De gustibus...

By way of follow-up to my post about being not entirely whelmed by “Downton Abbey”, let me share with you what I found on my cable video on demand TV show page:

Evidently the Downton demand is so great, the fans can’t even be bothered to scroll through the D-F section to find the episodes.

Or can it be that they can’t figure out that whole alphabetical thing?

Happy, happy

At the moment I can’t recall how I came across this company profile on LinkedIn. Doesn’t matter.

I’m kind of smitten with the idea of working for a company called “Happiest Minds”, with “a mission to create Happiest People and Happiest Customers.”

Even if they appear to specialize in pretty much everything under the sun.

Literally silly

The City of Palo Alto has declared today to be Amelia Bedelia Day—celebrate by being literal.

If you’ve not yet met Amelia Bedelia, you should. She’s the subject of a number of books by Peggy Parrish, and today marks the 50^th Anniversary of publication of the original volume. In it, when housekeeper Amelia Bedelia first arrives at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, her new employers, Mrs. Rogers gives her a list of tasks to perform while they’re out.

It turns out that Amelia Bedelia has what you might call a machine-language simplicity about her. She takes every instruction literally. Imagine, then, what the results might be if she’s told to “dust the furniture” and “dress the chicken”.

Yes, indeedy—that’s exactly what happens.

But—it turns out that no one makes lemon meringue pie like Amelia Bedelia. So—just as we have come to adapt to the quirks of our electronic devices, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers find ways to accommodate Amelia Bedelia.

I think everyone who works in software ought to read Amelia Bedelia. I introduced my historiography professor to her. Part of the course included a module on statistics. He was what passed for a computer nerd in the W&M history department in the early 90s and he’d never heard of her. My own copy is well worn because I never tire of its amazing silliness.

Yes, all right—I am easily amused.

But so should you be. And; you should mark the day appropriately. Take someone literally. Be silly. At the very least, have a slice of lemon meringue pie.

Recruiters 29

If anyone’s wondering why the unemployment situation is so dire, I submit that a major contributor is the unassailable fact that 97.9% of recruiters are just complete morons.

I’ve given you many, many examples of this in the past, but here’s one from just this week.

Email came into my queue on Friday from one of the approximately 12,677 employees of a large, national recruitment firm specializing in tech positions. It slugged “Noticed your resume – new job open for a Sr. Product Manager (Start UP) – please apply!”

Well, coming from this particular operation, that’s pretty meaningless. And, as is also typical for this outfit, the job description was…not exactly straightforward. So I emailed him asking for clarification:

And here’s what I got back from him:

Well, ooookay, then. He hadn’t answered my questions, but he’d given me enough information to know the job’s not for me. So I filed it in the appropriate folder.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find this in my queue on Monday:

I needn’t tell you that the job description is identical to what he’d sent before.

And, as I’ve said many, many times before: I just don’t know how these people remain employed.

Still writing dangerously, Chapter 2

Hurrah!

After squirreling around for days, I finally got dinner on the pub table for the main characters in my novel. Shepherd's pie & steak frites (it's a bit of a gastro-pub).

For some reason, I’ve kept going back to fill in set-ups, & just could not get the damned shepherd’s pie out of the kitchen. But I finally did it.

It was either that or just have them drink themselves into insensibility—hours & hours, pints & pints.

Perhaps I should try drinking myself into insensibility the next time something like this arises?