Category: Shaming

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And we move step by step toward the Orwellian Nightmare…

IMG 0882As I’ve mentioned again and again Job searches are difficult especially if you’re an older worker.

Now as if to increase the difficulty, it’s become commonplace for recruiters to use your social media profile to determine your fitness for a particular position. 

If the recruiter finds something questionable in your social media, you’re not going to get the job. This apparently includes something as simple as a picture.

A news piece out of Texas where a job applicant was shamed over a photo in her instagram and didn’t get the job she was applying for demonstrates just how bad it’s gotten.

Those of us that don’t do a lot on social media or those of us who have no social media accounts are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. 

I found one line in the article particularly telling. 

“Go on with your bad self and do whatever in private. But this is not doing you any favors in finding a professional job.”

Uhh, you social media account is your social media account and it’s not the business of any employer to shame you especially for something as innocuous as a bikini photo.

This isn’t the first instance of social media being used to cause harm. This is simply the latest in a long line of egregious actions on the part of employers, or media.

I personally don’t want to live my life under a microscope. Yet it appears according to Linkedin that I must. 

I ask again where does it stop?

Will we end up with corporate “Social Purity Standards”, How about a GATTACA type society where genetic purity is required to work at all.

These articles about social media accounts all say you must be careful what you post, that makes sense, after all as my grandmother used to say, “You don’t air your dirty laundry in public.” 

But social media is something that you share between you and your friends. It should be something that allows you to keep in touch with a select group of people. That is, if you engage in it at all. My few friends and I typically communicate via text messages, or phone calls not because we have anything to hide but because that’s the way that is most comfortable.

We’re guys, sometimes we say off color things and honestly some comments if taken out of context could be blown way out of proportion.

Back in the stone age when I was in school we used to have object lessons taught to us by our teachers. One of those object lessons was on the nature of gossip. The lesson started by whispering something into the ear of the person sitting next to you. They whispered the same thing to the person next to them, and so on.

By the time the message got to the 15th person it was completely different and 100% wrong.

For example if a buddy of mine were to say, “I’m living in a tent in the back yard for the duration of October,” because he couldn’t stand his wife and daughter’s love of Pumkin Spice EVERYTHING as a joke. He may even have said it in front of his wife on a phone call which all involved would have laughed about.

If that was in a social media post and taken out of context, that same friend would be inundated with questions about how his separation was going and was he okay and what a bitch his wife was. Likewise on his wife’s social media her friends would be rallying around her and talking about what a son of a bitch he was and that she was better off without him.

It could easily be taken out of context.

3nd friend asks 2nd friend about him and short reply is “Well he’s out in the tent in the back yard with the dog”

3rd friend knows based on time of year that it’s a joke about pumpkin spice.

But an acquaintance of #1 and friend of number 3 sees the post and reads into it, “trouble in the marriage with divorce imminent,” before long the whole thing spins out of control and a lot more energy is spent correcting the misunderstanding than was spent creating the original post.

This is why so many older folks just aren’t that interested in social media. It’s not that they don’t know how to use it, they know how wrong things can go, and how quickly. It’s a lesson we all learned back in the early days of telephones when we all had “Party Lines”.

Party Lines were the single greatest source of neighborhood gossip in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s.

If you were filing for divorce, you went to the attorney’s office, you sure didn’t talk about it on the phone. Rumors often got started just because you made an appointment with a doctor, lawyer, or accountant on a party line.

Social media is the “Party Line” of this age. The irony is, back in the day, we all paid handsomely to have private lines as they became available in our neighborhoods.

Now, people flock to social media to post details about their lives that should be private and yet they’re sharing it all with whole world.

This makes me wonder if facebook still lists me as a user, or for that matter myspace. Those accounts have been closed for years, (According to facebook or myspace,) but I have no proof that another facebook or myspace user isn’t able to see what I posted before I decided social media wasn’t for me.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time for legislation to prevent corporate entities using social media to spy on their employees. God knows the last thing we need is more legislation, but perhaps it’s time to have a very clear division between corporate social media and personal social media and a “Never the twain shall meet” set of laws.

In the case of the young lady who was shamed by a potential employer, because there was a picture of her in a bikini on her instagram…

I hope she sues the shit out of them.

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Oh Yeah… Gotta make sure ya get that pound of flesh!

First, I guess I took a little more than a short technology break. I don’t know how frequently I’m going to be posting but I’ll see what I can do to be a bit more regular about it.

Abusers

I’m posting about this growing trend to make sure that someone is absolutely bashed, kicked, shows appropriate contrition, and then is bashed and kicked some more.

Here’s an example.

Been working at a company 6 months, been transferring calls to the appropriate extension for all that time. Phones and extensions are changing all the time and so it was without much surprise that I get a new phone list.

Dead center of the page, there’s a RED label that says “Warm Transfer” followed by an extension. It’s an unfamiliar extension and so at a glance you’d think that the red lettering was calling your attention to a new extension.

WRONG!!!!

Beaten

Turns out someone thought that coloring only the words “Warm Transfer” was a good idea to highlight a supervisory extension on an otherwise data heavy, very busy page.

So in a chaotic, very busy environment, where you’re graded on how many calls you take in a day, and how often your associated paperwork has mistakes and people on the phones complaining about everything from their lot in life to other products, and the product that you actually are there to answer questions about, you make a mistake. In a normal workplace, making a mistake would be, meh and the employees wouldn’t live in fear. Unfortunately that’s not the case where I work.

Torturers

Someone on a call, needed to talk to a person in the department associated with the “Warm Transfer” number. So you dutifully set about to transfer them, and you dial the most prominent number on the phone list.

OOOPPPPSSSS!

An unhappy supervisor answers and asks how they can help. You explain what’s up and they respond by telling you “This is a supervisor line.” You apologize, then they ask how you got this number you explain it’s on a paper in front of you next to text that says warm transfer and tell the supervisor that you’ll let everyone around you know that the number in question is associated with a supervisor so they shouldn’t use it unless they need a supervisor.

The Sup tells you ok, and transfers you to the right extension. You take care of business, then move on to the next grumpy, annoyed, irate person.

Then your corporate instant messaging lights up asking all kinds of questions and demanding to know why you’re not paying attention to their instant messages, when you’re actually doing your job and talking to a customer.

You finish the call and respond to an interrogation via instant messaging. Then you’d think it was over.

IT’S NOT!

Screamingsupervisors

The last and final indignity is that now YOUR supervisor comes over to make sure that you are appropriately contrite, know what your mistake was, and that it was solely your fault that you interrupted a supervisor.

FOR GOD’S SAKE! REALLY?

It was a simple and easily corrected mistake. On top of that the mistake had been corrected & noted immediately after the first supervisor had said it was the wrong extension.

But in this day & age there is no such thing as an innocent mistake. 

Waiting for your mistake

So for me at least, every day is a grueling eight hour stress test.  Make no mistakes, answer every call, don’t spend too much time documenting, move on to the next call, don’t say what should be said or what needs to be said, and live in fear or terror of being chastised, yelled at, or honestly… bullied all day long.

I come home each day more exhausted than when I was working lifting and toting 50 LB bags of fertilizer, or crawling around in 100° F attics running ductwork.

I’ll tell you this, those honest jobs were a hell of a lot more personally satisfying. 

Workplace Bullying institute

Ahh well, this too shall pass.

And that’s why I’m looking for a new job and why I’ve been offline for the most part for the past few months.

We as a society need to remember that minor mistakes and problems, not only shouldn’t but needn’t be blown out of proportion. 

A simple comment, a word, or small mistake is not cause for the weight of JUSTICE to be brought to bear on the individual who misspoke or did something slightly wrong.

Most of the time, folks will correct their behavior on their own with a simple, “Hey, X, Y, or Z isn’t right.”

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The end of white guilt ?

White people shoulda thought of this years ago. White guilt is going to be eliminated, not because any of the issues actually get fixed, but because the trigger words for white guilt will have lost all meaning.

This country is racist, That town is racist, This person is racist, That college is racist, The police are racist, The media is racist,

racist

RACIST

RACIST

Cursed.jpegIt reminds me of the scene in The Mummy Returns where one of the bad guys is grumbling at another bad guy “This is Cursed, That is Cursed,” and starts pointing at random objects “Cursed, Cursed, Cursed!”

Of course all three of those bad guys come to a nasty end at the hands of their employer, The Mummy. Nonetheless it stands as an example of what happens when you overuse a word.

After a while the word loses all meaning and no-one pays attention anymore. Oops! The Mummy just ate you.

College-Campus.jpegSince I mentioned “trigger words” I wonder where the White safe space is? Where on college campuses can oppressed fearful white student go and not hear the incessant “trigger word” of their assumed guilt.

Oh yeah, there aren’t any spaces like that. Not anymore, even though there used to be. They were called college campuses. Ironic that once the Campus was the bastion of freedom of speech, free exchange of ideas, and an opportunity for young adults to mature while coming to grips with the world in a place of safety.

Today however that feeling of safety has been reduced by nothing other than Social Justice Warriors run amok. Now it’s perfectly okay to terrorize people who are symbols of oppression even if they themselves are not oppressors, and never have been.

WTF

Unless those people happen to be followers of Islam / Daesh.

Then it’s forbidden to say anything at all, regardless of the horrific oppression of women, the enforced control over women’s bodies, the enslavement of children for sexual purposes, the murder of people who believe in a different version of God, the murder of gay people, or simply those presumed to be gay.

Speaking out against these horrors is racist, leaving a large percent of the population with a WTF look on their faces.

Yes, I just conflated Islam with Daesh. I did it on purpose and in this particular way because there’s not much difference, and because Isis, was an Egyptian goddess and I’d like to see her name restored to her.

My point is, that amidst all the noise and craziness of tiny events and small affronts, we’re losing sight of some really important global issues and simultaneously devaluing the impact that certain words should have.

If you call someone a racist, that word should have impact. It should mean something and is supposed to be a word that invites censure of the person being described as such.

If everyone is racist, then no-one is. If everyone is special, then no-one is.

What has brought this particular train of thought to derailment in this blog, is the recent dust-up at a Missouri college. Apparently the football team is threatening to strike unless a white university president is removed.

ap-university-of-missouri-protests-grow-after-athletes-jump-in.jpgI’m sad to report that Monday, the rabid crowd got their wish, the president resigned.

BUT was it his fault that there was name calling? That some drunken frat boy yelled the “N” word at members of a black student organization?

That two trucks drove by a student protest flying Confederate Battle flags? That someone made a swastika of Poo in a Dorm bathroom?

NO! It wasn’t.

confederate-Flag-in-a-truck.pngRegardless of what many people apparently would like to think, white people are not all controlling, omniscient, all powerful beings.

This president’s ONLY failing in this matter was that he happened to be white.

That is exemplified by one of the student groups issuing a long list of demands that read like random sections from a drunken reading of Mein Kampf. (I know kids, you don’t know what that is and you’re afraid to read it because it was written by Hitler and might trigger you.)

The standout demand was they wanted the university president to acknowledge his “white privilege”. Which to me is akin to nothing short of saying “I’m a racist, and all white people are racists. Please kill us and burn our societies to the ground. Then bitch at those of us that survive because you can’t charge your damn iPhone.”

Whatever investigations this university president may have initiated to get to the bottom of the events didn’t bear fruit within the requisite 15 minutes demanded by a campus full of short attention span morons.

No white people were randomly dragged forth from a dorm to be punished by the mob for their complicity in institutional racism. The crowd demanded instant action and heads of the offenders on pikes.

Funny story. There once was a little town in Florida called Rosewood. The town was almost exclusively black and it’s people lived in relative peace with churches, stores, a turpentine mill and sugarcane mill. In all respects it was a nice middle class town.

In 1923, in a completely wrong misguided quest for instant “Justice” white men lynched a black resident of Rosewood because a white woman who was having an affair told a lie.

Seems the woman had been smacked around by her lover while her husband was at work. In an attempt to explain her injuries she claimed a black drifter had beaten her and she implied she’d been raped.

Predictably, people lost their damn minds. The folks in Rosewood justifiable organized to protect themselves. The white folks organized to essentially compound their screw up and began combing the countryside for black people and burned virtually every structure in Rosewood to the ground.

The town was abandoned and never rebuilt.

I learned about Rosewood in junior high school, in Florida… You know that place everyone likes to call redneck and stupid???  

The lesson about Rosewood was that misguided “Justice” is NOT Justice at all. Lies have consequences, People shouldn’t rush to judgement or punishment, because if you do without due process and obedience to the laws we all have a hand in creating, you create far more damage than good.

Rosewood isn’t just a lesson about racism. It’s a lesson about how panicky and stupid people can become if they become a mob and have a target.

When there were no heads on pikes and “frontier justice” didn’t happen… After all, HOW are you going to track down random individuals who may or may NOT be students of the university? The ONLY conclusion the SJW crowd could come up with was that the president of the university must inevitably be a racist, and therefore part of the problem.

At this point the social justice crowd has demonstrated far more institutionalized racism than a few individuals yelling nigger, or being artistic with shit.

The first event; The student government president who is black, claiming someone in a passing truck (were they students?) called him bad names,” has yet to be verified.

Yet the mere suggestion that nothing was being done was enough to start an inevitable cascade of insanity. Unverified as the allegation is, and will no doubt remain, I wonder if there was some conflict between the Student government president and the University president.

Was this a revenge situation that got out of control? We’ll never know because with the resignation of the offensive white sacrificial goat all investigations will stop. Case closed, we got our man and he was punished.

The only thing we have to show for all this angst is a man who happened to be white was persecuted, bullied, and intimidated, into leaving his job and potentially losing his career with no proof of wrongdoing, apparently only because he is white.

KKK.pngI call that pretty much the definition of racism.

Good job! Students of the University of Missouri. The only thing you didn’t do was march in sheets with torches, burning crosses on lawns.

In related news this morning, The Chancellor of the University of Missouri is also resigning. There had apparently been complaints of various types against him.

Given that the students are now running the show and are on a roll, why don’t they just demand degrees and finish the job of devaluing American College degrees to toilet paper.

Based on the “Critical Thinking Skills” demonstrated by these and other “Thinkers” in the SJW crowd college diplomas clearly aren’t what they once were.

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I don’t think that means what you think that means…

NewImage

I’ve been reading the various articles about the “ Social Justice” push to have confederate monuments “removed from public view.”

My views on Social Justice have changed over the years. In the words of Inego Montoya from The Princess Bride; 

Inego

“I don’t think that means what you think that means…”

When I was first on the Social Justice bandwagon I had a simplistic view. I thought it was about justice for everyone and that we all were supposed to have equal access in all things. Additionally, we were supposed to respect each other’s rights and beliefs. Someone’s beliefs were to be protected just as surely as their right to speak because the two were inexorably intertwined.

egalitarian

It was incumbent on the observer to listen OR NOT, however, we were all supposed to defend each other’s right to speak, be heard, or believe whatever we wanted to believe, no matter how wrong headed or outlandish what was being said might have been.

Naively I believed that the end goal of Social Justice was a completely egalitarian society were all of us rose or fell in accordance with the level of our abilities and work.

bellcurve

Very lazy or stupid people fell, very clever or lucky people rose, and those of us in the middle ground could look forward to having nice lives, families, and retirements. In my world view the wealthy weren’t evil, they were incentive. Inherent in my view was that even the wealthy could and sometimes did fall, just as clever people (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs) rose.

My belief was that no-one in this great nation should have a child go hungry, and everyone should be contributing. I thought that even the lower bounds of society could and should contribute and be compensated for their contributions. I’d happily feed the homeless guy who’s picking up trash on a city street. (In fact I still do that today. Someone in need who has pride enough to be concerned about where we all live will get a meal, or two, and / or a ride from me.)

Medieval Torture Devices

This was a simple concept, and for me, very easy to incorporate into my world view.

Then it started to get mean. My fellow Justice warriors weren’t all that interested in balance. They seemed only interested in retribution.  After all, what you may consider “Just” the people on the receiving end of your “Just Cause” may view as a loss of their rights and freedoms. Many of the Social Justice warriors, then and now, were more than willing to impose their will on others without mercy, because after all, Social Justice was “RIGHT”.

I began to have serious problems with Social Justice when I saw that the same “Sins” the Social Justice crowd railed against, being perpetuated by the SJ crowd. The only difference was that the “SJ Warriors” had picked new targets, and that made it all okay.

Today, in the name of Social Justice we’ll shame people, we’ll fire them, we’ll destroy their careers at the drop of a hat, and even if the reasons for “Punishing” someone turn out to be unfounded, our society never looks back and never even tries to repair the damage.

NewImage

Some Social Justice pundits seem to have the opinion, “They (The target du jour) deserved what they got. If not this time, then for all the times they got away with it.”

Remember the La Cross team in North Carolina? How about the Fraternity that was closed due to false gang rape allegations?

NAACP

Which leads to the current madness of removing confederate monuments. There are two contenders for the “Most insane / inane” award.  The leader in this category is the push in Memphis to dig up Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s grave. A close second is Al Sharpton and the NAACP demanding that Stone Mountain monument in Georgia be sandblasted from the side of the mountain. I ask myself how the hell is any of this behavior different from ISIS blowing up Palmyra, or The Taliban blowing up the reclining Buddha’s? The short answer is there’s not one whit of difference.

eyeball

The Bible says something like;  “If thine eye offends thee, Pluck it out.”

That passage says nothing about gouging something YOU find offensive, out of the side of a mountain. It says nothing about gouging everyone else’s eyes out, and in truth isn’t saying pluck out your own eye either.  It’s saying take responsibility for yourself and don’t look at something if it offends you.

Bible

True social justice would be making these monuments about teaching. Teaching that these monuments are built to honor people deserving of respect because they stood up for what they believed in. Then explain why they were wrong, and the horrible losses on both sides of a conflict that should have been avoided. Let these monuments serve their intended function, to remind us that deep divisions within our nation lead to very sad, dark places.

I’d take up the social justice banner again if the movement was about doing things better but these days, Social Justice is about cracking an offensive egg with the 20LB sledgehammer of punishment.

Go ahead, argue with me! I’ve got DIRT on all of you; what I don’t have I’ll make up!

That’s how we do things these days isn’t it?

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I don’t know which is worse… Chinese Hackers or Indian Headhunters

Kumar

Ok, 

Maybe I’ve overstated it a bit. Clearly the Chinese hacker is worse.

I just got an email from a headhunter, and this time I’m going to shame them, that’s what we do now days isn’t it?

There are a number of issues with this email.

First, this guy has contacted me before about other opportunities at the same company. I’ve politely responded to each and every one of these supposed opportunities and received NOTHING.

Not one single acknowledgement of any of my emails instructing him to submit my resume or any of my subsequent follow-ups on the status of the position.

Second, is this:

Please let me know should you be interested and revert  back with your updated resume along with the best time to  reach you asap. In case you are not interested, we request you to refer a friend or a colleague who might also be interested in this position. We have an attractive referral policy.

IIC New York

Revert back?

Wasn’t India a British colony? Don’t they still have a British based school system?

Third, Rajesh has a copy of my resume and he refers to the fact that he’s reviewed my resume prior to sending me the information on this position with Toyota.

Shouldn’t his sentence have been more like “Please let me know should you be interested and reply with an updated resume if applicable. ”

Fourth, since ol Rajesh won’t respond to my emails if I were to refer someone else to his company,  I’d NEVER be able to collect on that attractive referral now would I?

Thanks to Google Maps, Street View I can confirm that there is really a building at the address listed, although I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least if there had been an empty field.

I had no sooner written a response to Rajesh and pressed send. When another email came in. 

SS

This second email is the height of bad form. But what makes me really suspicious of it’s origin is the header information.

I’m going to investigate this company a little more so I’m not going to totally shame them.

The header is suspicious because the person sending the email is also the person to whom the email is addressed. It’s not until I dig into the header that I find my email address.

It almost looks like someone is spoofing the email except there are no links pointing anywhere other than to the company referenced in the footer. So maybe the email is legit.

The text of the email is:

Hello,

I have an immediate opening for Facets Tester –East Coast claims Exp.

With Regards

While I admire brevity, my only response to this email has to be “That’s Nice, now what?”

“Facets” is an ambiguous term. It could refer to the GEE WHIZ new term (designed to make something “Sound” special) for testing filters in web searches. 

blue bonnet w flowers

Think “Womens Bonnets” — 25,000 items

add “Blue” — 5000 items

add “With Flowers + Floral” — 25 items

These are “Facets” of an item or search. In other words it’s a SQL search.

SELECT FROM Clothing WHERE Gender like ‘Womens’ AND ClothingType like ‘Bonnets’ — 25,000 items

AND Color like ‘Blue’ — 5000 items

AND Decoration like ‘Flowers’

OR Decoration like ‘Floral’ — 25 items

Apologies to the real SQL folks out there, I know some of you could do it all in one single statement. My SQL is a bit rusty.

I’m not sure why we keep renaming shit. It just annoys the crap out of everyone. If it’s NOT NEW then leave the name alone!

Facets healthcare System

Or, and the more likely meaning of “Facets” in this email is referring to a healthcare billing / insurance system called Facets. I’m basing that on the term “Claims Exp.” in the email.

But does this email mean that they want East Coast claims experience or that the position is located somewhere on the East Coast? Again, I’m left to wonder.

I swear I’ve thought more and more lately about just starting a Headhunting agency. The tag line would something like “We Do everything OLD school!”

For some of the hiring managers I know, “Old School” would be a breath of fresh air.

My goodness, I’m turning away from social media in one posting, and now I’m espousing the virtues of Old School job recruitment in another. 

Next, I’ll be writing a book on a typewriter!

Ok who put the Luddite pills in my cream of wheat?