Tag: Working

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Sure, it was a PR stunt. But it was funny!

Okay, I admit it, I loved Trump working the fryer at McDonalds.

It also triggered a pseudo random train of thought, so buckle up buttercups! Y’all know I’m nuts.

So what if it was a PR stunt? It was nonetheless fun. If I lived in Philly I’d have gone to that drive thru and waited for however many hours it took, just to have the possibility of Trump handing me a Big Mac, Fries & a Coke.

Yes, RFK Jr. would no doubt have something to say about the health benefits of McDonalds food. Rightfully so, & I look forward to him cleaning up the chemical soup that our food has become. Nonetheless, he no doubt saw Trumps point over the weekend. Making America Healthy Again is something for after January 20th.

The pundits clutching their pearls about Trump working in McDonalds have all missed the point.

Trump was having fun, his supporters were having fun, and they were doing it at Kamala’s expense.

Wasn’t it Kamala who has invoked the image of the poor fry cook being harmed by Trumps economic policies? Wasn’t it she who said Trump had no idea what it was like to do menial work? Didn’t she herself say she’d worked at a McDonalds when she was younger? Although no evidence to support this claim has been uncovered as of yet.

Trump just hit her head on. I’d bet every single person in that McDonalds is voting for him.

Trump at the drivethu.Trump can say now that he too worked in a McDonalds, and the world has the receipts to prove it. He supposedly said, “I’ve worked in a McDonalds 15 minutes longer than she has.” This may, or may not, prove to be true but for the moment it stands. 

“So, all you pearl clutchers, now that Trump has worked at McDonalds in Philly. What else have you got to attempt to degrade / defile / defame / demean him with?”

Are you demanding a redux of “Dirty Jobs” With Trump as the host. Mike Rowe might have something to say about that, or he might say “What the hell”, grab a shovel and work shoulder to shoulder with Trump.

We know from the tree planting memorial at the White House on Oct 10th, that Kamala Harris has never used a shovel in her life. Apparently neither has her husband. That whole event was seriously awkward, and underscored for me the very thing this election has come to be about.

Our government is full of elitists that haven’t done a days physical labor in their lives. Yet these people claim to know what’s best for the majority of the laborers in this country.

That’s the real divide. It’s not about race, gender, or education. It’s about work and workers. It’s about how they feed their families, get to work, heat their homes, and meet their life goals.

Trump Are these done.Surely the pundits don’t think Trump wasn’t having conversations with those workers asking them about their lives, their hopes, and aspirations.

That’s Trumps secret sauce.

He is able to engage with normal average people. He’s a direct, rough speaking New York businessman. I could see him in his younger years shoveling on a construction site as easily as sitting behind a desk. I identify with him as someone who knows about a hard days physical labor.

That ability is something the abstruse Kamala can’t touch. If she speaks plainly, it’s to wag her finger at us in faux moral & intellectual superiority, putting us morons in our place. When she’s not speaking plainly she’s difficult to understand and it feels like she’s not telling the whole truth.

Obama just tried finger wagging with Black men accusing them of misogyny. It didn’t go over well. Black men are as screwed by Kamala extending the Biden / Harris policies for another 4 to 8 years as any White men. The problem isn’t about her being a woman President. It’s about shitty public policy that has clearly hurt us all.

The way I see it. After 10 years of noise and far too many, mostly false, sprinkled with factual, accusations, I no longer believe anything the news media says about Trump. Every word out of these peoples mouths is by definition misinformation, negative spin, or a flat out lie.

Kamala dropping back to something Trump supposedly did, as an answer for the Biden / Harris Administration failings is being seen for what it is. A smoke screen for her inability to answer unscripted questions or think on her feet.

I and I suspect the rest of America wonder, why the media has unilaterally been saying what they’ve been saying, and why do they always use the same exact words? Do their writers rooms only have one thesaurus between them?

We still don’t know for sure, but It looks very much like the State of New York is going to overturn the 34 felony convictions. If / when that happens it will be very interesting to see if Trump sues them for damages. You know, little things like restraint of trade, slander, libel, loss of income, and the interest on about half a billion dollars. I hope he charges the Fed rate in effect when he turned the money over.

Fun fact, New York prosecutors said Mar a Largo was worth 18 million dollars, which was a flat out lie, the comps showed that. The 18 million dollar valuation was their basis for charging him with fraud.

Mar a Largo brings in 50 million dollars per year. Business properties are valued by the raw value of the property, structures, fixtures, improvements, and by their brand recognition and revenue stream. Mar a Largo is a functional membership based golf course. New York prosecution, in order to make their case devalued the property & improvements and completely excluded the value of recurring memberships to the golf course. So tell me again how fairly those idiot prosecutors calculate property value. Crow all you want about 34 convictions.

When those convictions are overturned, I’m betting there will be a lot of attorneys from the New York prosecutors offices looking for jobs at McDonalds and hoping Biden forgives their student loans because their law degrees will be useless. At least now they’ll know how to run a fryer and Trump will be in the training videos.

Even if those convictions aren’t overturned. The damage is done.

Americans all over are asking, “What the Fuck?” People don’t trust the media, they’re not trusting the government, they’re starting to see that something is very wrong and asking questions, for which there are no answers forthcoming from the government. The latest DHS debacle via FEMA has thrown gasoline on the already flaming dumpster of immigration policy. It’s fortunate too. Because more Americans are asking very basic questions.

Why hasn’t FEMA been moving heaven and earth to help those stricken in the storm zone? How dare any government official say that the people in the damage area should have planned for a Hurricane? What? 300 miles from any coastline? Are you kidding me with that shit? Why do illegal aliens get phones, debit cards, and free housing and American Citizens get bent over by FEMA and fucked? Why does Ukraine get billions and billions of taxpayer dollars while folks in NC, GA, & TN get denied a $750 government loan? 

As long as people remain angry and keep questioning these things I think the “Machine”, whether Democrat, Republican, or something larger and more corrupt, will be forced to back off.

The only people still believing the lies are the blue haired, higher than fuck morons that think the Harry Potter universe is somehow real. There’re more average Americans than them. 

The threat I’m concerned about is ANTIFA and BLM. They’re the foot soldiers whose one job is to destabilize major cities. Were they to start rioting mid November if it looked like Trump won, they could cause martial law to be declared which might stop the transition of power on Jan 20th.

Believe me I won’t be surprised. At this point breath taking corruption is on display each and every day. The Democrat party at this point will “save democracy” by destroying democracy to maintain power & control.

Let’s say that Trump wins this election clean. Meaning with such an overwhelming number of votes that no amount of cheating would install Kamala without triggering a civil war. Further, let’s say that the New York convictions stand and Trump is disqualified from holding office.

Does that mean that JD Vance is installed as The President in similar fashion to Kamala’s installation as The Democratic candidate?

That would solve concerns over Trumps age expressed by some people. It would also put an end to the renewed demands for cognitive tests of Trump.

(Funny how those demands were dismissed by the media when they were directed at Biden, (and turned out to be needed,) but suddenly are unquestionably relevant with Trump.)

Trump is not campaigning from his basement. He’s out and about, interacting with the public and press. Unlike Biden or Kamala. Heck she isn’t keeping up with Trump, so who needs cognitive and physical fitness testing? 

Vance’s advantage is that he is young & strong. Vance is smart and tactical and he seems to resonate with average working class folks. Vance as The President would be interesting because as a former military man he’d be real sensitive to military misdeeds & misbehavior.

If Vance was The President I bet General Milley would shit himself, right before being taken to his Courts Martial, tried for treason, and serving as an example to other corrupt individuals in the Pentagon.

I digress but think Vllad the impaler’s punishment is too gentle and kind for that treacherous, traitorous, bastard Milley. That’s just my opinion and I could be wrong. 

It’s possible the “Machine” that’s been driving all this insanity for the past couple of decades, has been painted into a corner. It’s also possible that we could have 12 years of JD Vance.

If he’s a good President, that would be just about the right amount of time to burn the rot out of our government, arrest the criminals inside and outside the government sphere, and avoid a messy uprising.

Sorry for “Attention Deficiting” it today. The wild horses in my thought processes were all competing with equal vigor. At least it’s all kind of related.

 Have a great one.

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He works hard for da money!!!!

I worked way too hard for my income!

Hunter Biden literally worked his fingers to the bone firing off threatening text messages. For his efforts within a month he got 4 -5 million dollars.

Wow! Obviously I’ve been doing this whole making money thing wrong my whole life. What I should have been doing was threatening high ranking officials of the Chinese Communist Party.

I could have retired comfortably a long time ago.

Does anybody happen to have Henry Zhao’s phone number? I can dash off half a dozen threatening nasty text messages before dinner!

I was thinking perhaps I could go for hush money. There are a lot of really nasty politicians in California, I’m sure I could catch someone with their hand in the cookie jar! Oh wait… They’re 98% Democrats (they have no shame,) so that wouldn’t work. I’d have to find a Republican. In California those are few and far between. Dang! I’ll have to move to another state first.

I’m glad that there’s at least ONE IRS agent who has a sense of morality and duty. I’ll have to make a note of his name for future reference. If I ever get audited, I’ll have to ask for him specifically. He might still be a son of a bitch, but at least he has some vestige of moral compass.

I’m also enjoying in a very dark way that the DOJ, FBI, and Merrick Garland have all been proven liars about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

You’l recall, that was the laptop that these agencies and every media outlet swore on their mother’s lives was Russian disinformation. At the same time, these same organizations, called anyone talking about the laptop Russian operatives and in some cases traitors.

Uh huh…

I think every single one of their people screaming the laptop was Russian disinformation should be arrested…

They clearly were attempting to affect the outcome of national elections, and maybe should be investigated to determine if they were Russian operatives.

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Grrrrrr! Brain not cooperating !

I’ve been trying to write something to finish a short book.

I’ve tried looking at the blank page. That didn’t work. Took the dog for a walk head didn’t clear. Scanned some porn, uhh nope! That didn’t help.

I figured I’d turn toward the blog to see if I can write anything. Then two sentences in, the dog wants to play.

I have worked on cleaning out some of the paperwork out of office closet and found that once again the other half had stashed paperwork in another backpack. On the bright side this stuff was all from 2010 so I don’t have to worry about it. Straight to the shredder!!!

My limit is 2016, pretty much anything prior to that year with the exception of tax records (those are 2013) I’m just tossing in the shredder pile. I’m going to have to find a shred event for a lot of this crap because the shredder can’t handle it. I might be able to keep the shredder running if I could cool it with liquid nitrogen. I’m completely out of that so the shredder runs for 20 minutes then shuts down for an hour.

Then I sat back down to look at the blank page again. Nope, nothing…

The paperwork led to an archeological vein of melancholy as I found a bunch of stuff from 2009 and remembered that we’d just gotten back into this house after the fire. We were happy. We both had good jobs, new cars, new house, and everything was bright. I’d been saving like a fiend in my 401K because I wanted us to be able to retire.

My 401k was depleted 6 years later by unemployment and the other half insisting that we stay in California. I loved him, so we stayed. He lost one job, due to a minister that was far more sinister than ministerial. He kept his other jobs and replaced part of what he lost with a less invasive church position. I found another job that destroyed my career (what was left of it.)

It’s so damn funny that HR people don’t seem to understand taking a job slightly outside your career so that you have a roof over your head and food on the table. These dumb ass HR people just can’t seem to process pragmatism. They seem to believe that you should run up credit cards, then move back in with Mom & Dad while looking for the golden position. Most realistic people would take a job to feed their family. Well, realistic people of my age group, anyway.

There was a time when employers respected the hell out of initiative. There was even a time when the employer that gave you the slightly outside your career would offer to you the first open position that they had that was in your career path. After all they already know your work ethic.

That doesn’t happen anymore. Promoting from within doesn’t seem to happen very much anymore.

Regardless, I’d started rebuilding my 401K and saving as much as I could from 2016 through 2019 all the time looking for a job in my career path and trying to regain the ground lost so that we could have some decent retirement.

Then, well another layoff due to offshoring! Yea!

What I didn’t know was that the other half wasn’t thinking the same way I was. Even If I’d made half a million a year, and done the max 401K contribution, it wouldn’t have helped much. We’d have been in about the same boat I’m in right now. Unless I was putting hard cash away in some other kind of investments.

It made me sad. I tried to do better for us.

I didn’t plan for him dying before we’d retired. I figured I’d be the one on the slab first.

That’s actually kind of funny.

Like Baldrick from Black Adder, my cunning plan blew up in my face.

This is one of the hardest parts of all this. It’s the recognition of what we almost had, what we missed, what we’d hoped for, and dreamt of.

I sometimes feel like I’m sweeping up broken glass. I keep getting those thin shards in my feet because I’m barefoot and I can’t cross the glass to my shoes.

What I’d really like to do is finish the dang story so I can publish it.

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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.

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Hey Apple, here’s a thought…

I saw that you were having some trouble getting people to come into the office.

It’s in The Wall Street Journal today.

You know what? I’d come into the office. I’d work for a reasonable salary, and not demand much of anything.

Give me some reasonable medical coverage, and enough cash after taxes to pay my bills and I’d be a happy camper. Put me in a cubicle and give me software to test. I’d keep my head down, do my job, and leave at the end of the day.

I’ve got 40 years of experience in technology. I’m not particularly political, (at least not at work,) I don’t give two shits about catching COVID, been there, done that.

I’m not interested in social justice, or trans rights, all I want is a job. In my view none of the politically charged stuff has a place in the workplace. That’s stuff that each employee can pursue in their personal time.

Oh I’ll be polite, I’ll be Politically Correct, I’ll listen to people decrying the injustices they’ve endured but I’m not going to comment or engage with it.

I’d come into work, do my job, and that’s it. I’m not interested in office politics or becoming management. I’ve done both, and am old enough now to recognize that neither is my cup of tea.

I’d like to just work in the trenches.

You’d know that if you’d ever bothered to respond to the multiple applications I’ve filled out seeking employment in my field with your company.

Honestly, my offer seems like a reasonable one. A trouble free employee who shows up on time, does their job, and collects their paycheck.

I have zero social media profiles except for this blog and LinkedIn. I’d not be Twittering, Facebooking, Instagramming, or posting on Tic Toc, during working hours.

Seems like that would be an employer’s dream.

Given that you’ve ignored my applications for years, I can only assume you’ve become far more interested in Social Justice Work than making reliable products and software.

Nonetheless, if you change your mind, fire off a comment to this post. I’m sure we could talk.

I’m even willing to relocate. Bear in mind, if you’d want me to move to Cupertino or Northern California it would affect my base pay requirement calculation. The rents up there are wicked high. One thing though, I’m white. Hiring me could negatively affect your diversity quota.

Just a thought Apple…