Month: July 2003

A couple of late-night notes from the job-hunt front:

:: As things are now entering the “Any port in a storm” phase, I am now deciding to re-enter food service. Sigh. At least it will be nice to have a job interview or two where I’m not saying things like, “No, I don’t have any direct experience in your field, but let me show you how my skills and ability to learn will benefit you…” (Of course, one of the bigger mistakes I’ve made in my life is leaving food service before I was ready to do so a few years back. But still….)

:: My Employed Overlord has some thoughts. I’ve been unlucky in a number of ways that he mentions. First, the majority of my working life has been spent in small towns in the Southern Tier of New York State (that’s the region to the south of Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, immediately north of the Pennsylvania line), in the restaurant business. This means that my exposure to tech fields during the big boom was minimal, so I’ll still be behind that particular curve when things heat up again. This also has the effect of limiting to an absurd degree my networking. Basically, what network I have is online these days, which may help in terms of locating freelance writing work (thanks, Greg!), won’t be of much help in the immediate task of securing a job in Buffalo. Spending six months in Syracuse didn’t help matters, either. That was good for my wife’s career, because it moved her along in her company’s career path, and I did do some crystalizing of my goals and thoughts on just where the hell I’m trying to go. But in terms of actually grabbing a job, well — ick. And had I been hired someplace there, I would have had to quit just months later, anyhow.

:: I agree with my Grudging Overlord that people who can’t or won’t apply for an IT job online are suspicious. I can think of a few extreme examples in which that might not be the case, but on the whole, they should be applying using the tools of their trade. I will note, however, that if a company assumes this but does not spell it out — or even does something like specify a snail-mail address on the company Website, thus implying that resumes sent there are considered — they could be open for legal problems. (I have no idea if My Overlord’s company does this or not. I’m just sayin’.)

:: The Imperious Pooh-Bah also takes me to task again for not learning another skill on the side. Well, I have picked up a good deal of HTML — I’m not competent enough to actually bill myself as a Web designer, but I’m comfortable enough to simply cite my familiarity with it on my resume. (One of these days I plan to set up a site just for my copywriting business, but I have a large number of other priorities right now.) I would point out that I consider by broadening of my writing interests in the last year or two to be learning a skill. Until just a short while ago, I only wanted to write fiction. The idea of writing articles of different types for different publications never much entered my mind, and the whole copywriting field was something I knew nothing about until, about a year ago, I happened to spot this book in the library, the reading of which I followed with this book. This is another area where moving to Syracuse messed things up, because I figure I missed out on a good six to eight months of marketing and developing my skills along that regard. I do agree with the King of Prussia that learning additional skills is advisable. I’ve tried to do that.

:: Another thought about going back to restaurants: I am willing to do this not because I like the idea of doing that again, but because the other big industry in Buffalo that is always hiring is one that I find pretty damned nauseating: telemarketing. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I spent a year and a half in my last job in telesales, and I pretty much hated it. The people were nice, and the actual work was fairly painless — it was business-to-business calling, in which we actually worked the same customers over a long period, as opposed to the “Call someone at dinner and then you’ll never speak to them again” robotic stuff that takes place in most call centers. There are two big telemarketing shops here that have ads in the classifieds every week, and have done so for as long as I can remember, and they’re always advertising on-the-spot interviews. Going into a field with the kind of turnover that makes such recruiting practices necessary really gives me pause, especially when I had the following conversation with one of their recruiters on the phone on Wednesday:

Me: Hi, this is Herbert Walker, returning your call.

Recruiter: Hi, I was looking at your resume, and I was wondering if you would be interested in an interview. Are you available after 3:00 pm tomorrow [Thursday]?

Me: Actually, that’s bad. My wife works the evening shift, so I’m pretty much unavailable for an interview after 1:00. Is there any way we can do a morning interview?

Recruiter: Hmmm. All our morning slots are filled up already.

Me: Damnation and a pox on my house, for not calling earlier! [Not really, but that’s what I thought.] Oh, OK. How about Friday morning?

Recruiter: No, unfortunately I am in an offsite meeting Friday. So we’d have to wait until next week.

Me: Oh, that’s fine, I suppose. I am free at any time on Monday or Tuesday. Name the time, and I’ll be there fifteen minutes early, with all documentation.

Recruiter: Oh. But we don’t schedule interviews that far ahead. We typically only schedule interviews for the same day.

Me: “That far ahead”? Three business days is “That far ahead”? Especially for a company that, from what I can tell by the classifieds, is always interviewing? Are you insane? Just turn the pages of your day-planner until the top line says “MONDAY”. There you go! Not hard at all, was it? [No, not really. But that’s what I thought.]

And it can’t be a good sign when I ask the question “What do your positions pay?”, and then hear the actual flipping of pages as the recruiter, who must hear this question a lot, nevertheless flips to that page in her recruiting script. Hoo-boy….

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Matthew Yglesias provides links to a debate that might blossom as to the morality of the Administration’s various misrepresentations viz. the war in Iraq. For many on the left, the whole WMD issue is seeming like more and more of a giant lie that was foisted on the American public in order to drum up support for the war; for some on the right, it simply doesn’t matter if the claims regarding WMDs were factually true at all, because that was never the “real reason” for the war in the first place. This response strikes me as woefully inadequate.

First of all, it seems to me to boil down to “It’s OK that the Administration lied about WMDs, because that entire rationale was basically one giant lie anyway.” If I am to be assuaged by the fact that the lies were all just misdirection anyway, then I’m sorry to report that I am not assuaged at all. Rather the reverse, I’m afraid, because that means that the Administration decided to lie to me on two grounds, not just one: Not only did they trumpet a rationale for war that was itself not accurate, they didn’t even portray what (we are told) is the actual rationale. Basically, SDB tells us, it boils down to salesmanship. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair decided that they couldn’t sell a war on Iraq as an opening salvo in a long-term strategy designed to restructure the entire Islamo-Arabic world, so we got an amalgam of humanitarian concerns and half-baked WMD stuff. Now, I’m not sure I buy the whole “They didn’t say this because they knew they couldn’t sell it” defense, because quite frankly that rationale has been out there for some time, and not just by armchair generals but by actual Administration officials such as Paul Wolfowitz. It’s not like it was a carefully-concealed secret. But even then, I have other reasons for being troubled by what I now call the “Misdirection Rationale”.

First, it undermines the humanitarian argument that the pro-war factions have been flogging. I’ve found it problematic that Saddam’s horrible regime has been at the top of the list, where other horrible regimes around the globe are barely on the radar screen at all; surely, to say that we were obliged on humanitarian grounds to depose Saddam Hussein carries with it an implication that we’re also obliged to do something about the other brutal dictators who abound. It speaks volumes that we’re not doing so, and it leads me to wondering: if Saddam Hussein had come to power in, say, Tunisia and run precisely as brutal a regime there as he actually did in Iraq, and all other things were equal, would we have gone into Tunisia instead of Iraq? Probably not, given that with this strategy of confronting the dangers of the Islamo-Arabic world, we needed a good beachhead, and for various strategic reasons, Iraq was apparently to be that beachhead. Now, if that strategy actually is what we are doing, then Iraq makes sense as a beachhead, in pretty much the same way that Normandy made sense as a beachhead for the big Allied invasion of Nazi-overrun Europe in 1944. But then you lose, in large part, the whole moral claim to dealing with this particular regime. The moral justification becomes an a posteriori justification, used more to bludgeon liberals (“How could you oppose our ending of this?”) than a case for action in the first place.

Secondly, concealing the “real” rationale for war beneath a veneer of more emotionally-laden stuff seems to me a pretty cynical approach. It says, “For heaven’s sake, we can’t possibly tell the people what we’re actually doing. We need something big! Something that will grab them! Something that will scare the crap right out of them!” So we were told that Saddam Hussein’s regime had connections with Al Qaeda; it was strongly implied that Saddam was on the verge of making a nuclear bomb; and all the rest of it. It wasn’t a case of persuasion; it was a case of selling, which is not the same thing. It was like the beer commercials that make it sound like a party will erupt in your own backyard, complete with scantily-clad women, if only you’d drink Coors Light instead of Pabst Blue Ribbon. The whole thing smacks of distrust — of the American people, of the world, of their own case and their ability to argue for it.

And finally, the “Misdirection Rationale” stikes me as faulty because the Administration does not appear, quite frankly, to have done much planning for the steps after the initial war. No clamp-down or issuing of curfews, no anticipation of looting, the now-dawning realization that our armed forces might be lacking in sufficient manpower to pull it off. We’re in a post-war environment right now where the war doesn’t so much seem to be “post”, when we’re dependent on some guy walking in off the street to tell us where the bad guys are hiding, et cetera. I agree with SDB that we’re in Iraq to stay, but I’d be more confident of the end result if our planning to this point had reflected that from the beginning.

So that’s my current thinking on this subject.

(I can only hope that when I get a job or start doing something actually productive, I’ll be able to channel my thoughts into something other than politics. The past week or so notwithstanding, I’m really not trying to morph into a political blog here.)

UPDATE: Kevin Drum weighs in on this topic today (and also here), and I think he’s pretty much got the right of it. He concentrates, quite rightly, on the question of just why the President won’t say what our real reason for war is. War is a time for leadership, not salesmanship. I commented on this aspect a couple of months ago, as well.

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As an unapologetic, unrepentant fan of the show Friends, I can only hope that this Joey spin-off turns out more like Frasier and less like After-MASH.

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Via Oliver Willis, I see that Steven Den Beste has reworked another blog-post of his into a column for the Wall Street Journal. I don’t agree with the post and article, but I’m nevertheless keenly interested in how SDB has managed to parlay ideas developed in his blog into a paid piece of freelance writing. (I assume he’s been paid for the piece.) This strikes me as a potentially good way for freelancers to keep the pot simmering, so to speak.

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Here’s something I’ve been wondering: Do managers and recruiters give employment applications placed online — whether an e-mailed resume or a Web-based application form — equal weight with employment applications placed in person? I don’t know…some people I know insist that it’s best to do it in person, but I’m really not so sure about that. I seem to recall having a conversation with Matt a while back in which he scoffed at people who would use snail-mail to apply for a tech position, and he’s in a position to know, since he’s at least partly in charge of tech hiring where he works. And when I was in restaurant management, it was quite impossible for me to remember the faces of every person who came in to hand me an application, so the ones who would insist on talking to the manager directly (as opposed to simply handing the thing to the host or hostess at the door) really didn’t have much of a leg-up. Sure, the ones who looked presentable and clean-cut might get a more immediate perusal of their application, but we never did “on-the-spot” interviews, and unless that person had obvious qualifications — say, five years or more of restaurant experience — they’d basically get the “We’re accepting applications now, and we’ll review them later and call the people we want to interview” spiel.

So I don’t know. I like to think it’s really convenient that I can apply with a lot of companies online and thus not spend a lot of time driving around picking up applications, but I’m likewise uncertain how that translates as far as getting an interview.

(There were other concerns we’d employ in the restaurants: for instance, if someone would call us during the Friday dinner hour or during Sunday breakfast/lunch hours to enquire about their application status, we’d take their name and immediately file them as an “also-ran”. Ditto people who would see our classified ad, which always included the “No phone calls please” clause, and call anyway.)

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

I’m not actually going to show them here, but if you want to see what the Hussein boys look like in their post-romantic-interlude-with-United-States-soldiers state, click here. That’s about all.

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Note to job recruiters: When you call me and leave a message on my machine, and you leave your phone number as part of that message, and when said number is your cell-phone number, could you make sure your cell-phone is actually accepting calls when I try to call back? Pretty please?

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Jane Galt on telemarketers and the Do-Not-Call registry.

This is an excellent post, really and truly. Read it. Indeed, heh, and huzzah.

I remember when I watched some high-up guy with the Direct Marketing Association talking about why his industry is against The List, and he said something to the effect of, “Why would consumers willingly put themselves in a position to not receive offers that they will find valuable?” Well, that’s basically like asking someone why they never shop at K-Mart, despite the fact that K-Mart almost certainly has something there that’s (a) of use and (b) cheaper at K-Mart than where they usually get that item.

As the consumer, it is my right to decide when, where, in what manner, and with whom I will part with my money. If I want to do it with Person X and not Person Y, even if Person Y’s deal is better, well then, that’s none of anyone’s business but my own. So there.

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Rachel Lucas is in a snit over a poll that shows a substantial amount of Germans believing that the US government is somehow behind the 9-11 attacks. I’m pretty-much with Matthew Yglesias on this: you’ll find people believing stupid stuff anywhere, and in this particular case, since a similar portion of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was involved, I’ll just consider it a wash.

But Rachel does have this cute item: “Dubya can’t even put on a flight suit without liberal journalists accusing him of trying to enhance his crotch so as to gain votes, fer Crissakes.” Well, Rachel, since you yourself advanced the idea that Dubya’s donning of the flightsuit somehow re-invigorated American manhood or some such nonsense, is this any wonder?

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My evil compatriot is on the subject of comic-book movies. I’ll just comment further on the Top Ten that he comments on:

1. Batman. No. I did not like the first one. I did like the second one, and I think the third one (with Val Kilmer as Batman) is the best in the series. Now, the one with George Clooney….

2. X-Men/X2. Outstanding, if we’re talking about the second one. Good, but could have been much better, if they’re mentioning the first one.

3. Spider-Man. An outstanding first half, a lackluster second half, and a last-five-minutes that nearly sinks the entire film.

4. Superman II. I believe this, after Batman, to be the most overrated superhero movie of all time. The fights at the end drag on and on, Superman is given powers we’ve never heard of before, Gene Hackman serves not much by way of useful purpose, the Clark Kent/Lois Lane love story is handled in a cheating manner (“I’ll just make it so she doesn’t know it ever happened!”), et cetera.

5. Superman. My favorite superhero movie of all time, even if the climax drags and involves pure deus ex machina.

I haven’t seen any of the following, and I’m not sure if I even want to:

6. The Hulk.

7. The Crow

8. From Hell. (Actually, I do kinda want to see this one.)

9. Blade.

10. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This is one of my least-favorite pop-cultural phenomena of all time. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

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