Of tattoos and Thai prisons

Back when I worked in “creative affairs” for various film companies, people not in the business told me I might have too much good taste to pass judgment on what movies should get made. That was when things like the Porky’s and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises were reigning at the box office.

For some reason I have a rep for being somewhat more, ah, intellectual than that sort of thing.

Well, it’s Friday, when I like to let the freak flag fly, so I’ll just let you in on a little bit of the secret side of me: I can be just as tasteless as the next guy. Two points in support.

One of my favorite movie lines ever is from a decidedly B movie called Down Periscope, which is…oh, shoot—it has no redeeming social value at all, but it cracks me up every time I run across it on cable. 

The line is, “I want a man with a tattoo on his dick! Have I got the right man?”

And trust me, there’s no one like Rip Torn to deliver it.

As a friend of mine has been known to remark, I don't know whether to have those words printed on my business cards or carved on my tombstone. I'll get back to you when I decide.

(Sadly, this clip cuts off just before we get to the, um, heart of the matter, but take a look anyhow.)

My second example of reasons why I’m perfectly qualified to greenlight projects is that I cannot get enough of the sequence in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason where she’s locked up in a Thai prison after they find drugs in her luggage at the airport. It’s the best version of “Like a Virgin” ever.

I’m ready for the weekend, now.

Prescription for hell

Yesterday the pharmacies of the Cupertino, Saratoga and Sunnyvale Target stores did something I did not think was possible: they made Express Scripts look like they aren’t the worst prescription provider ever to blight the healthcare system.

My doctor transmitted two prescriptions to the Cupertino Target (and one to Express Scripts, whose business model appears to be to obstruct everything your doctor prescribes until either you die, the doctor dies, or your condition clears itself up). Since one of the scripts is a first stab (so to speak) at treating back pain I’ve had for a couple of months, I felt it was a bit of a priority.

(On a pain scale of 1 to 10, 10 being “shoot me now”, I’ve been hovering between 6 and 8 for a while.)

So when the clerk there said, “We don’t have that one—is that okay?” well, no it wasn’t, really. I asked if the Sunnyvale store had it, so he phoned—oh, yes; they had both medications. It would take about an hour for them to [some kerfuffle about transferring it electronically, which I didn’t understand, because e-stuff moves pretty much at the speed of, you know, electrons] have it ready.

I dawdled my way over to Sunnyvale, and even though an hour hadn’t elapsed since I left Cupertino, I thought I’d check to see how they were progressing.

That’s when we all discovered that the transfer had somehow been made to Saratoga, not Sunnyvale, and Sunnyvale could do bugger all until Saratoga had backed everything out of their system and e-transferred it over to…

Well, you get my drift.

The thing I wasn’t really happy about (and I did mention, didn’t I, that these meds are for pain, meaning I wasn’t my baseline sunny self) was that the staff thought it was really quite a jolly thing to have occurred. Imagine, sending it to Saratoga, even after having spoken with us to check we had it.

Well, eventually I got both medications and did a lot of deep breathing on my drive home. And then I took Target’s little “post-shopping customer satisfaction survey”.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of the “instant winners” of their $25 gift card. Possibly because I totally screwed their Net Promoter Score (NPS), and told them I’d ask my doctor to send future scripts to CVS.

But guess what—when I got home and fired up my PC, I had a little email from Express Scripts announcing, “We are processing your order.”

Of course, they still have any number of ways to screw that up, so I’ll hold off on any surveys.

The non-Zen of making tea

The other day I was making a pot of tea, and I wasn’t really paying a whole lot of attention to the task at hand. So to speak.

Meaning, I was thinking about something not involving pouring boiling water out of a kettle and into a teapot. (I don’t have no truck with using tepid or even pre-boiling water for making tea.) Kettle in one hand with stream of extremely hot water arcing out, tab of tea bag in other (you know, so the tail doesn’t swoosh into the pot and then you have to pick it out with your fingers because you’re too lazy to go get a spoon).

So it really wasn’t a huge surprise when I overshot the pot and splashed the water onto my hand. It was kind of interesting, though, because part of me detached to observe everything that was going on.

There’s a fleeting moment—that nanosecond where you see the water careening off the exterior of the teapot and headed for your hand—when you realize that this is not going to end well, but it’s too late to do anything about it, prevention-wise. And then the very instant that the water strikes your fingers, just as the pain receptors are firing up to your brain, time freezes just long enough so you think, “You know—the time for concentrating on what’s happening was about seven seconds ago, not now.”

And then you shoot into all kinds of action—slamming the kettle on the stovetop, whipping your hand away and flapping it about, dancing around the kitchen and howling. There are also a few words that your mom might not be happy about.

I will say this—pouring boiling water on your hand turns out to be an effective method of taking your mind off back pain. However, I don’t really recommend it as a regular therapy.

Recruiters 35

Because I’m upping my job search game, on the advice of a friend I re-activated my Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com accounts on Saturday. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I’ve ever had good job leads out of either of them, but on the principle of casting a wider net, I thought, what the hell?

Well, I found out what the hell was—within four hours of posting my résumé on CareerBuilder I had three spams from different “arms” of Farmers Insurance Company, assuring me that I was an ideal candidate for a rewarding career in being an insurance agent.

To tell you the truth—I can’t even think what there is in my CV that would come within the same continent as “insurance agent”. But I was immediately reminded of why I’d let CB lapse—because I’d had these before.

What got really creepy was this one:

No, I did not click on any of the links, nor did I click on the attachment that purported to be my résumé. What I did do was a web search, and found that my BFF Jenni Sims has been at it since at least 2010, sending out an identical email to people who are registered on CareerBuilder. She’s toxic, that Jenni.

I also contacted CB’s fraud squad (officially Trust and Site Security Team), the makeup and location of which I don’t really want to speculate on. And I tweeted, which got some attention from someone with the handle @CareerBuilder. After several DMs, he advised me to hand over to TSST, who would take care of everything.

Well, not so much. After saving the full header information for the JobSerious, three Farmers and one Bankers Insurance (yes, another sales opportunity) emails and sending them over, here’s the reply I got:

(To tell you the truth, I don’t even know what that that ic3.gov URL is there for—since that’s nothing to do with CB, although I suppose they think it looks like at least they’re trying.)

I inquired how, if Jenni isn’t a “registered employer”, she got my contact details? And this was their response:

So, in essence, "Not my yob, man."

The inchoate construction of that reply (along with a different signature block) is one of the indicators to me that CB has probably offshored their “security” operation, and no one’s bothered to give them any kind of pick list for this sort of communication.

At any rate—so far it’s spam/phish 6 and actual job leads 0 for CareerBuilder (now run by AOL, BTW). So I’m closing it down.

Again.

Really—you have to go a long way to underperform Dice, but CareerBuilder’s triumphed in this regard.

Gratitude Monday: scenting Spring

I’d taken a break from morning exercise because of back pain, but started up again at the weekend. And somehow, in the intervening week or so, spring has just washed over the Valley they call Silicon.

I say this not because there are flowers all over the place—narcissi have been poking up for a while, and blossoming fruit trees have been bursting with color for more than a month.

After all, there’s plenty of landscaped color year-round hereabouts—the best high-tech money can buy. And you can't tell just from temperatures, either; we barely droop below the 60s all year round.

No, over the weekend I was practically overcome by the scents of spring, the sweet, sometimes spicy aromas that seem to hang in the pre-dawn air. You walk into intense pockets of them, and in the dark they’re all a surprise—you have no visual clues to where they’re originating. It’s a mostly-silent magical mystery tour all to yourself.

As with all things seasonal, I don’t expect it to last for long. But while it does, I’ll breathe deep and enjoy it.