it. I have a lot of ideas about how to do my job, but I don't always push hard to make them happen. Even if I have in me the passion and the drive, they are just not turned all the way up. I run with the brakes on, and it's a very wasteful way to run

But it was her observation on the joy of reading a copy of USA Today in the lobby of a hotel that really made me smile, ponder and wonder about the price we pay for living in