Sleepless on the mountain

I’d fallen asleep on the couch for a few minutes. 

It was near bedtime so when I woke up I just relocated to bed. I started to drift off and then something happened. I’m not sure what, but I was wide awake. There were the usual creaks and sounds of the house, but for some reason they seemed louder.

Then I was thinking of all the stuff I need to do, which led to what do I want to do, which led to how do I do it, and the links in the chain went on & on from there.

Eventually, I decided to get up. After all, there’s no need to toss & turn in bed keeping Jesse awake.

His response to my sleeplessness was to sigh in an annoyed way. Once I left the bed, he curled up right in the middle of the bed. I guess I’m not going to be allowed to get back in the bed until I’ve settled down.

Something has me unsettled. I don’t know what it is. There’s something familiar about it, but it’s been too long for me to be able to put my finger on it.

I’m debating pouring myself a small drink to see if that will allow me to relax enough to go to sleep.

I haven’t had a problem sleeping like this in a very long time. I’m really wound up and I have no clue why.

Maybe I’ll try writing some. I’m wondering if I’ve got an idea percolating that needs to be written then I’ll be able to sleep.

It’s possible it’s the moonlight although it’s not a full moon, it’s a bright and clear night.

Happy February, It’s a beautiful day

It’s in the 50s here on the mountain. The snow we had last week is melting fast, but I’m not putting my snow shovels or snow thrower away just yet.

February and sometimes March have been known to throw us curve balls and drop feet of snow on us at the darnedest times.

There are a few things that I’ve noticed this year. The dog never developed his super fluffy coat. The leaves on the maple and apple tree hung on for a really long time before dropping, and the cottonwoods and maple tree are already budding.

It’s thus far, been a mild Winter here. But there’s still a month & 1/2 to go.

I often think the trees and the animals are better predictors of the weather than we are with all our technology.

The various tax forms should be available now, and that means I’m going to be working for the government sorting all this bullshit out. I’m still working through all the tax nightmare left behind by the passing of my other half, and the COVID era. Apparently the accountant really fucked up the filings from 2019 on… So yipeee! I get to spend a ton of time unfucking the mess.

I wish Trump would just do away with the IRS already! There are so many things I could say about them. Most of it boils down to just the plain weird stupid shit about our tax code.

Chief among some of this is why is the tax code so damn complex? Why do we have an entire industry built around dealing with taxes that the fucking government takes right off the top, they know how much they’ve taken, then they jump us all through hoops where we file in terror of making a mistake then they always find mistakes that cost us more.

Why the fuck don’t they just send us a bill? Better yet, go to a flat tax, Even better… Stop taxing us altogether!

I’m annoyed about it.

I hate that over the past four years so much of our tax money was literally wasted on endeavors that did absolutely nothing for the American people.

I’ve also come to reject the premise that taxes allow us to have a safe and productive nation. 

That is absolute bullshit.

With our taxes going up over the past 16 years, I submit that we do not have a safer more productive nation. In fact I would say it’s exactly the opposite.

Maybe I’ll do some real research and then podcast about it.

In the mean time, I’m going to breathe, and see what I can do about enjoying this beautiful day.

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.

Snow Day

The weather reports were all conflicting.

Some reports said, 2 – 4” and other reports said 18” thankfully the snowfall this morning was less than 2”.

It’s still snowing off & on but not really accumulating. I got my workout today from shoveling snow.

Jesse is annoyed, he really likes his walks, but I wasn’t feeling up to it anyway. Instead we’ve played ball and we’ve played in the snow. He likes laying in fresh snow and challenging me to bury him. It’s sweet and silly and makes him smile.

Honestly, it makes me smile too.

There is more snow forecast. Perhaps tomorrow there will be new stuff to play in. As of this writing, it’s snowing lightly, more of a dusting. Radar says there’s a heavy front coming through. But this wave is only supposed to last for an hour or so. I guess the real question is how many of these waves we have left.

I’ll have to get him and myself out for a walk tomorrow before we both go stir crazy. I know, It’s only been one day, but it doesn’t take long for either of us to get cranky.

 

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.