Happy Birthday Marine Corps.
I know, I’m pissing in the wind when I say this, but to all the Marines out there, don’t get too screwed up tonight.
Have a great time, and be good to each other.
Election Day!
Happy Election Day!
It’s a cold rainy day here on the mountain. On the plus side, at least I’m not having to walk through snow to the polling place and back. Yes, I’ve done that in past elections. It’s been raining enough here that if it was only a few degrees colder we’d have a foot or more of snow.
If it’s raining where you are, don’t let that stop you from casting your vote!
I don’t buy the hyperbole about voting for the soul of the nation.
In fact I don’t care what your politics are, or your party preference.
What I do care about is that you vote. Vote your conscience, vote for candidates that represent your beliefs, vote because it’s your civic duty.
If you can’t be bothered to do this one thing, then you have no voice and I’m not going to listen to you whining about the results after the election.
Personally, I’m hoping to see Gavin Newsom tossed out, unfortunately here in California that won’t make much of a difference because there are a lot of bad ideas that have ossified into the dreaded, “We’ve always done it this way,” mindset in this state.
I would enjoy seeing Gavin standing there with his hair blown back in surprise. I know it’s kind of a cheap shot but I’d love to see his smug arrogance take a nice uppercut. For clarity’s sake, I’m not advocating physical violence to Gavin, I’m speaking metaphorically about his attitude and arrogance taking a hit.
There was a time when such disclaimers weren’t necessary, these days though, people seem to be searching for anything they can spin into something it’s not.
I pray that Newsom takes such a drubbing that any presidential aspirations he may have, get flushed down the toilet. The whole country knows what Newsom has done to California. I’m hoping that they remember it in 2024 and decide they don’t want the rest of the country to follow California’s lead. Let the wonder that is Kamala Harris be a warning to everyone.
I’ve been fascinated by the Democrat messaging over the past week or so. (Spending hours on end in a car means you listen to a lot of radio.) The message seems almost like they’re expecting to take a major hit. Some candidates sounded like they just expected to win without really putting in the work.
These candidates seem quite surprised that they’re being challenged strongly by their opponents. When asked why their opponent is doing so well in polls they’re unable to answer. To me that speaks to a profound disconnect between the incumbents and their constituents. In a nutshell, that’s the answer. Many of them appear to be blindsided that their voters are interested in much more basic issues than special interest stuff. Most of us are really focused on basic necessities.
How can so many candidates have missed or ignored that?
The Republican Party appears to have capitalized on the concerns most Americans have. What remains to be seen is if they were lying to get into office or if the candidates really meant what they said on the campaign trail.
Time and vote counts will tell.
There was a piece in Politico that says in part, “The 2020 presidential election was rife with allegations of voting machine hacks that were later debunked. Yet there are real risks that hackers could tunnel into voting equipment and other election infrastructure to try to undermine Tuesday’s vote.”
That one was a head snapper. I thought there was no possibility that the election could be tampered with. Isn’t that what we were told after the 2020 election? So what’s changed?
More from Politico
Wireless modems enabling hacks of voting machines or vote tallies
At least seven states and Washington, D.C., use wireless modems to transmit unofficial election-night results to their central offices. These modems use telecommunications networks that are vulnerable to hackers, and malicious actors could exploit them to tamper with unofficial vote data, corrupt voting machines or compromise the computers used to tally official results.
Really? So are we to assume that since the 2020 election which was “perfect and secure”, that some states have taken steps to make the voting process more vulnerable? If these states haven’t made the process less secure, then can we assume that these states were as vulnerable in 2020 as they are today?
Does that mean that law suits filed by Trump which were dismissed as having no standing should be re-evaluated?
I’m sorry, but I’m kind of a binary guy. Either something is a problem or it’s not, Politico seems to be playing both sides depending on which party wins. How about we just settle for reporting the actual facts, and let the chips fall where they may? That would seem to be a simpler way to deal with politics and life in general.
President Biden’s speech may have muddied the voting waters as well. Listening to his speech I couldn’t help but think he was setting us all up for endless challenges about ballot counts and election integrity. As if we haven’t had quite enough of all of that over the past two years. What happens when the Democrats become “Election Deniers”? How does that play out?
If both parties become election deniers, does that mean both groups are domestic terrorists?
I’m looking for a change in this election.
I’d like to see someone tap the brakes on the excessive spending in Washington.
Instead of hiking the interest rates to curb inflation, how about we fix the supply chain issues? More products on the shelves and in the pipeline would also curb inflation.
I hope that our politicians pay more attention to the immediate issues that we’re all facing.
Go Vote, and have a good day!
The rain has picked up quite a bit. The normally dry creek bed behind the house is roaring, rocks the size of small cars are tumbling down the mountain. It’s causing the ground to shake almost as if there’s an earthquake.
When I think of all the water rushing down to the desert floor, I’m hoping that it makes it into the ground and replenishes the aquifers a bit.
Before all the streets and rain culverts, water ran down and soaked right in. On old aerial maps a perfect example of an alluvial plain was clearly visible. Today, with all the streets, parking lots, and pavement, localized flooding is becoming more common at the base of the mountain. Builders and City officials literally paved over the alluvial plain and now spend tons of taxpayer’s money combating the flooding. It would have been simpler to take the hint from nature and not allow building there in the first place.
For all our knowledge, humans miss the obvious more often than not.
I’ve often thought there should be wilderness buffer zones between communities. I picture areas that provide habitat for wildlife and access for runoff to soak into the ground. Zones as I envision them, would provide places for walking, hiking and communing with nature. I’m not talking about miles wide buffers, I’m talking about 1/4 of a mile or so green belts.
I guess the problem is that some people would see wilderness areas as places to dump their trash and do bad things.
I suspect that I’ve been a canary in a coal mine.
Unfortunately I’m not alone.
I’d actually hoped that the emerging patterns in society were transient anomalies. I’d also hoped that I was seeing things that weren’t there, that I was crazy, that I simply misunderstood or misinterpreted the bits and pieces of information flowing past me.
Oops! Maybe I wasn’t.
For a long time I’ve been noticing things. Small little things about the way people were behaving, trends in social justice, and the way so many people appeared to not only be polarized, but also unwilling to have a discussion with anyone who held different opinions or beliefs.
When I mentioned the things I’d noticed, my friends and family shut me down immediately. Usually they’d tell me that I was wrong and making a bigger thing out of something than it was. Eventually I stopped even trying to talk about what I’d notice and assumed that I was maybe too sensitive.
One of the first things I recall noticing was how differently Men were treated in sexual harassment situations. You could end a man’s career with only the accusation of Sexual Harassment.
Sitting in a sexual harassment training class in the ’90’s I innocently asked if the same rules appleid to women. The Female trainer treated me like I was insane and confidently told me that Women don’t sexually harass men.
When I explained that at barely 18, I’d had a female boss say, “Fuck me or you’re fired,” The sexual harassment trainer called me a trouble maker, a liar, and told me and the class no woman would ever do that.
She denied my actual lived experience, choosing to treat me like I was the aggressor instead of legitimately the victim by her own definition of victimhood. This kind of denial, that Men could be victims of sexual harassment, continues to this day.
For me it’s fascinating how utterly dismissive HR, Upper Management, and society at large are of this phenomenon. Women in my experience don’t sexually harass Men as often, but how would we really know?
Since men are dismissed as aggressors, troublemakers, or crybabies if and when they report it, are they likely to actually report it? Most men will simply think to themselves, “There’s no point in reporting it, that’s a waste of time. So I’ll just have to put up with it until I find a new job.”
Then they go out and find a new job. Over time, some men I suspect begin looking only at those positions where they will be working for other men. From my personal experience, I’ve had a lot more bad women bosses than bad men bosses.
At this point in my life, I’d rather work for a man. I don’t mean that to be misogynistic, it’s simply a statement of fact. Over 40 years of employment, the bad female bosses greatly outnumbered the male ones.
Zero Tolerance policies started showing up in schools, and businesses. These policies referred to sexual harassment in the beginning but rapidly expanded to include almost anything.
Does anyone remember the PopTart incident? Apparently a 5 or 6 year old cleverly chewed around a PopTart until it looked like a gun. The Horror!
The child was promptly removed form the snack area, remanded to the principals office and I recall his parents being called to the school. I don’t recall offhand if the police were also called. This was a direct result of contextless Zero Tolerance policies. He’s a child, it’s not likely he was going to hurt other children with a PopTart.
Policy is policy. Except when it isn’t.
When Zero Tolerance showed up in business, if you made someone uncomfortable or treated someone badly, or unintentionally slighted someone in some way. You’d have the HR department on your neck. Suddenly you couldn’t say someone was flat out wrong. You had to couch it in all kind of sweet language that served no purpose because you didn’t want someone taking you to HR for a reprimand.
After seeing a couple of coworkers toasted because they spoke plainly and honestly, I chose to keep my mouth shut. I’d execute whatever harebrained bullshit plan the boss wanted, even if it ran the project right off a cliff. No-one was interested in what I might have to say, much less my experience. So I’d let ‘em learn for themselves.
I was ahead of the curve in “Quiet Quitting”.
There were exceptions. If a boss was approachable and open to real discussion then I’d happily provide whatever insight or concern I had about a particular project. Trouble was, a large majority of bosses were not interested.
I’ve been honestly amazed at how many times, bosses have had an entire department plow the same ground, stumble over the same rocks, and then blame the employees for the failure.
This confused me, then It occurred to me that most of these people had exactly the same degree, taught from the same books. Then it wasn’t a mystery anymore. What remained a mystery is that so few of them learned from the mistakes.
In retrospect, if you believe you are absolutely right and that the failure is due to incompetent employees, then I suppose introspection wouldn’t be the first thing on your mind.
I must admit, I admire that elitist mindset.
Zero tolerance policies are never enforced equally. There is more zero tolerance for a white Male, or White Female than for a person of color.
Apparently there are levels to Zero
Persons of color typically don’t have to measure up to the Zero Tolerance policy. There are myriad excuses for this, but the most frequent I’ve heard are, “Their Culture is different,” or “You, white person, just misunderstood.”
There was a lady I worked with who went to HR because a supervisor had actively fondled her breasts while they shared an Uber back to the company from an offsite meeting. She was white, blonde, and pretty. The women in HR told her she was over reacting and that she didn’t understand Latin culture.
This lady didn’t come to work after that, her latin husband came in the next day to deliver her resignation, and clean out her office.
It is fortunate that the supervisor who fondled this man’s wife was not on site. I suspect that had he been, we all would have been treated to a cultural lesson in how Latin men deal with such insults.
At the same company, a black woman who wore an excessive amount of very cheap perfume took her supervisor and two other co-workers who shared cubicles next to hers, to HR.
Her contention was that these people were harassing her by asking her to tone down the perfume and not reapply every hour during the day.
This lady could literally be followed through the building by her perfume. The coworkers adjacent to her cube were having full blown allergic reactions. Swelling eyes, throat constrictions, etc. HR after hearing both sides, told her coworkers to take Benadryl. The supervisor was reduced in rank and that was the end of it.
Until the letter from perfume lady’s lawyer arrived. Then the supervisor and her coworkers were fired for harassment. Perfume Lady went out on stress leave and rumor was, she’d been paid off handsomely on the harassment suit.
I learned working for that company, that Zero Tolerance only worked one way. White people had no right to a safe and comfortable working environment and that complaints, even legitimate ones were weighted by the color of a person’s skin.
I mentioned these things to some friends and family and was told that clearly I didn’t have the entire story and that I must be jumping to conclusions.
5 years later, we can see this philosophy, now called equity, permeates government, business, and education, across the nation.
Equity is not Equality.
Equity is a thumb firmly on the scale. Equality is everyone is treated the same regardless of their appearance or social status.
When the Vice President says that FEMA funding will be assigned based on equity and is not challenged. There’s a problem. The White House and FMEA walked back her statement because there was considerable blowback. But I look at this as a test. The day there isn’t substantial blowback is the day that this weird issue of “Equity” will be entrenched.
At that point, folks from the non equity favored groups will be on their own during a disaster and perhaps on a wider scale too. Imagine the fun that can be had with “Equity” taxation.
There may come a day when certain groups will have an additional tax percentage added or subtracted from their tax bill based solely on the color of their skin.
It sounds outlandish today, but I won’t be surprised if someone floats the idea.
When the canary in the coal mine passes out, the workers evacuate the mine.
When a human canary tweets and chirps about things, they’re called ignorant, racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, nazis. They’re cancelled if they’re in the public eye, they’re mistreated and / or fired if they’re working for a large corporation. Which is in effect being cancelled. These days with corporations demanding access to an employees social media even what is said to your friends can get you fired, regardless of the context in which something was said.
“Hey Jack do you want to go to the trans abortion parade?”
“No thanks Greg, that’s not something I’m interested in. I have plans to go surfing with some buddies anyway.”
UH OH!
The trans HR worker at your company decides that you’re a closet Transphobe and even though you’ve never said anything offensive to anyone at work, you’re a bad person.
The canceling may be subtle. For example an application to move to another department may be “lost” resulting in the offending employee not getting the opportunity.
A .5% raise may simply not happen due to “poor performance scores” Asking the supervisor what was wrong with performance usually results in “I’ll look into it,” but nothing is ever done and nothing is ever conclusive enough one way or another to take action.
After all that Supervisor is a busy person, meetings to go to and luncheons to attend with all the “Right” upper management and all…
An employee can wait it out hoping the HR person goes to another company, but they’ll never regain traction and will always be underpaid until they too move to another company.
This is probably why some people realize a 5 to 10K pay increase just by moving to another company.
Having seen this kind of thing with my own eyes has made me very selective about which companies I apply at. A big red flag is a HR person asking for my social media accounts prior to an interview.
I have no social media accounts. LinkedIn being an exception. (That account, I am so tempted to delete because it’s pointless to me.) I’ve actually had HR people tell me that I must have social media accounts and that I must share them with the company. They simply will not believe that I’m not sharing my life with complete strangers.
The most recent incident resulted in the HR person telling me that starting out with their company by lying wasn’t going to get me an interview. Since I wasn’t lying, when I said, “Okay. Goodbye.” The HR person lost their shit. “You’ll never work for us!” I paused hitting the disconnect button, “Frankly I wouldn’t want to work for a company that starts out calling me a liar. There can never be trust between us. I really don’t do social media and you can spend the rest of the week trying to find a social media account, aside from LinkedIn but you won’t find one because there aren’t any. Again, Goodbye.”
Honestly, I have 4 friends, and 3 family members. We know each other’s phone numbers. We text or call each other. The rest of the planet doesn’t need access to those conversations.
I have something like 50 former coworkers excluding friends and family in my circle on LinkedIn. Not one of them has contacted me about anything in the past 5 years. So really what’s the point?
It’s not just the HR people from companies. The Headhunters do it too. I know I’m not supposed to call them headhunters anymore but I’ve lost track of what their preferred fancy title is. They’re still doing the same thing, they’re trying to increase the head count at a company… Ergo they’re headhunters.
Again, here’s that canary thing.
More and more studies are suggesting that social media may lead to depression, anxiety, and in some cases suicidal ideation. Some of those studies indicate that much of the social media people post may in fact be fictitious to garner upvotes and feelings of external approval. This is interesting because it speaks to some profound insecurity. Why would I worry about approval coming from someone that I’ve never met and probably wouldn’t recognize on the street?
The only approval I want is that of people that I have a real relationship with.
Full disclosure, I did at one time have Facebook, Twitter, and Parler, accounts. Facebook was the first to be deleted, then Twitter, and finally Parler. Today, I’m better off, less angry, or depressed, than I was when I had these accounts.
You see, I fell into the trap of approval clicks. I was disheartened when I posted something and got few if any responses. On Twitter and Parler most of the responses I got were from extremists. With the Twitterati I was castigated for being too conservative and therefore a hate monger. With the Parlerites I was too liberal and Un-American.
I couldn’t win for losing, and so I took my ball and went home.
Even if I still had those social media accounts, simply having a Parler, Gab, or TruthSocial account would immediately exclude me from most HR department hiring pools. The thought would be, “He’s a MAGA Terrorist! We can’t hire someone like him!”
It wouldn’t matter if I’d never posted one single thing. Simply having those accounts would be enough to activate bias against me. My resume and qualifications would never end up on a hiring manager’s desk.
The thing is, if you don’t post “enough,” whatever that is, then you’ve just created an account to meet the HR requirements. That’s not enough, they want to “Get to know you” through your posts.
Canary Time again. Changing the meaning of common words is bad.
When I brought this up to some acquaintances they told me I was out of my mind. Uhh Nope!
In this context “Getting to know you,” Is another euphemism for “Getting to judge you”. That wouldn’t be so bad if they were judging a person on their work, but this is judging the person on their politics, opinions, and beliefs. Not on their ability to actually scrub the corporate toilets.
I’ve thought about just giving them the address to this blog. Who knows, after some of the people got done reading this blog they might realize that human beings may have differing opinions and that doesn’t mean they’re planning some nefarious crime.
Nah, the HR folks would quiver and quake, then have mental breakdowns from having to read. They’d all go out to their safe spaces or go out on stress leave.
When words have no meaning communication is impossible.
This is especially true if descriptors are involved. If Man and Woman aren’t defined, and pronouns are fluid then what exactly are you saying in legal documents? How about medicine?
Imagine being wheeled into an operating room, and just as you’re passing out from the anesthesia hearing the doctor commenting that your genitalia was completely incorrect for a circumcision but no worries, the doctor would fix it all so that the desired outcome was the right one.
How about losing your 20 million dollar inheritance because you now identify as Zer but the great aunt willed the money to her wonderful nephew William?
Legal documents are precisely written to describe exactly what, when, who, and how. If you no longer fit the definition what happens? If Wilimina walks into the attorneys office will ze get zer inheritance?
If a house is defined by its owner as a tent, then the owner calls a mover of tents to strike your tent and move it to another location can there be breach of contract?
This strange redefinition seen today could lead to Zero Racism though. If you said that everyone in America was colored then how could there be racism? Everyone has some color. The only way they couldn’t would be if they were completely transparent.
Murderers could redefine their act as a retroactive abortion. If they were to convince the court of this, would they only face charges of practicing medicine without a license?
Can a trans individual identifying as a birthing individual commit rape against another birthing individual? Or were they just scissoring rubbing one large everted clit against a smaller clit with an inverted passage?
Does the potential offspring from such an event have any legal standing or is the offspring null and void since the rape couldn’t have occurred in the first place?
Something like this might create a whole other set of problems because there are religions who view immaculate conception as a really big deal.
Words matter sometimes
But it seems only when a word may be leveraged for victimhood. The gold standard of this it the forbidden “N” word. This word must never be used in any context because it causes hurt.
It’s hate speech except when it’s not. A person of darker color may call another person of darker color the “N” word. Persons of darker color can use the “N” word in song lyrics broadcast on the airwaves but no-one else may use this word.
If a person of lighter color sings the lyrics of a song containing the forbidden “N” word they may be violating hate speech laws and subject to cancellation, fines, imprisonment, and payment of restitution.
To say Black Lives Matter is virtuous. To say All Lives Matter is racist. For a person of darker color to say White Lives Matter is heresy, that person of darker color is an “Uncle Tom,” a “Hateful bigot,” and should be cancelled immediately.
Saying something hateful like Blue Lives matter is completely Nazi-esq inciting violence and welcoming the police state.
Yes, I’ve been a looter
I and several coworkers were in the San Jose Convention Center during the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989. We were presenters at a Technology convention.
After the quake we picked our way through the roof panels, broken machines, and shattered glass.
Once outside we quickly realized that everything was changed. The public transportation system wasn’t running. There was small rubble in the roads, on the sidewalks, and some of the streets had cracked. In the distance we could hear sirens and see smoke. Later we learned the damage we picked our way through was nothing like the damage in San Francisco and Oakland but it was enough to make walking interesting.
We were all dressed in business attire. The ladies with me were in high heels and dresses. Standing there I realized that we were going to have to walk back to our hotel and connect with the rest of the folks from our company who were not at the convention center or who had left the center via different exits.
I explained my thought about getting back to the hotel to the ladies with me. After waiting a little while to see if there were others from our company wandering in the crowd, we set off on foot toward the hotel.
Picking our way through the loose rubble it became obvious that the ladies high heels were a problem. About a half mile from the convention center we came upon a shoe store. The windows were broken and there was no-one minding the shop. We entered the store and located sneakers in the proper sizes for the ladies.
At this point we were technically looters. We’d entered a building without permission, we were actively “stealing”.
Both of the ladies left notes stating the SKU number, size, and description of the sneakers they were taking. Those notes also contained their names, and phone numbers, with a promise of payment. The ladies put in their notes, “Thank you!” We slipped the notes into the locked register drawer and left in peace.
Several hours later we arrived at the hotel to find chaos. The phones were down, the power was down, but the bar was open and the hotel was providing a free buffet of cold cut sandwiches. About an hour later, hotel maintenance was able to rig up a generator that powered the bar television and we got our first look at the damage in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose. Later in the night power was restored to the hotel.
A day or two later, when the airports opened, our company flew us home.
Several weeks later, one of the ladies I was traveling with, got a call at her desk. It was the owner of the shoe store. My coworker called me and our other coworker over, then put the owner on her desk speaker phone. The store owner told both ladies that instead of asking for a check, he wanted to let them know he’d framed the notes and hung them behind the cash register. He’d done this because he couldn’t believe someone would do what we did and it gave him hope.
We asked if the store had been looted further, he told us that the San Jose Police had locked the area down shortly after we’d been there so all of the local shop owners had suffered only minimal losses.
The lesson I learned is that taking something because you need it, and only taking what you need is very different from ransacking and cleaning out a place because you want a bunch of stuff.
According to the letter of the law we were looters. We could have been arrested and charged. We could have been shot and no-one would have thought anything about it.
Flash forward to this time in our history and I’d no more think of doing what we did than think I could fly.
There’s something different in our country today. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like there’s an overwhelming greed coupled with entitlement.
Now days looting is synonymous with stealing stupid stuff and stealing everything from a store. I guess looting has always been synonymous with these things. People don’t understand that just because something is “insured” doesn’t mean there’s no price.
I have a very different view of a mother stealing a can of baby formula or a loaf of bread and can of tuna, than I do people raiding a Best Buy. Yeah you stole a 65” flatscreen but it’s not going to do you any good with the power out. The mother on the other hand is obviously feeding her children.
So you cleaned out a Coach store and stole 50 handbags but what good are they?
I was thinking about these things in the wake of hurricane Ian.
There are reports of looting in some areas of Florida. The problem is people looting a grocery store to feed hungry children are treated the same as the assholes who clean out a Best Buy. Someone taking one pair of sneakers is treated the same as someone taking 50 pairs.
These are not the same thing. In the moment though, police aren’t going to be able to differentiate the person who’s a criminal out of necessity and the asshole criminal who’s in it due to opportunity, and for greed.
I’d bet that most grocers would hand a mother a can of formula, a loaf of bread and can of tuna and not think about it. That’s serving the community. The grocer would probably be happy to pass out one or two items each, to folks who were orderly and asked nicely.
But when a mob of people breaks in after a disaster, taking entire cases of stuff for themselves with no intention to share, that’s morally wrong and speaks to a selfishness and greed that’s detrimental to the community.
For me personally I always thought there was shared moral code all Americans understood. An almost absolute definition of right and wrong. The past few years have made me question that belief.
I find myself asking what has happened to the country I grew up in. What happened to feeling like you could trust the intentions of others and take their stories at face value? When did we forget that lying is wrong?
I used to stop and help stranded motorists, I used to pick up hitchhikers, I used to buy meals for homeless people or folks that were down on their luck. Now I do none of that. It’s not because I don’t care, it’s because I can no longer tell if someone is really in need, or if someone is trying to play me.
When did we lose our way?
A more important question is, “Can we find our way back?”
I know that looting is going to become a problem in the coming days across Florida. I just hope that the police and everyone else is mindful that, some people are taking only what they need to survive or feed their children, and aren’t too quick to judge.
You know, I don’t think it’s that that people don’t want to work
I think it’s that people are sick and tired of the endless bullshit that comes from trying to get a job.
I’ve talked to people who’ve had five interviews and hadn’t met the hiring manager yet. There are others that say they’ve had to explain their technical chops to recruiters, and then to the company HR, and then got to a video interview composed of people from every department except the one that they were going to be working in. In that interview they got to re-explain their technical abilities to people who had no clue what the job title was.
I read of one programmer who asked, “Will I be interacting with the accounting department on this project?” When he was told, “No,” he followed up with, “Then why are two of the 5 interviewers in this room from accounting?
It’s not just about having to fill out a 50 page job application where your’e cutting a pasting everything from your resume into the prescribed little boxes. And then having to submit your resume with the 50 page application. It’s about the complete disrespect that’s shown during a phone interview or zoom interview by people not having read either of the documents.
Technical people tend to cut straight line to a solution and don’t waste a lot of time getting from point A to point B.
There are also a lot of HR and recruiters who play the whole bait and switch game. No I don’t want to accept a 6 month (onSite) contract on a technical support desk, when I applied for a programming position.
No I’m not interested in a salary that is half of what I stated that I needed, with the possibility of overtime.
I love that the recruiter told me, “You’ll be making your requested salary when you consider the OT.” Uh no that’s not how it works. If the company decides to cut the OT then I’m not making enough to pay my bills. The recruiter said, “Oh you don’t have to worry about that! Most people complain that there’s too much OT and they have no time to do anything.”
The poor girl just didn’t understand that the company sounded like a shit show right from the start. Of course, the Corporate web site said, “We have a commitment to work life balance.” Uh Yeah! I can see that ever so clearly.
A buddy told me about an interviewer that couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to take a management slot instead of the position he’d applied for.
His answer was pretty straight forward. “I’ve done management, I want to spend time with my kids right now. I just want a job that pays the bills, is low stress, only has occasional overtime, and that I can go home at quitting time without worrying about people, resources, and budgets.”
The interviewer just couldn’t get it through her head. She literally kept talking in circles trying to get him to agree to take the management position. The kicker was that the management position only paid 2K per year more than the slot he applied for.
Eventually my buddy terminated the interview telling the interviewer that he was no longer interested in working for her company. She literally started screeching at him for wasting her time.
He told me it was one of those times when he missed the satisfaction of slamming the phone receiver down, especially since it was a zoom call. He substituted closing his laptop while she was berating him red-faced on the screen. He said it was strangely satisfying hearing her muffled screams from the closed laptop. He said he could have simply hit disconnect, but he really wanted to make the point, by closing the laptop screen she could see what was happening.
I’ll have to remember that for the future. I think my buddy may have come up with the phone slam equivalent for Zoom calls!
I’m still annoyed and amused by the hiring manager that pushed for a phone interview even though I told her I had a conflict because I was participating in an online collaboration meeting with my current employer. My participation was text chat only. She simply wouldn’t take “No” for an answer and I let her badger me into doing the interview. So during the call that she forced, She heard me typing a reply to one of my coworkers and immediately started yelling about how I wasn’t prepared for the interview and was obviously looking up information about the questions she was asking. I explained yet AGAIN that I was participating in a meeting and that I was answering a coworker’s question.
Nope! She went off on me and I thought, “I wouldn’t work for this person or her company! I’d rather stay right where I was. Better to drive daily 90 miles one way through LA traffic than to work for someone like her.”
I told her as politely as I could, “Goodbye,” and disconnected. She called me back telling me that it was unprofessional to hang up on her! I was well past my boiling point, “I asked what part of goodbye didn’t you understand? What part of I’m not going to be screamed at by someone that I don’t know, don’t work for and have no desire to ever meet in person, don’t you get?” I repeated, “Good Bye” and disconnected a second time. She called back to continue berating me.
I remember sitting there wondering what the hell? I hung up, blocked the number and went back to my meeting.
Later in the day I wrote a letter to the HR department of her company. I called out her harassment and offered to send them my phone log as evidence of her repeated calls. I further requested that they flush my application, and resume from their system. I have not applied to that company in the 10 years since.
They’re 25 miles from my home. At the time I knew 2 of their VPs and one of them had walked my resume into the company. I told them both about my experience with this particular manager. As of now, I know absolutely no-one who works for this company. The VP who’d walked my resume in, had been promoted to Director, but left the company a year or two later saying the place had become a shit show of egos and political bullshit.
He’s at Microsoft now.
I’ve had a couple of interviews where a hiring manager was grilling me for proprietary information about a previous employer throughout the interview. They’ve both been Chinese and refused to give up on the subject. The employer they zero in on is a defense contractor I worked for 8 years ago. Any information I might have is long since irrelevant and none of their business in any case. I’m not going to divulge anything about that time in my life except the employment verification number for them to call.
What these people don’t seem to get is that when they get all demanding and particularly if they seem to posses information about the project or projects I worked on, I’m going to call the security number and report that they’re asking inappropriate questions and have details they shouldn’t have. I’ll let the security people deal with these Foreign Nationals asking about confidential projects.It’s no skin off my nose to drop a dime on them.