Tag: Government

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Triggered, First thing in the morning! Yeah!

After years of working in corporate America, there are a few things that really trigger me.

One of those things is Emails with the words, “Mandatory”, “Comply”, “You Must”, “Required”, and my favorite is “Compliance is Mandatory”.

You see, these words or phrases never herald good news for any employee.

The term; “Mandatory Overtime” Only occurs in corporate email in the Summer when you’re planning a vacation, or in Fall/Winter before Thanksgiving or Christmas. That’s been my experience, your milage will vary.

Much like COVID’s 10 days to slow the spread there’s always a time component. Corporations always start with 30 days but all the employees know that’s complete bullshit. Whatever failures in planning that led to “Mandatory Overtime” in the first place are cumulative failures that cannot be resolved in 30 days and are much more likely to require 90 to 120 days.

But the HR department and management in general, lie in hopes of not having a bunch of people simply walk off the job.

Invariably Paid Time Off will be impacted and your employer will be looking for some kind of proof that you have a trip planned or are going in for surgery. The last company I worked for even added penalties if you were sick during Mandatory Overtime. They also had one guy drop dead at his desk because he was so terrified of losing his job, he neglected to seek medical assistance for a heart attack. Instead, he drove to work and died at his desk. Did the company relent? Hell NO! There were also miscellaneous people who went out on stress leave never to return.

If you’re a salaried employee, mandatory overtime actually reduces your hourly wage because you get no bonus or incentive to put in those hours. Usually, salaried employees don’t have enough “time in position” to benefit from stock options either. So even if the company succeeds due to salaried employees accepting their reduction in pay, there isn’t any long term benefit to them. But the executives see huge bonuses, and get plenty of accolades, even though they weren’t included in the “Mandatory Overtime” edict.

Having been in exactly the position above more times than I can count. The word “mandatory” has become a triggering word to me.

Over the years, “Comply”, “Compliance”, and “Must” have also become triggers for similar reasons.

“You must comply with the new standard”, means that you as an employee will have to set aside time to attend training. Often that time is supposed to be given to the company during some kind “lunch and learn” but the truth is you’re still working even though you’re not technically on the clock. After all, “this new training is for your benefit,” uh right…

If the training is from HR, it’s not for your benefit, it’s so the company can cover their ass.

Training of this type often includes: Sexual Harassment Training, New policies, (I assume new pronoun usage these days), Cheapening of Insurance, or Workplace Safety.

All of these sound like great things, until you read the fine print when you sign that you’ve taken the “Training”. 99% of my experience is that HR is making modifications to the terms of your employment and providing a mechanism that allows any perceived slight to be grounds for termination. Couple that with so called “Zero Tolerance Policies” and well being a white male… You’re screwed!

HR is not the employee’s friend and hasn’t been for decades.

Which leads me to my triggering this morning.

The California EDD sent an email that says in part;

“Urgent: You Must Verify Your Employment or Self-Employment for Your PUA Claim“

“Even though your Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) benefits have ended, federal rules require you to provide documentation to prove that you were, or planned to be, self-employed or employed at some point between 01/01/2019 and 11/15/2020.”

They start the email by SHOUTING my name because apparently, the state of California doesn’t know how to use lower case.

They direct me to the State of California’s shitty website which is always a pain in the ass to log into, and is in fact, such a pain in the ass that I stopped using it, opting instead for snail mail.

Triggered though I am, I’m curious to know what the hell EDD is talking about and what kind of documentation they’re asking for, so I try to log in anyway. Don’t they already have all that documentation? It should be in their files.

The login inevitably fails and I’m locked out of the account for an hour. What’s new? EDD couldn’t program their way out of a one bit puzzle.

In this particular case it also looks like they’ve changed or updated their login page and are now showing me a security picture of a die and a comment that says 1997 Chevy.

This leads me to wonder if the login is fucked up or if someone has been playing around at stealing my account. Neither would surprise me with California EDD.

As an aside, I’ve applied to work for California EDD on several occasions since it’s obvious they could use someone testing their shitty software. They, like every single other potential employer, promptly ignored my application.

Honestly, at this point I’d be happy with a response from any potential employer that said literally, “Fuck off you piece of shit!” At least then I’d know where I stood.

While EDD was sending me money, I felt compelled to respond to their shit. Technically since they were paying me, I considered myself an employee. But now that they’re not sending me money, and I’m still unemployed…

I’m much less inclined to go out of my way to deal with them.

I’ll wait another 30 minutes and try again. If I still am unable to log into the web site I’ll have to decide to ignore them, or contact my state representative’s office. In the past the representative’s office has been the only way to make headway with the EDD.

I hate having to involve them in this bullshit but I may have no choice.

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Well now, Time for another week of Biden Follies

Please note, ‘biden’ is hereinafter defined as a “fuck-up of epic proportions.”

The beauty of this is “Biden” and “biden” are completely interchangeable.

Therefore, I can write this blog well in advance. (sort of like the media did for Trump’s mean tweets.) The President and his Democratic cronies will, without any doubt provide fodder for me to make fun of, over the weekend.

That’s the saddest thing about the people controlling the levers of power.

I can count on any or all of them to ‘biden’ it reliably.

It’s a pity they cannot be relied upon to actually do their jobs or be constructive in any way.

Last week we had all the noise about photos of border patrol riding horses and the way the photos appeared, made it look like the split reins were being used to “whip” illegals coming across the border.

Maxine Waters said, “It looked like slavery” (As if she would know…) Looks are not necessarily truth and the ignorance demonstrated by the politicians in Washington DC is astounding.

With very few exceptions, the members of Congress have never been within 1000 feet of a horse.

(This image is one that’s been peddled as horrific evidence that the border patrol was whipping an illegal. But if you really take a look at the image, the border patrol agent’s right hand is grabbing the illegals shirt. The rein is simply blowing in the wind, because that agent dropped the rein to grab the illegal.)

The shrill men & women claiming that the illegals were being whipped, are the same people who’d not have the sense to avoid horse shit with their Jimmy Chu’s or Ferragamo’s.

Cowgirl Barrel Racing At A Small Rodeo Arena

But once again, truth, or reality, mean nothing. So the biden administration is doing what it does best.

(Looking at the photos from the border, I was reminded of barrel racing. Here’s a photo of a woman getting ready to maliciously beat a barrel with her reins.

Ahem!)

Horse mounted border patrol agents are apparently going to be forbidden.

I’m sure that in the coming weeks there will be injuries to border patrol who have to walk the crowd, and there are sure to be more drownings of the illegals.

I say this because horses are flexible animals. A rider on a horse can, with relative safety walk the horse into a river and assist someone who is being swept downriver. ATVs can do some of this work, but not in 3 or 4 feet of water. From a horse, the rider can concentrate on helping someone, from an ATV not so much.

It’s obvious why too. The horse has a brain. The horse will move to better footing and maintain a position all by itself. Leaving the rider to throw a rope to someone if necessary.

Horses also have a bit of sense. When the rider tells a horse to move out of a river, or across rough terrain, the horse will pick a path that most often works. (Horses don’t like falling down any more than we do.) Which is probably why the border patrol agents chose horses over ATVs in the first place. It’s simple common sense, (a.k.a. Horse sense,) they chose the best method for the environment they operate in.

Once the horses are removed from the equation, and the injuries to both border patrol and illegals increase I’m sure we’re going to hear from Congress about how unacceptable it is that illegals are not being treated well. They’ll be remarkably silent about the border patrol officers that are laid up with injuries.

In that environment and rough terrain, I’d choose a horse.

As an aside, it’s been 50 years since I was on a horse. Horses and I don’t generally get along with each other.

I’d add one more reason for using a horse. If I got hurt, provided I could get on my horse, I know that even if I was unconscious the horse could take me back to the barn.

ATV’s aren’t nearly that smart.

We all know this political monster we’ve allowed to be created will remain silent and do nothing to help the border patrol. The evidence supports this assessment.

The current administration and our politicians will do anything to destroy our country.

In that task, they are devastatingly efficient.

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Gee Thanks Joe!

So as has been stated, I’ve been looking for a job for 2 years. I was laid off from my previous job due to outsourcing in Aug of 2019. Just in time for COVID Yea!

Throughout 2020 I applied for various jobs in my field that process has continued into 2021, with no positive results.

With over 30 years experience in technology and software testing I’m apparently unemployable. That’s not whining, it’s just a statement of fact.

Way back in the day, I demonstrated that I had a high aptitude for technology and computers. I was literally hired out of a junior college and never went back to finish a degree. That’s on me I admit it.

The fact is most of what was being taught in colleges had zero relevance to what I was actually doing because the colleges were teaching technology that was already 5 -10 years out of date and I consistently found myself on the bleeding edge of new technology.

There was little incentive or indeed value to paying for knowledge that was irrelevant. You see, my pragmatism dictates that knowledge is useful, a piece of paper proving my indebtedness, less so.

New hardware, new software, new languages, new technology was coming out every month. It was all most of us could to just to keep up within the companies we were working for.

While all this was going on, there were the innumerable layoffs, mergers, and acquisitions that made someone like me have a resume that looked like I couldn’t keep a job.

That assumption is completely false, but as time moved on and younger HR people came into the industry, they were applying all their college knowledge to my resume and frankly there was a significant disconnect.

Over time it got harder and harder to find a job, but I persevered and remained gainfully employed.

In my career, I have been a technician (back when we actually repaired machines at a board level), I’ve been a technical instructor (teaching others how machines worked and how to repair them), I’ve been a regional representative (supporting corporate product sales, and solving problems of product implementation and repair), I’ve been a technical support representative (explaining very technical issues to non-technical people to solve their problems), I’ve also worked in retail and warehousing.

All of this experience is useless today because I don’t have a degree. I ask you what function a computer science degree would serve since that degree would include FORTRAN-77 or COBOL, parallel communication, or RS-232? Virtually none of these skills have any relevance today.

To be sure, subsequent technologies that grew out of the aforementioned do have relevance and those technologies would have been learned on the job over the intervening years.

Which is to say, I’m on an equal footing with anybody coming out of college today with the possible exception of those educated in C# or some of the later languages. That being said, the core logic of computer languages is still the same. High level languages compile down to an instruction set that commands the processor to carry out specific actions. That hasn’t changed since computers occupied entire buildings.

The language simply provides a more human readable and therefore easier mechanism to create software. You can still bypass all of those higher languages and write software directly in assembly code. (The instruction set specific each processor. Before you ask, there are still people who earn really good money doing exactly that. Those folks, I respect immensely. Coding at that level is tedious and abstract beyond belief. I’m a little too ADD, or not ADD enough to do anything more than ‘tinker’ in that realm.)

As an aside, the folks that code at that level, are the folks ALL the sexy high level languages rely on. Assembly coders are an interesting and unique bunch. It’s not unusual for them to be socially challenged and challenging to more “normal” people. Assembly coders, deal in absolutes, mathematics, and the purity of silicon switching. Right and Wrong are terms which have no grey areas 2+2 in their world always equals 4. Something works and is therefore “right” or it doesn’t and is therefore “wrong”.

I haven’t met any coders who work in the new field of quantum computing. I would guess that they are a completely different kind of duck. Quantum theory being somewhat less determinant and the underlying math is so far beyond me I can’t begin to visualize it. I’m quite content to take it on faith that they know what they’re doing.

I digress…

The point is, I actually like computers and technology. I like testing it, and verifying that the code does what it’s supposed to do. It’s a puzzle to me. My job in the last decade or two has been to test the software coders create. I’ve mostly looked at this as a cooperative effort where I’m a fresh set of eyes working on code that the actual programmer finished working on weeks before. They’ve moved on to other parts of the project and are being productive. I’m making sure they didn’t miss anything and if they did, I’m the one who captures the errant behavior and shows them how I induced the error.

In this capacity, I’ve learned so much and been blessed to work with some truly amazing people. I earned the nickname “Demon” and wore it proudly. My “Demonic” tests, helped to produce a wide variety of award winning and useful products, of which I am also proud.

Now I’m dealing with having all that taken from me. It was hard enough to deal with human HR folks and get myself, or my resume in front of a hiring manager. Most hiring managers look at my resume and think, “This guy has been around. I’ll bet he knows all kinds of things that I could leverage.” That’s how I’d get hired.

But that was when humans actually read a resume. Now, folks like me are lost in the filters of HR databases. Databases I might add, that are controlled exclusively by the priesthood contained in the bureaucracy of layers of HR.

The hiring manager writes out a list of ideas about the kind of person they’d like to fill a position. HR passes the requirements up level after level of representatives ultimately getting the request to one or two people who actually enter the requirements into a database. However, by the time the data is actually presented to the hiring system the requirements are absolute and glacial.

The hiring manager wrote the initial requirements in a fuzzy way. “This or this would work for the position.” HR enters the requirements as “THIS AND THIS MUST BE PRESENT.”

(C) Scott Adams 2008

That’s how you end up with tons of people out of work, and corporate HR saying there’s no-one available for a particular requisition. This is also how you end up with corporations not capitalizing on workers within their own ranks for internal openings that could be promotions, and why so many workers leave a company after a few years.

I’ve personally witnessed newly minted Baccalaureates applying for open positions within the company they were already working for and being ignored. After 6 months or so they’re tired of being passed over and they go to work for the competition in the position their new degree qualifies them for.

Then I’ve also gotten nasty looks from HR when I laughed in their faces as they lamented that workers had no loyalty and how difficult it was to ramp new hires up to being productive. When asked what I find so funny, I’ve told them exactly why people in my department left. It wasn’t the pay, it wasn’t anything other than HR locking them into a particular position and having no hope of advancement.

As a side note HR people really hate having their noses rubbed in their own poo.

All of this is what workers deal with every day. This is one of the reasons the hiring process is such a royal pain in the ass, for employers and prospective employees.

But along comes Joe Biden… With his imperial decrees about mandated vaccines, and what do we have?

Now we have companies adding “Must Be Vaccinated” to their job openings.

And in HR’s usual moronic fashion, they’re making the vaccine mandate apply even to people who are applying for remote only positions.

So now there’s another hurdle to surmount. It’s not enough that the remote position is on the other side of the country and a prospective employee will never darken their corporate door. A remote only worker cannot transfer any disease to any other employees via a zoom teleconference. There is zero risk or threat of contamination.

Yet, corporations will demand that a worker be vaccinated simply because they can. Their HR departments will fall back on the excuse, “We’re in compliance with The President’s mandate, and the law. After all it’s for your protection…”

Translated: “We’re protecting the corporation from any/all liability. We’re doing our bureaucratic duty…”

So thanks President Biden, you’re batting 1000 at screwing everyone. Good job!

(AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

The trouble with career politicians is that they’ve never had to consider unintended consequences. That fact coupled with greed and elitism is why politicians always fail.

If good ol Joe keeps up the pace of failure, I suspect that Washington DC will very soon look like The Vatican. The question will be, are the walls keeping the angry population out, or the shitty politicians in?