Cruisin' for a bruisin'

I have friends who cruise—you know, take trips on boats whose point is essentially to have the appearance of travel with the substance of remaining stationary. Kind of. & they periodically urge me to join them on one of the trips.

The experience has never appealed to me for a couple of reasons. One: I am not what is known as a good sailor. I got queasy on a nuclear powered aircraft carrier. I don’t see the positive aspect of paying out a couple of grand to spend seven days tossing my cookies. If I wanted an internal cleanse, I’d go to an ashram.

But almost as important is the overwhelming fakery of the modern-day cruise industry. A floating casino with hot-&-cold running activities to keep you revved up for the never-ending food spreads. It’s all manufactured, to my mind.

Occasionally they pull into a port—Ketchikan, St Martin, Acapulco, Kristiansand, whatever—so you & 679 of your closest shipmates can swarm over the souvenir shops for six hours before you have to be back on board to heave off for the next leg. This is not my idea of a good time no matter how I look at it. I don’t like being cooped in, herded around or being ordered to be festive.

Then there are the cabins—which, from watching reruns of “The Love Boat” you might anticipate would be analogous to a Marriott room. Well, maybe the Marriott’s room’s bathroom.

Plus the health hazards. Seriously—cruise ships are floating plague infestations. They concentrate more germs than a kindergarten convention. Flu, norovirus, Legionnaire’s Disease. When you coop hundreds of people up for days, & a couple of people get sick, it’s going to spread.

But here’s a new twist on the whole cruisin’ for fun scheme: a woman on board a Scandinavian cruise fell ill & while being transferred to a rescue boat at sea was dropped into the ocean. 

I suppose These Things Happen. But only if you’re daft enough to get on the ship in the first place.

No, you’re not going to get me onto a Fun Ship any time soon.

Latest pet trend

If you’re feeling a bit ragged after filing your taxes, or about the latest news out of Congress, here’s something that might provide a pickup: Petite Lap Giraffe. From the “world wide famous Sokoblovsky Farms”.

If you haven’t seen PLGs, those wonderful comrades at Sokoblovsky have helpfully posted the videos “as seen on American commercial” for DirecTV. (Scroll down past the pix of the “parentals.”)

Even though I’m sure it’s really not within my discretionary income budget, & my landlord would throw a fit, I’ve put myself on the waiting list for a calf. The next one is expected in 156 days & already promised to a prince.

& the wait will be a while:

BTW—way to run a viral marketing campaign, DirecTV.

Economic McNuggets

I don’t know what category this story falls into: economics, tragi-comedy, restaurant news, end-of-days, whatever. But McDonalds, that ultimate symbol of American culture, devoted yesterday to a highly-advertised big-splash hiring drive.

The stated goal was to add 50,000 employees to the 650,000 already working there in the US.

Which sounds impressive until you consider that we’re not talking full-time employment, with sustainable income, benefits or any sort of security. (In fairness, I can’t think of any job that offers security, except corporate executive managers, who seem to get paid spectacularly well even when they get fired.) In fact, employment at McDonalds brought us the neologism McJobs, which the OED defines as “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects.” & this hiring spree includes a attempt to change perception of them as a corporate employing entity.

Another troubling aspect of this story is the news that many of the McJob seekers and holders are middle class adults with families to support, not the teenagers working after school that we picture in the uniforms and visors.

The smug joke about post-university career prospects used to be that the graduate with an engineering degree asks, “How does it work?”; the graduate with an accounting degree asks, “How much will it cost? And the graduate with a liberal arts degree asks, “Would you like fries with that?” Evidently the engineers and accountants are now competing with teenagers, art historians and recent immigrants for part-time jobs at minimum wage.

From reports on the web from local news outlets, McDonalds’ National Hiring Day campaign has been successful. Restaurants from Hawaii to Maine have been stormed by applicants.

Thing is—like the product the corporation sells—these jobs are bigger on form than substance, which is bad for the individuals and the economy. Great for the stockholder and corporate management, though, so I guess we can stamp “mission accomplished” over it and move on.

Recruiters 19

You’ll recall my surreal experience with the Recruiting Chick for an enterprise software company here in the Silicon Valley. and the first farce of an attempted phone conversation with the Hiring Manager.

Well, despite their best efforts to inject the Marx Brothers into business life, the HM eventually did contact me. He was late calling, but not as late as the recruiter so I let it slide.

Interestingly, he opened by asking how much of the job I’d already covered with the RC. I refrained from stating the fact that we hadn’t talked about it at all since 1)she’d blown 1/3 of our allotted time by calling late; 2)she wasted most of the rest of the conversation trying to throttle irrelevant salary information out of me; 3)at no point did she bring up the actual job.

In fact, her only essay into the position under discussion was an email the following day to ask me if I realized the job was public sector marketing, not healthcare. And when I replied that the description she’d sent me focused on healthcare within the PS arena, her response indicated that the description “wasn’t quite on target”, and the additional information she gave me was useless if her intent was any sort of clarification.

Okay—so, back to the actual conversation with the HM. I just told him that the job description I’d been given apparently wasn’t an accurate depiction of the opportunity under discussion, since it focused on healthcare. HM humphed about a bit, thought RC might have been working from an older document and sent me the “right” one.

Which was exactly what the RC had sent me, although she apparently hadn’t bothered to read it. But then, looks like HM hadn’t, either, when he forwarded it to recruiting to start the process.

It turns out that he didn’t want a product marketer at all (despite the title on the JD), but a solutions marketer, who could identify and pull together entire solutions of multiple internal and partner product lines for presenting to public sector customers (which HM never really defined—everything about this group of people was amorphous and vague). I spoke with this guy for more than 30 minutes, asking a lot of questions, and I still didn’t get a picture of what this creature they want looks like.

So, red flags—which had already sprouted up like poppies in April from my conversation with RC and the flapdoodle about scheduling a simple phone call with HM—expanded to the size of banners at a May Day parade at the Kremlin. The level of dysfunction, the inflexibility in their approach to information exchange, the inability to define or articulate what the hell they want, their utter lack of communication—all Very Bad Signs.

HM had said he had more candidates to interview and I should hear back from RC the following week. But within two days I had one of her chirpy emails—again misspelling my name—to say, “At this time, we have decided to continue to interview other candidates for the role with more Solutions Marketing background.  I will contact you if any other positions open up that might be a better fit for your background and experience.”

With difficulty I restrained myself from wishing her good luck with that, since they didn’t seem to be able to define, much less articulate, what they want. And the qualities most in evidence from everyone I dealt with weren’t ones I’d want to surround myself with 50-60 hours per week.

Now, I’m well aware that in the corporate scheme of things, these clowns don’t give a toss that they’ve exposed themselves to me as incompetent buffoons with delusions of superiority.

They’re holding something they think I want—employment. Which is true. But that doesn’t prevent me from seeing them from what they are and finding that both risible and contemptible.

Next year in Jerusalem...

Today at sundown, Passover begins. That’s the festival that celebrates the Children of Israel being freed from slavery in Egypt. The Pesach season itself goes on for eight days, involves a kind of spring cleaning in Jewish houses & the shunning of any bread-like food that requires leavening (yeast, baking powder/soda, etc.). That’s because when the word came to the Jews that they had to get out of Dodge (so to speak), there was no time to let bread rise. They had to grab their gear & git.

Probably the most well-known part of Passover is the Seder, the dinner that begins the holiday, brings family together & reinforces the history by following the instructions in the Haggadah. It’s an interesting ritual, but if you’re in a hurry, Slate has conveniently provided a two-minute Haggadah to give you the big picture.

I’m not Jewish, but I’ve been to a few Seders, including one put on by Jews for Jesus; & another by friends in the film industry where the Questions were asked by the youngest male, black Catholic attending. & then we watched the Passover sequence from C.B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, as you do.

But here’s something of an update for the 21^st Century (or for year 5771 in the Jewish calendar): the Pesach story if Moses had had access to the Information Highway.

It still includes part of the Passover sequence from The Ten Commandments. It’s good to hold on to tradition.