Kardashian dissidence & diffidence

I’ve not been following the whole Chen Guangcheng story very closely. The limit of my interest is to wonder why he is inevitably referred to as “the blind Chinese dissident”, as though blindness somehow distinguishes him from other dissidents, or defines his dissidence. (As opposed to those dissenting on grounds of being foot-washing Baptists, or rodeo clowns, or Trotskyites.)

It apparently even trumps the fact that he’s a lawyer.

Whatever.

Chen sneaked into the US embassy in Beijing, sparked massive heartburn at the highest levels in the Chinese & US governments & the Marines at the gates were probably field stripping their automatic weapons again & again in their off-hours. But then they found an escape hatch that permitted Chen to become a visiting fellow at NYU’s school of law.

(Kind of interesting that it’s the law school & not, you know, the Braille Institute.)

But I did perk up when Andy Borowitz “reported” that, a day after Chen landed at Newark, he was “already sick of Kardashians”.

Amen, brother.

How do I spam thee?

Let me count the ways: starting with a phishing email purporting to be from the US Postal Service.

What was my first clue? Aside from not having sent any packages since December? Or any, ever, that would pass through Des Moines?

Or the fact that, in these United States, we use the term “package”, not “parcel”? The Brits, and their former colonies (like Nigeria), use the latter.

Ditto the use of plural verb with the subject noun “company”. Again, the Brits use plural verbs with nouns that could represent a collective group. (“Her Majesty’s Government are most displeased.”) We use singular ("Congress just sucks.")

Maybe that the USPS is unlikely to have any service involving the concept “expedited”?

Or that any government employee would employ an exclamation point in written or electronic communication?

Perhaps the idea that any American would have shipped a package or parcel s/he’d consider worth paying $14.13 a day in storage fees? (Or, “for each day of keeping of it”)

Especially via the USPS.

They do get a pass on incorrect usage of it’s/its; if Oracle can misuse it like ignoramuses, it’s not necessarily hard evidence against foreign scammers/spammers.

Legoland über alles

As if bricks and mortar retailers didn’t have enough of a problem with showrooming (the practice of customers checking out merchandise in a store and then using a smartphone to track the item down at a lower price somewhere else), it turns out there’s worse. A Silicon Valley high tech exec has been charged with theft for using his smartphone to spoof price barcodes to buy stuff at “a much reduced price.”

Thomas Langenbach, a vice president with German software giant SAP, has allegedly been using his smartphone to scan barcodes on boxes of Lego bricks. Then he generated his own barcodes—lower prices—which he stuck on the merchandise. And, of course, paid the fake price.

I don’t know how it worked—he must have generated codes that would ring up as Legos, but at the different price, because even Target checkout clerks would notice if they ran a box of bricks across the scanner but the display showed Pampers or Diet Dr. Pepper.

But evidently it’s been going on for some time—when the cops searched Langenbach’s $2M San Carlos home (which is not really all that upmarket in this area; but, still), they found “hundreds of boxes of unopened Lego sets”. And evidence that he sold more than 2000 items on eBay over the past year for a total of $30,000.

No telling why a guy who’s been with a global software giant for more than 20 years would want to nick little plastic bricks in mass quantities. Maybe it’s the very fact that he’s been with a global software giant for more than 20 years. And it’s a German company. Maybe he needed lebensraum, so to speak. Legos are, after all, a product of Denmark.

Here’s his LinkedIn profile. Perhaps this gives a clue.

Or, well, maybe not.

Ah pity the fool

Let me take the occasion of Mr. T’s 60^th birthday (which was yesterday) to describe my latest interview experience.

The position is for…well, I don’t know what it’s for. Because the hiring manager doesn’t know what it’s for—might be a business analyst, might be a program manager.

Might be a rodeo clown.

It’s a contract job at a Fortune 100 networking giant—if you’re reading this on the Internet, you’re using this company’s products; and I spent nine months there last year in another business division.

The hiring manager approached me a couple of Wednesdays ago, because the person who had been doing this work was leaving on the Friday (so I guess she thought she ought to find a replacement or she’d lose the budget).

I had no warning she’d be calling, because my résumé hadn’t actually been submitted to her. It had been sent to another hiring manager somewhere in her vicinity (by the unethical contracting agency that submits your CV for positions for which you’re not qualified without bothering to consult you about it), who hadn’t acted on it. But s/he handed off a fistful of candidates to RG, this hiring manager, and she’d liked mine.

So we talked for an hour; it’s an interesting challenge to do with synthesizing a boatload of network data to such a form that sales teams can use it to sell replacement routers, switches and services into customers. And she got in touch with the unethical agency who responded to me as though this were the position they’d actually submitted me to…two, three months ago. Their rep contacted me to exclaim that they wanted to pay me the munificent sum of $10 less (X-10) per hour than the work merits.

I told her I wouldn’t do it for less than X-5; so too bad, so sad.

Naturally this perturbed her and later that day I got a call from her colleague who of course wanted me to accept the offered rate. He came back for a second round to ask if I’d accept X-7 and I said no and basically commented that for what they want done, X-5 is a gift. He gave me a song and dance about how ridiculous [networking giant] is—expecting senior level work done at bargain rates and blah, blah, blah. I sympathized and told him to inform the hiring manager that I wished her luck finding someone who can do as good as job as I can for what she wants to pay.

I thought they were out of my hair, but the next day I got an email from KJ, colleague of RG (hiring manager), wanting to set up a call. The times she gave me didn’t specify time zone, and since she’s in North Carolina and I in California, and since I thought we’d put paid to this on a payment issue, I emailed my rep to ask what-the-hell.

Sadly, they’d agreed to my rate.

Anyway, I spoke with this KJ chick and the agency bimbo told me that RG wanted me to come in for a face-to-face interview. I set that up for yesterday, supposed to be 30 minutes. Then, after it was scheduled, it morphed to 60.

Well, imagine my surprise when I got there to discover that RG really didn’t have a lot of questions for me, but that I was supposed to speak with KY, her boss…at the one-hour mark.

And (sorry for the long set-up, because here’s where the relationship between Mr. T and my experience solidifies), this is what cracks me up. KY verged on the edge of belligerence, telling me they want “a go-getter” for this position, someone who’s “going to make it happen”. (Keeping in mind that they don’t quite know what “it” is.)

He wants someone who’ll be really invested in success, and the group has a goal of $100M-$150M in product sales/$225M in services sales associated with this project for FY 2013 (starting 1 August)—so am I comfortable with having a number assigned to me.

Well, first of all, no—it’s ridiculous to tell me that my performance is measured on performance that I’m not in control of. To wit: sales that account teams I’m not related to directly do or do not make.

And second—I’m a contractor. I get paid the same niggardly hourly rate whatever anyone else does. By definition I have no incentive—I have no stake in success.

(I don’t phone it in—but, seriously: what the hell does he expect?)

I don’t expect I gave him the impression that I’m the person he wants—I pointed out that I have no control over what sales are made in their setup, and said that I’m a team player and I do my part.

But I may have been channeling BA Baracus in that conversation. In “The A Team” BA (Mr. T) stood for “Bad Attitude”, since they were dealing with 1980s sensibilities.

These days they’d call it what it is, which is bad ass. And that’s what I felt.

Consulting the oracle

Okay, another example of corporations lowering communication standards. Ordinarily I wouldn’t name the company, but this wouldn’t have any impact if I didn’t have the logo there—it could be any site in the websphere.

But no, it is indeed the heading of a case study page on the site of a Fortune 100 multi-national corporation.

Perhaps they offshored the “content” management?