Category: Musings

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I saw this on X today. It got me thinking.

Refuse MEME.Up until March or April of 2020 I was suspicious of our Government but still naively believed that they were mostly okay, and that corruption was not the norm.

We had a new President, a supposedly novel and little understood disease, (turns out it was neither since Covid-19 is apparently a chimera virus built in a lab,) and 14 days to stop the spread.

At the time I believed that President Trump had been falsely maligned for attempting to close the border and the Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats were out of their minds fighting him on the subject. Then, as now, I think their fighting him was about nothing more than abject, bitter, hatred.

Either they knew that COVID-19 wasn’t a real threat, or they were colluding with other world leaders to make sure the whole planet was exposed. I still find it hard to wrap my head around the possibility that these politicians hated Trump so much that they’d rather burn the world down, than admit he was right.

I say this because the logic of quarantining a region where an unknown disease has originated is irrefutable.

If a disease originates in a particular region, and is essentially confined to that region, you prevent travel from or to the region. That allows time for the medical folks to suit up in biohazard suits to minister to the afflicted without contaminating the rest of the world. In no scenario do you allow travel by air to destinations around the world. 

This is actually something we’ve known since the 1950s when nuclear and biological weapons were a real possibility and our military ran endless scenarios regarding the outcomes of either, based on prevailing wind patterns.

If things had ended there, I would have written it off as a series of poor decisions and chalked it up to morons being elected to Congress.

But then it went further. Suddenly we had a vaccine, but vaccines take decades of clinical trials or at least they’re supposed to.

We had doctors suggesting caution regarding the vaccine, who were then censored.

As the situation went on, it devolved. President Biden claimed it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated and painted all those folks as pariahs for choosing to exercise their right to bodily autonomy.

It was the first time in my life that I felt completely and utterly betrayed by my government.

Worse was the sense of betrayal I felt when most of the country turned off their brains and many would gladly have seen unvaccinated people thrown into camps.

People from all walks of life suddenly felt like potential enemies, and some places went so far as to go “fascist” demanding to see your covid shot record. The NAZIs did that regarding people’s IDs and travel permits. “Where are your papers?” Was used to terrorize citizens of occupied nations.

Hospitals refused to help cancer patients or perform some surgeries on people unless they were “Cleansed” by an experimental vaccine.

I spent these years feeling more alienated than at any point in my life. What was being forced on the American people and indeed the world was absolutely, undeniably wrong.

I still feel alienated. The schism created by politics, the BLM summer of “Love”, lockdowns, and all the rest has made me feel very disconnected. 

Add the revelations of widespread waste, and potential corruption, throughout the government and, well, as the late Jerry Doyle put it in the title of his 2010 book “Have You Seen My Country Lately?: America’s Wake-Up Call” 

Have you seen my country lately? I seem to have misplaced it. Whatever this is now, it’s not the country I thought I lived in. 

Granted, Trump, Musk, Bondi, Hegseth, Vance, Patel, and all the rest claim to be working to restore our nation. They may in fact be doing that in every way but one of the most critical.

The soul of our nation had been very wounded for a long time. Thus far I’ve not heard a plan to heal that wound.  I still feel very alienated and mistrusting of my fellow citizens and more so, our government.

I don’t think we should live in the past. But I do think we shouldn’t forget how wrong things went, or how quickly. There’s a cautionary tale here, and something important to be learned.

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Today is “Stinkys” spa day

Pretty much the whole day will be shot. It’s just as well, I won’t be tempted to look at the news.

I also won’t have to see Elizabeth Warren, Jasmine Crockett, AOC, or some government worker whining on X about their horrible mistreatment.

Lieawatha (Warren) has pissed me off so much I can’t see straight. She is posting about every 15 minutes on X and usually whatever she’s posting is easily disproven with a 1.5 second news search. But we all know there are people that will not spend the 1.5 seconds to cross check the lying bag of feces. I’m tired of being lied to, I’m more tired of having to check every damn thing this woman says.

Crockett is an absolute moron. Does she hear herself saying 5K won’t do anybody good? She was on her knees licking Biden’s ass over a 700 or 1000 dollar check to “help” out the American public who the Democratic Party had screwed.

Actually I’m sick & tired of Democrats in Washington altogether.

That being said, I’m getting impatient for arrests. If the government is corrupt, then I’m for calling it treason and hanging the perpetrators on the Capitol lawn.

When we start hearing things like trillions of dollars being wasted, that’s gonna fire us up. There was a headline today claiming that trillions of dollars in medicaid payments were made to ineligible people overseas. WTF?

Then I look at the Goddamn tax brackets and find that the small sum I get in social security is still high enough that the motherfucking IRS / Government is going to tax me on it. What the actual fuck is that about?

As I was looking at my taxes, I was thinking that I didn’t want the IRS to have my bank account number. Why? Because I don’t want to make it easy for those fuckers to put money in my account, more importantly I don’t want to make it easy for those fuckers to lay hands on what little money I have. 

I’d rather deal with handing a check to a bank teller.

That’s how little trust I have in these government fucks.

While lying scumbags in Congress allow and profit from breathtaking corruption and waste, they’re taxing Social Security recipients who barely have enough per month to keep up with their medications, food, and rent/mortgage.

Really?

This is why so many people are ready to show those fuckers in Washington D.C. what an insurrection actually looks like. I pray to God it doesn’t come to it, but if it does, I’m betting that there aren’t going to be trials, just firing squads.

I thought the Democrats were supposed to be looking out for the poor, the low income, and the disadvantaged people. Another lie!

The only time any politician is concerned about the people, is when they’re glad handing for votes. They’ll all bend the people over and fuck us to get what they want. 

This stuff running on the TV and through my head is exactly why I need a break.

I suppose the funny thing is that Democrats in Washington, and across the country still haven’t gotten the message. We voted for Trump, we voted for his cabinet, his administration, and the people that he told us he was going to have installed in various department that needed a good scrubbing.

Elon Musk can access my shit. Kash Patel can access my shit, Tulsi Gabbert can access my shit, Dan Bongino can access my shit. 

I trust these people so much more than I trust the old entrenched establishment.

What’s funny is that the whining Democrats seem shocked that the very people Donald Trump told everyone he was going to put in these positions, Are actually in the positions as specified.

We knew these folks were going to be doing exactly what they’re doing before the election. Guess What? 

WE’RE HAPPY they’re ripping through the bullshit. 

We’ll be happier when corrupt politicians are being marched out of their offices and down the Capitol steps.

If the new DOJ in concert with the FBI starts arresting people in D.C. My cock will be raw from rubbing one out every time a new arrest is made. I may even get chafed.

That’s what we’re all waiting for. We’re waiting for arrests just like children wait for Santa on Christmas Eve.

We don’t even care if some of those arrests are vengeance. Because some people really deserve it, and have brought it on themselves.

I need a break! Jesse will enjoy being “handsome” and having his fur all fluffy. I’ll enjoy him being happy about it too.

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But it’s only 1%

Waste of money.I keep seeing people talking about USAID being only 1% of the budget. As if somehow that justifies the waste.

Waste is waste. That 1% is still more money than I’ll ever see. It might be more money than most of the people in the United States will ever see.

That it’s only 1% isn’t the point. The point is what that 1% is being spent on. An alternate point is, “If we see this here, what will we find elsewhere in the miasma we call our government?”

The best thing we could have happening to our government right now, in my opinion, is to have successful businessmen looking at government, not as a black hole of poor investment, but instead looking at it like a failing business that they’re trying to save.

I say that as a preamble to the point I want to try to make.

I don’t understand the logic of trivializing money spent, or money earned.

Let me provide a couple of anecdotes from the opposite perspective. A perspective of companies trying to make a profit.

I once worked for a company that sold software. The software, drove process controls in devices and could easily be integrated into a company’s machines via a pretty clever API. 

The company’s software was in a ton of other manufactures machines. It saved the manufactures time having to write basic control software and allowed them to concentrate on feature differentiation.

The company I worked for sold licenses to use their software. Part of the licensing structure was for updates, modifications, and integration assistance.

One of my friends worked in the Sales department. One day he came to my cubicle really despondent.

He’d been working for weeks on several deals only to have those deals rejected by the ‘powers that be’ because they weren’t big enough. Meaning the individual deals weren’t in the millions of dollars range.

I can understand that philosophy if the smaller deals were going to require a lot of hand holding or customization. But that wasn’t the case. The other companies were looking for just the base software and they were going to handle the integration into their product on their own. They were looking for a jumpstart to get their products to market.

The powers that be, rejected 6, trouble free 1/2 million to 3/4 million dollar sales because they wanted nothing less than million dollar sales.

Neither of us understood the logic. Money is money.

The Company, like so many other I’ve worked for, no longer exists. 

Turns out bad management destroys even the best company. In this particular company’s case their refusal to do smaller contracts opened a door for their competitors to bring their products to market and capitalize on the perception that my company was “Too Elitist”. My colleague and I were long gone by the time everything imploded.

I’ve watched more than my fair share of companies and their dynamite products go down the tubes through bad management, arrogance, and greed.

I worked for another startup company whose CEO said in a meeting, “If smaller investors don’t understand our name change then we don’t need their money. Larger investors will understand and support us.” 

A couple of colleagues & I walked out of that meeting, looked at each other, chuckled, then polished up our resumes. The company was gone 8 months later.

The point of these anecdotes is:

When people trivialize even small amounts of money, (Or waste,) it seems to open the door to foolish decisions, or more waste.

In the case of companies, they lose access to operating capital and sometimes that’s enough to starve a company to death. With companies, they may get a reputation for being difficult to deal with, or slow, and that drives away potential future customers.

In the case of the government, trivializing amounts makes it more likely that smaller amounts of waste will be overlooked as “the cost of doing business”.

For example: If I’d known USAID was so wasteful, I’d have applied for an 80K grant renewing yearly to study frogs in drought affected areas of the mountains where I live. (There aren’t any frogs here.)

It’s a little bit of money, less than .000000000001% of the national budget. Regardless, it would still be a waste, and I’d be living pretty well on the government dime.

If NBC or CNN reported on me doing research on non-existent frogs swindling the government out of 80K a year, most people would be outraged.

Yet this is exactly what a lot of government apologists appear to want to sweep under the carpet and ignore. 1%, 5%, 10% of the national budget?

It’s just a little waste…

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I admit it, I hate looking for a job, and have come to hate editing my resume.

Employment signs.I miss the days of simply having a resume that represented my work history.

Back in the day, because of my industry a resume could be cut & dried. We didn’t need to jazz it up or modify it for each application. We chiseled our history into a document that didn’t change.

We’d write a cover letter explaining that we’re appreciate the opportunity to interview and we’d interview with the hiring manager, not a committee of people from unrelated departments.

I’ve never understood the philosophy of Edna from accounting participating in an interview for a dude who was going to be slinging solder in the board repair department.

Unfortunately, the hiring process, over time, became more like a sorority rush, or the election of prom king & queen. Or perhaps more like the example provided recently by congressional confirmation hearings.

I’ve been in interviews where the hiring manager didn’t actually get to ask relevant questions or the answers “Timed-out” because the other unrelated departments needed to ask their irrelevant questions.

Point of interest… the troubleshooting procedure for a $50,000 high speed dye sublimation printer is radically different from changing toner in your desktop laser printer.

That troubleshooting procedure is not something that can be described in 5 minutes. However, to a hiring manager, the description of that process can tell him if the candidate has done the work and is qualified to do the job.

As a hiring manager, I’ve been overruled when requesting a small number of interviewers. HR’s explanation is, “Larger, more dynamic interview processes allow for determination of the candidates ‘team player’ abilities.” Trouble is, most of the people in my field are introverts. Many are just one step shy of being hermits. The really qualified, super smart, radically capable folks in my field are great in one on one, or one on three interviews. But put them in front of a crowd of 6 or 8 people asking them irrelevant questions and they freeze completely.

Not that HR departments ever listened to a hiring manager’s reason for keeping the interview small.

I digress. 

Several years ago, I’d been laid off, I was struggling with my resume, not because it didn’t represent me and my work. But because it wasn’t “Hip & Modern”. It wasn’t getting the attention it used to get because the HR departments dumped it into a database. The hiring manager didn’t see my resume unless someone in HR thought it was worthy.

It used to be, you mailed your resume directly to the hiring manager & they handed their selections to HR to schedule an interview. Way back in time, the hiring manager was on your phone themselves asking when you could come in for an interview.

Anyway, my resume was tailored to answer a hiring manager’s initial curiosity and provided enough technical data to peek interest.

That wasn’t working anymore. HR saw information that they couldn’t make heads or tails out of, and didn’t have the ability to do anything but robotic searches for keywords.

I’ve related the state of HR pre-screens.

HR: Do you know networking?
ME: Yes
HR: Do you know IP?
ME: Yes
HR: Do you know Ethernet
ME: Yes
HR: Do you know MAC address?
ME: Yes
HR: Do you know packet?
ME: Yes

All of those questions are encompassed by the answer, “Yes” to the first networking question.

A full and complete answer which doesn’t allow them to fill in check boxes is this, “I’ve been in the industry since RS-232 terminal connections were MUXed at 9600 baud to Super Mini computers like the Nova 1200 series.

I’ve worked with both token ring and the common star networking topology in use today. I’m certified in the operation of several network sniffing tools and therefore am familiar with the OSI networking model.

Now can we please move the fuck on?

That doesn’t work if you want an interview. Just so you know.

After talking with several people about my resume, I decided to get “Professional” help with a rewrite.

I was not pleased and didn’t get my money’s worth. This professional made my resume a word salad of meaningless drivel worthy of Kamala Harris.

I hated it, and guess what? As an experiment I submitted it to a couple of job application requests and got LESS response than using my old monolithic resume.

However, seeing what this professional had done, I tried to hybridize, incorporating some elements from the so called “professional”. It hasn’t helped.

I’ve also noticed that the resume rewriting services aren’t being pushed on LinkedIn as they were in 2019 – 2021. I’m guessing that enough people expressed their dis-satisfaction that LinkedIn decided it was a bad business model.

Since I’m actively looking for a job again I’ve been re-evaluating my resume. I’m not even pleased with the hybridization. There are too many strained sentences that fail to make the point. It looks like hyperbole and oversell. It feels like I’m telling lies.

I guess that’s the bottom line. It feels like the only way to get ahead, or in this case, just to get a freaking job is to dishonor myself by being what I am not.

It comes down to how much am I willing to give up in order to retain my honor?

Why can’t I just be who I am? Why can’t I apply for a job, without having to retool my resume again and again to highlight skills for each particular position? What does this do to my resumes already floating around out there? Are those the lies, or is this new one I’m sending, the lie?

I left management instead of continuing to slug my way up the corporate ladder. Apparently that was a no no. It always creates questions and my truthful answer many people take as a lie. 

I didn’t like what management at my level was becoming, and I didn’t want the whole corporate thing. I just wanted to do my job, then go home at the end of the day. I didn’t want to be on call 24/7 or deal with employees calling out sick then giving me excuses and having to sit in judgement. I just wanted to sit at my desk, produce good results, and be at peace.

To HR, this appears to have been a demotion, a failure in my ability. For them, the mad scramble to ascend to the heights of corporate infrastructure is the only measure of success.

For me, success was sleeping in my own bed at night, next to the person I loved, having enough money to pay the bills, and to not remember or care about the political machinations going on at work.

I truly wanted all the Machiavellian shit to be well above my pay grade.

HR and in some cases hiring managers don’t get it.

I’m no threat to anyone’s career because I’m not interested in politics. A lot of older hiring managers get it. But the gatekeepers in HR who, to be honest, are mostly female can’t process that way of thinking. 

They view everything as a means to an end. They’re always processing through the lens of breaking the glass ceiling. In that mode of thinking there is never an equilibrium between satisfaction and income.

The other thing that is really weird about job searching these days is that some recruiters only want the last 10 years, others want your full job history. The former say 10 years is good enough and demonstrative of your most recent experience. They’ll also say that no-one is going to read a long resume.

The latter say, having your whole job history is valuable and that interested hiring managers will read it all.

I’m not sure which is the right answer. Honestly I’m not sure that anyone really has the “Right” answer. I have come to realize that most people have zero respect for experience. 

I used to resent that. Now I look at it as a function of their education. The 20 to 30 year olds (myself included when I was that age,) always think they know best. When I was in school I was taught the value of history and on my first jobs I learned that experience often trumped book knowledge.

The elder mentors I was so fortunate to have in my career would say things like, “You can do it that way, which is by the book, and it’s gonna take 4 hours to assemble and disassemble. OR we can unbolt the unit, turn it on its side and access the broken part through an assembly access panel on the bottom. We’ll be done in an hour and can go have lunch. Your choice sport.”

I think a lot of the 20 & 30 year olds these days don’t have plain spoken mentors. They might not be getting the benefit of a mentor because there’s a lot of fear about thinking outside the box, so to speak. Someone is always going to raise a stink if you don’t do everything by the book. These days, the stink raisers can really fuck up a situation, and they manage to drag everyone down to their very limited view of any situation.

I guess that’s why I’m reworking my resume yet again. It’s why we have committee interviews that only muddy the waters about every candidate. It’s possibly why interviews these days feel like “The Dating Game” or Prom elections.

Oh well, back to the resume…

P.S.

If you’re looking for a worker that’s happy to do his job, show up for work every day, be trouble free, non political, and no threat to your position. Send me a message. If you’ve got a remote position available, let’s talk because if I don’t have to drive anywhere or deal with people, I’d work pretty damn cheap.

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Sometimes… Thre are places that are just bad JuJu!

One of those places for me is the Wrightwood Market in my little town.

For the 35 years I’ve lived here. Every single time I’ve tried to do business with this place it’s been a cluster fuck.

Every time I’ve gone there for gas, they’ve been out.

Every time I dropped in for smokes (when I smoked) they were out of my brand.

Every time I’ve stopped in for literally anything they’ve been out or their card readers were down or their cash register was broken.

This trend continued right to today.

I needed 2 gallons of gas. We’ve got some snow coming in, I needed to fill the gas can so that I’d be able to run the snow blower. It’s a simple thing … but an impossible task.

Pulling out of my driveway, I thought, “Drive down the hill, or buy the fuel in town.” A message popped up on my phone saying that it would be raining within the hour so I decided to try the Wrightwood Market.

There was a truck, a jeep from Texas, and me, In one lane. A van and a small car in the other gas lane. The truck was filling his tank, probably a double tank, it was taking a while. No big deal… I could wait.

Suddenly the Texas asshole slams it in reverse and starts backing up. I hit the horn, then put my car in reverse. There’s damn little maneuvering room in their parking lot and for me to back up meant I’d have to back out into traffic.

The Jeep stops.

Then some bitch from the market comes out and tells me that I need to back up so the jeep can leave. I told her my problem was that the jeep started backing up without looking and that was why I’d laid on the fucking horn.

Why was she treating me like I was the bad guy? I’ve actually had a dumbass back up onto a car I was driving. I sure as hell wasn’t going to have it happen again.

It was at this moment that I snapped. 

I’m fucking tired of having to accommodate everyone else. I’m tired of impatient  dumbasses.

I decided, “fuck it”, I’ve not spent money with these people for 35 years why should I break a streak. Then I started to work my way out of the lot only to have another moron pull in as though to park, then stop. 

Blocking me and everyone else in the fucking drive.

I motioned for the new dumb fucker to pick a damn direction. Once he moved out of the way, I drove down the hill to get gas, as I should have done in the first fucking place.

So It cost me 2 gallons of gas, to get two gallons of gas and 45 minutes in time when it should have taken 10 minutes. 

It occurred to me, I like my house, I like my view, I like my yard. I don’t really like the difficulties of living here.

It’s tough to get any kind of work done, septic, painting, repairs, whatever, it’s always a pain in the ass. Add the issues with getting mail, the fact that depending on which map is used, this part of the town exists in no less than three other towns, each 15 miles or more distant. That the street I live on is, in an indeterminant state. The county says it’s private when they don’t want to maintain or repair the damage they’ve done, but happily exert their easement rights and drive heavy equipment over it all the damn time.

And well, it’s tipping the balance and making the thought of leaving the house, the memories and the town not such a bad idea.

Better to leave while I have good memories of this place and the time I spent here than have those memories destroyed.

The area is changing, the neighborhood is changing, the town is changing, and honestly not for the good. Hesperia, a local town has the worst driving in all of California.

Moving here was a respite from what was happening to California. It’s taken 30 years for my little town to catch up with the rest of California, but here we are.

When I moved here, part of it was about my other half being here and happy. Coming here also was like me returning to the Midwest. But I was still able to commute to my job in LA or Orange County.

Commuting isn’t possible anymore due to traffic volume and poor planning.

The problems of California are here. I feel like I did just before I met Jerry. I was heading out, my plan was to go back to a place where the rules made sense. 

Perhaps it’s just time to go.