The esca­lat­ing unem­ploy­ment rate was over­shad­owed this week by David Letterman’s pub­lic con­fes­sion of sex with female staffers and Pene­lope Trunk’s repro­duc­tive tales. It reminds me of the death of Farah Faw­cett over­shad­owed by that of Michael Jackson.

It’s on TV right now. Staffer Stephanie’s diary is out. Long walks on the Let­ter­man ranch as late as last fall and she was in love. The Orlando Sen­tinel ‘s blog just an hour ago call­ing it “the tweet heard ’round the world” and ask­ing, “Do mommy blog­gers reveal too much information?”

Father, father, every­body thinks we’re wrong
Oh, but who are they to judge us
Sim­ply because our hair is long
Oh, you know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some under­stand­ing here today

This post could go so many ways. Hell, I could tell you my own juicy bits… but that’s not my style. It is Penelope’s however.

She does what I call real­ity blog­ging and it’s just as sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic as its visual coun­ter­part on TV (I don’t watch real­ity TV either). I’ve heard she’s ditzy, I’ve heard she’s smart. One thing for sure is I cer­tainly keep hear­ing about her and she cer­tainly knows how to get atten­tion. Whether she is a mas­ter manip­u­la­tor, raw mas­ter mar­keter or both, she got what she wanted.  There’s no doubt that she has cre­ated a rock solid per­sonal brand by design or by acci­dent. Either you love it or you don’t. I don’t think it’s by accident…

Guess what? It doesn’t mat­ter what we think.

She is self employed and the pro­fes­sional risk she took is her baby. Yeah, if you read the tweet, her blog or the news you get the sick pun. I’m not sure if I feel sorry for her need to pub­li­cize the things she does or admire her moxie to brazenly dis­close her ill­nesses, repro­duc­tive facts and con­di­tions, or even know if it’s real life events or the prod­uct of her imag­i­na­tion she blurts out. Every­one has stuff going on with their body, fam­ily, men­tal state. It’s the human con­di­tion. Maybe because I get that and have my own life to deal with I don’t find it inter­est­ing to read about hers. Frankly, I think Pene­lope is look­ing to call atten­tion to her­self more than ever because she’s look­ing for hype about her new prod­uct.

I’m more than happy to enable her need for atten­tion by pro­vid­ing the juicy links. I just don’t care. What I do care about is that she’s happy. And I don’t even know her. But if you know me you know that I want every­one to be happy includ­ing me. We live in a democ­racy so if she chooses to make a liv­ing by talk­ing about her per­sonal life, there’s a mar­ket for that kind of prod­uct and the money’s good, then good for her. We have the choice to read or not.

In 2009 there is equal­ity in new media. Any­one can put their life online.

Picket lines and picket signs
Don’t pun­ish me with bru­tal­ity
Talk to me
So you can see
What’s going on
Ya, what’s going on
Tell me what’s going on
I’ll tell you what’s going on

I feel sorry for Stephanie for get­ting involved with the emo­tion­ally unsta­ble ass of a bf who found it nec­es­sary to ruin not only his own life but make her’s, Letterman’s, Regina’s and any­one else’s involved a nightmare.

It seems every year on Feb­ru­ary 13th a ton of arti­cles are pub­lished about work­place romance. Then every once in a while you get the odd story that has noth­ing to do with Valentine’s Day tim­ing. Still and all, there is no deny­ing that work is and will always be the #1 place to meet a roman­tic part­ner. While many are flingy in nature, some of these romances turn into mar­riage. Accord­ing to a 2005 Office Romance Sur­vey con­ducted by Vault, Inc., 58% of employ­ees say they have been involved in an office romance.

Who do we think we are to try to pro­hibit the most base human instinct? I under­stand sex­ual harass­ment, unwanted advances AND reper­cus­sions for not com­ply­ing with a boss’s wishes. Yes, I per­son­ally under­stand that. It’s awk­ward, uncom­fort­able and unfor­tu­nate that peo­ple some­times do not respect one another enough to take no for an answer and have the abil­ity to move on and main­tain a pro­fes­sional work rela­tion­ship. Hor­mones are tough bug­gers to over­come. I con­sider it a per­for­mance issue related to con­duct. You can’t make the work­place uncom­fort­able for another employee, period.

Let­ter­man has yet to have com­plaints against his con­duct in the work­place filed against him. I don’t know the details and maybe they will be. Maybe he was coer­cive. Maybe one of his staffers with ben­e­fits will see the sweet seduc­tion of money and file some­thing hop­ing for ca-ching since she didn’t get the man. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they were com­pletely con­sent­ing and he was gen­tle­manly and not pushy at all. Maybe he and Stephanie glanced at each other across a table one day, locked in that “look” and des­tiny hap­pened inno­cently. Maybe any one of those rela­tion­ships had an actual oppor­tu­nity to be a real rela­tion­ship. I sim­ply can’t be against that kind of poten­tial fate.

Com­pa­nies would be much bet­ter off to under­stand human nature and cre­ate poli­cies that deal effec­tively with office romances rather than try to negate them. I under­stand why they try — it can get messy when lovers are scorned. But it’s not real­is­tic to think it isn’t going to happen.

The whole HR indus­try is furi­ously mak­ing new pol­icy for Bird Flu and social media use and only 20% have a dat­ing pol­icy. Dat­ing has been around for ever and social media and Bird Flu are new.

Where have we been?

Accord­ing to an arti­cle by Busi­ness Man­age­ment Daily, SHRM revealed that among employ­ers that do set such policies:

• 64% but dis­cour­age dat­ing between co-workers.
• 28% per­mit dating.
• 8% pro­hibit it.

I applaud the 28% that deal with it.

Here’s to peace and love, Pene­lope and Let­ter­man, every­one else that has a life and the wis­dom to live the one shot we have wisely. Every­one else can take a hike.

P.S. Mar­vin Gaye will rock for all eternity