The scum among us

One of the great pains of job hunting is recruiters. Really, I’m continually driven to ask, “How do these people remain employed?”

They remind me of literary agents: they get paid when someone picks up an option (or acquires a book manuscript)—they don’t care who or what, just that something sticks long enough for them to get their cut.

I can’t tell you how often during my Hollywood years I saw scripts submitted that were utter dreck & completely NOT what a given production company was interested in. (As opposed to the utter dreck that actually got produced.)

Or how many fatuous cover letters accompanied the properties (that’s what they’re called), including the amazing-to-me disclaimer, “Dictated but not read.”

That pretty much says it all.

In a similar way recruiters are trying to toss résumés at clients, whether or not they actually are a match, because the more they’ve got in the funnel the better their likelihood (in their minds) that something will stick.

With this focus on volume they can’t be arsed to actually, you know, read anything you send them. This includes emails as well as CVs.

Sometimes they can’t even pay enough attention to get your name right when they speak with you—the one that’s on your CV & in your emails; the one you keep repeating to them.

I’m guessing they’re more attentive (= servile) to their clients, but you can’t really count on that. The instant they hear a position’s been filled or a candidate rejected, they’re off at ramming speed, trawling the job boards for new chum.

Well, as the saying goes, you can't live with them & you can't get enough C4 to eliminate them from the gene pool.

Now it becomes clear

Okay, so evidently Pat Robertson is not the only rightwing religious spewer of crack-brained balderdash: there’s an Islamic cleric in Tehran who has proclaimed that promiscuous women cause earthquakes.

Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi appears to be focused on only Iranian earthquakes, so it’s not clear whether they’re the only disasters that matter, whether only Iranian promiscuous women cause Iranian earthquakes, or whether promiscuous women globally are responsible for quakes.

Does that mean they’re also on the hook for volcanic eruptions & tsunamis?

& how, exactly, are they responsible? Did they use their wiles to get men to found population centers on fault lines? Cause tectonic shifts via seductive walking? Use aromatherapy candles to ignite Eyjafjallajokull last week?

I dunno, but I’d purely pay to see Sedighi & Robertson in a contest to see who becomes more apoplectic in delivering spurious pronouncements tying weather & geologic events to those other, really bad, people’s actions.

News of the weird, chapter 2

I’m trying to get the latest update on the corpse-in-coach story from a couple of weeks ago, but it’s been unaccountably pushed off the electronic front pages by such trivia as global volcanic-ash-air-chaos, WaMu’s CEO weaseling in front of Congress (really—there has to be a required course in MBA programs for this) and the Vatican being persecuted by the, you know, truth.

The latest (still more than a week old) seems to be that preliminary findings by a British medical examiner indicate that Kurt Willi Jarant had been dead for about 12 hours when staff at Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport put paid to his wife and her daughter’s attempt to get him onboard an easyJet flight to Berlin.

The two women are naturally claiming to have had no idea that he was dead, that he must have “passed” at the airport, and they’ve lawyered up.

There have been no results at posting from the post-mortem, and the widow and daughter are free on bail. Gitta Jarant has now said that she wants to have Willi cremated soonest and take his ashes home to Berlin. She’s cooking up something straight out of ITV in the way of, Willi being a pilot, “the pilot souls” were just calling him home (but not to Berlin)), and so it was fitting, really, that he went that way.

You have to wonder, what with court costs, lawyers’ fees, non-refundable airfare cancellations, etc., if it wouldn’t have been cheaper to have had him cremated in the first place.