Yesterday I made my weekly visit to LinkedIn
and came across an opening with IBM’s threat management services business unit.
It’s not a precise match, but it is interesting, and LinkedIn helpfully
reminded me that I know someone who’s associated with IBM. So I copied the link
to the posting and reached out to that person—I’ll call her Hannah—and asked
what she could tell me about that division of IBM.
Note, please, not if she knew anything about
the job, or for an introduction to the hiring manager; just what she knows
about the division.
Here’s what I got back, quoted verbatim and in
its entirety:
“Nothing. Not with IBM anymore (and don’t do
linked in either). Hope all is well. H.”
Now, this is someone I consider a friend,
although not a close one. When reorganizations at Booz Allen a number of years
ago meant she was going to be laid off, I completely rewrote her résumé (a lengthy
process that involved interviewing her, researching the market and ensuring the
value she could bring to an organization was immediately apparent), which
played no small role in her getting the IBM job, inasmuch as it got her through
the screening to the interviews. In comparison, my request wasn’t a huge
imposition. Or so I thought.
As I said above, this is only about a 50%-likely
opportunity, but even so, Hannah’s brusque dismissiveness leaves a sour taste. (If she "doesn't do LinkedIn", it's entirely possible she didn't even click on the link to look at what division it was in.) I don’t know whether it’s a case of I’ve-got-mine-so-you-can-sod-off, or she
just can’t be arsed in general. Maybe she was having a crappy day. I did know she’d left IBM a while ago; maybe it
was under less-than-stellar circumstances. But even so—I think of large
companies I’ve worked for, and if someone asked a similar kind of question of
me, I’d give whatever info I had (even with caveats if out of date), and try to come up with
someone who might take a call to find out more. (I have in fact done just
that.)
Making less than that basic effort (which I
consider a minimally decent thing) hardly strikes me as kind. For a regular churchgoer, it’s also not especially Christian.
And here’s the thing: it’s rebuffs like this
that makes it so difficult for a lot of people to network during their job
search. We’re all told that networking delivers the biggest bang for the buck when
you’re looking for a gig, but a couple of 15-word Hannah-style brush-offs could
just crush someone who’s already feeling a little frayed from being unemployed
and getting fistfuls of rejections from job applications. This is precisely
when someone doesn’t need this kind of crappiness.
Well, I’ll wash this sour taste out of my mouth
and regroup. Hannah’s pettiness may make me exercise more caution in whom I ask
for help in my current search, but it has magnified the generosity
of others who haven’t been such jerks. It’s also reminded me to make that effort
of kindness to those who reach out to me.
What with my personal
loss this week and the continuing numbskullery surrounding the post-Parkland
debate on whether it’s better to exercise some common sense around free access
to every type of firearm known to mankind, as opposed to arming teachers who
are already picking up the slack for cheese-paring school districts; having
alt-Reich nutjobs (of the type who showed up in Charlottesville last summer) to
voluntarily kit up in all their compensation-issue body armor and
military-grade hardware and “protect” schools; banning backpacks at schools to “make
them safer places” [like it’s the third-graders who are bringing in Mac-10s and
not the alt-Reich nutjobs]; replacing video games with Jesus in the lives of
everyone under the age of…I dunno; and all the rest of the NRA-generated “solutions”
to the murders we’re witnessing with appalling frequency here in the home of
the bravado…
I just need a break.
So here are a few
frisnics I scraped from Twitter yesterday, in between reactions to President
Bone Spurs’ declaration that if he’d been at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high (or,
apparently, any) school, he’d have rushed in to confront (and take down) the
shooter (even though the latter—as an alt-Reich nut job—meets the Bone Spur
criterion for being a fine person), and saved
all the kids, and Georgia GOPigs threatening Delta Air Lines with loss of
tax-free jet fuel for ending its partnership with the NRA.
Gawd.
(I confess that I’m of two
minds about this Georgia-Delta spat, because I think it’s time that large corporate
tubs stand on their own bottoms. If you can’t keep your multi-national Fortune
100 company in the black without millions and billions of dollars in “tax
credits”, you’re basically running your business on taxpayer subsidies, and
there’s a word the GOPigs use for that when applied to individuals: welfare.
But this post is not about that particular outrage.)
There was a #IfOnly[Klepto]HadBeenThere
trend, to which I made only a minor contribution:
The rest I just picked
out kind of at random:
Perhaps some time soon I
can begin to think cogently about other things.
As you know, I’m a student of Internet
oddities. And I also have experience with the, erm, underbelly of the job
search. Which includes job boards.
Monster and CareerBuilder are so crappy I
refuse to use them at all; Dice is only marginally better. Mostly what they
appear to be are platforms for rapacious recruiters for South Asian contract labor vendors to spam you with unsuitable (and grotesquely underpaying) contract jobs
in places where you are not. (Evidently there are no maps of the United States
in Bangalore.)
The jury’s still out, as far as I’m concerned,
on Indeed. They’ve promised me (on Twitter) that they don’t allow recruiters to
scrape data, and so far I haven’t been spammed by the scumbags.
However, I was getting way too many emails from
Indeed, so I went to unsubscribe. And this is what they offered me:
Are you seeing the problem?
(Again, I had to tweet to them to actually get
them to stop spamming me.)
I found out on Saturday that my friend David
has died, and I’ve spent much of the weekend thinking about how much my
connection to him mattered to me. I can’t say that I knew him well, but I truly
valued his opinions, both when his perspective aligned with mine, and when it
didn’t.
We first “met” on Twitter. Yes, I followed him
because he played Detective Sergeant Wield on the BBC’s Dalziel & Pascoe series. Twitter’s the place where you can do
that. We had a few exchanges there, and later on connected on Facebook.
I thought his family background was very
interesting, although I got the sense that he didn’t find it so. (Fair dues; I
wouldn’t say my family is much to write home about, either.) One of his
grandfathers was an Irish traveller (the term applied to non-Roma gypsies in
Ireland) who went straight from the bogs at age 15 to India with the Connaught
Rangers. He spent 24 years there, which must have been quite the culture shock,
and I’d have been interested to find out more about that. However, he was a rigid,
deep-to-the bone Roman Catholic who refused to speak to his daughter when she
married David’s father, a Protestant.
David told me that during World War II, his
father was caught
stealing chickens and given the choice between six months in prison or joining
the commandos, so he “volunteered”. He landed on the Normandy beaches with
F Troop of No. 4 Commando on his 21st birthday. I was hoping that
someone would have captured his experiences in some kind of oral history
project, but David said they hadn’t. I got the impression that his dad didn’t
talk about it, and no one wanted to ask.
I’m a little unclear about his early days,
which were somewhere around Salford and Blackpool. He worked as a mechanic
in a garage following high school, then spent a few years in 129 (Dragon)
Battery of the Royal Artillery. (His friends on Facebook called him Gunner,
which makes sense, but also Modo. I always meant to ask what the significance
of that was, but never remembered when we were writing. Now I can’t.)
Only when he got out of the army did he take up
acting, studying at the Drama Centre, London, and graduating in 1993. Many of
his Facebook posts were humorous takes on that experience. They made me laugh,
and I didn’t even know any of the participants. He got regular work when he was
cast as Wieldy in the Dalziel &
Pascoe series; he left that in 2002, at the end of Season 7, and had small
roles in some movies and TV shows thereafter.
I found David’s Wield a little disconcerting,
largely because he wasn’t anywhere near as ugly as the character had been described
in Reginald Hill’s novels. But he captured the essence of Wield, so that was
okay. (In much the same way that Warren Clarke got Dalziel, even though Hill had
said that he didn’t think Clarke was fat enough to pay the part.) I wrote
about this; I assume David read that post, because he commented on the post
before that, where I lamented the death of Hill and expressed my admiration
for his writing. (He said he hadn’t read much of the novels, but that he’d met
Hill and he was a good bloke.) He never brought up my comments on his
portrayal, and neither did I.
David retired from acting after he was
diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, in 2006. By the time we started talking, he had
cycled through various mobility aids and was confined to a wheelchair. He was—and
is—one of the main reasons I join the WalkMS events every year. The first time
I did it and wrote about it, he read
my post, and thanked me.
By the time we got to email correspondence, he was
living in a care facility. This disturbed me more than I can say, because when
he played Wield, one of the things that struck me was his walking gait. Such a
free movement, long, sure strides, usually with his coat flapping behind him. I
tried not to think about it; I cannot imagine how he felt.
At some point in 2013 (I think), David rolled
up his Twitter account and moved his online presence to Facebook. Then he
closed that down and I was sad. He fired up Pinterest, but I’ve never got the
point of that, and it’s certainly not a platform for conversations. But he found
me on LinkedIn and connected with me there, so we could continue our exchanges
via email. (He said he had only joined LinkedIn because an agent had once told him
he should be reachable; thank you, agent.)
Following the Brexit vote, he dug into his
Irish connections to ensure his sons could stay connected to the EU by getting
dual British-Irish citizenship. (The genealogist he hired came up with a family
name of Fahey, and he sent me a photo of the American actor Jeff Fahey
alongside one of him, and asked me if I saw a family resemblance. They did look
similar, but…) We had several discussions of the lunacy of both Brexit and the GOP
platform. As an ex-soldier, he thought the mouth-foaming Second Amendment nutjobs
were a menace to everyone else. (And these discussions were before the events
of recent months.)
He also despised the God Squad—any flavor of God
Squad. (I can just imagine what he’d say about those who do nothing about
shooting deaths beyond sending “thoughts and prayers”.) I don’t know whether
the narrow-minded intransigence of his Irish grandfather was a factor;
certainly not directly as the old guy died either before David was born or
early in his childhood. But he expressed his contempt for religion on all the
social media platforms that I saw, and was a huge fan of Christopher Hitchens
(although he didn’t understand what he saw as Hitchens’ post-9/11 American
jingoism), Richard Dawkins and other prominent athiests.
We both loathed zoos and held similar views on
horse racing. (I can tolerate flat track racing, but I think steeplechase is
criminal. As I told David, the rider can make an informed decision about
whether or not to take a gate, the horse can’t. And I’ve seen too many of them
fall on muddy courses.)
He introduced me to Hitchens, “The Flight of
the Conchords” and Northern Soul. We talked about red hair and he sent me this:
He was a fan of boxing, which I am not. So I
sent him a picture once of a boxer. Dog. I also sent him Billy Crystal’s amazing
eulogy for his friend Muhammad Ali in 2016, which he truly appreciated.
As an actor David held many opinions on theatre
and films. He once told me that you don't need to have a huge intellect to be an actor, but you do need to be aware. You have to know your vulnerabilities and let them work for you. I thought about that a lot, because it ties into what some people call intuition—being attuned to the things that run deeply through you and allowing yourself to be guided by that inner truth. I’d occasionally send him bits and bobs, like Robert De Niro’s address at the Tisch
School’s commencement in 2015, in which he famously said, “Yeah, you’re all
fucked.” David enjoyed it, although he was disappointed that De Niro relied on
a teleprompter. (This was a sore point for him. He had the same complaint when
Tim Minchin read his commencement
address at the University of Western Australia.) He liked Tarantino and
Gene Hackman, but I let that slide.
One of his biggest gifts to me was Wes Anderson—it
started with The Grand Budapest Hotel,
which I adored, and then moved on to Fantastic
Mr. Fox and The Life Aquatic with
Steve Zissou. I shared them with my BFF, who overcame her aversion to animated
movies to enjoy Fantastic (it was
Bill Murray as Mr. Badger that did it). In turn I introduced him to Libeled Lady and the comic genius of
Jean Harlow, who held her own against William Powell and Spencer Tracy when she
was just 25 years old. David thought she was grand.
For a long time he was a fairly regular reader of
this blog. In fact, one of his earliest tweets to me was a compliment that
inspired me to this effort on Facebook for Tanka Saturday:
Better even than
“Will you marry me?” The best
Four words in English
Are “I like your blog”. From a
Stranger. Unsolicited.
And he sent me this PM on Facebook, which meant
so much to me: “Keep going with your blog. It’s interesting, and you observe
well and write well.” I’d forgot about that—I only came across it when I was
dredging through our correspondence this weekend. But it reminded me how unbelievably chuffed I was when he said it.
Our last exchange was in September. Then I got
wound up in stuff at work. I sent him one of my silly things in November, but
there was no reply. That sometimes happened, and it wasn’t unusual for a couple
of months to go by without contact. But this past week I noticed a flurry of
visits here, to the pages where I posted about the D&P show. And Saturday I finally saw a search term about David’s death. So I searched, found and then started crying.
David got 12 years after his MS diagnosis, but his
life should have been longer, and it pisses me off that he died so young. He'd probably mock me for praying for the repose of a soul that he didn't believe exists. Nonetheless, I do. He
leaves his partner Rachel, and his sons Bert, 9, and Gus, 6. And a lot of
friends, some of whom he never actually met.
On this Gratitude Monday, I'm grateful for my friendship with David, even as I am filled with sadness that it's been cut so short; around four years. I’ve been treating my sorrow with music this
weekend. This is one I keep coming back to, even though David had no connection
to the Scots that I know of. It's a lament, and it suits me right now.
