Vive le Champagne!

No one comes right out and admits it, but I’m pretty sure le jour mondial du Champagne was dreamt up by a marketer. Either for a producer, importer or distributor. Whatever.

I have no boeuf with any of that, since Champagne is my substance of choice. I’m perfectly happy to fall in with the fête and pop a cork in solidarity. I’m just a wee bit surprised that there have been eight such celebrations before this one, and I did not know about any of them.

Regardless, I shall contribute to the day by opening a bottle and toasting the art and science of Champagne—even though as far as I’m concerned, every day is Champagne day. And so, here are a couple of photos for you:

Grapes about ready to be harvested at a vineyard in Épernay. Yes, I tasted a few of them. Delish.

A glass of Champagne at a café across from le tour Saint Jacques (all that remains of the traditional starting place for pilgrims headed to Santiago de Compostela—Saint Jacques de Compostelle) in Paris. It was a miserably cold and rainy day, and I was waiting for my bowl of soupe à l’oignon gratinée to arrive.

Everything improves when you’re viewing it through a glass of Champagne.

Agile dancing

I wrote yesterday about system-generated emails from recruiters—I focused on ADP because it was top of mind, and so wonderfully inept. Yet theirs is all auto-nonsense.

Here’s something that came from Walmart—another GHC sponsor—although I’m not sure this one was through GHC. (Well, it came to my work email address, which is the one on record at GHC, so maybe it is.)

But no, this is a house recruiter’s attempt to be…memorable, by throwing handfuls of jargon into a blender and mixing them up with way too many metaphors and weird capitalization.

Look, I’m not even sure what he means by “It never hurts to get out on the Dance Floor!” Sometimes it does, if you’ve got a klutz for a partner. Or if someone posts video to SoMe.

Furthermore, who the everloving hell uses “scrum” as a transitive verb?

At any rate—I looked at the job he was hoping would be of interest to me wasn’t bad. But it’s for Walmart, so taking it would be like trying to make the operations of Mordor run more efficiently. Walmart stands for everything I loathe in America: despicable sourcing practices, reprehensible labor practices, stack-em-high-and-sell-em-cheap business practices. They are a blight on the face of the earth. I thanked him, but said that retail and ecommerce are not for me.

He’ll have to get out on that Agile Dance Floor and scrum it with someone else.

Excellence in recruiting /s

Every time I have to dust off my résumé, fire up the networking chat lines and calculate how much I need in salary (given the difference in benefits), I just want to puke. Because at some point I’m going to have to deal with recruiters.

Seriously—I’d rather face an auditor across a grody IRS table than talk with another recruiter.

But hey—them’s the breaks, so at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing I did my best. “My best” included putting my dusted-off résumé into the conference database (although that was more so I could get invitations to company events, really) and stopping by booths to chat with the mix of recruiters and worker bees who staffed them.

But that also triggered a raft of mostly system-generated come-ons, like this one from ADP:

My employer uses ADP to manage time reporting, benefits, payroll, etc., and it is an abomination to God and man. ADP is what you get when you have convinced yourself that you have no competition, so you can make user experience from hell and slow-moving organizations will go on paying you for it.

I’m betting their “talent acquisition team” used their software to send out this post-conference enticement for which they could not even fill in the GHC name:

 

ADP could not innovate its way out of a paper bag, and they're kind of pants at proofreading their emails, too.

I have so much more of this to endure.

Order in the court

We here in the US have our share of bizarre court cases, but I have to say that the Brits pretty much wipe the floor with, well, everyone when it comes to over-the-top, premier-league weird. Viz:

I mean, in most places a [male] lawyer apprehended in a G-string and fishnet stockings, in a random woman’s bedroom while loaded would be enough to make the evening news. But in Southwark (London), no, no, no—guy’s got to get off by claiming he thought the woman was a panda.

As one does.

I mean, the clipping doesn't say whether the defendant got done on the breaking and entering or drugs charges, just that he avoided the stigma of having a conviction for a sexual offense.

Small mercies, eh?.

Gratitude Monday: Civic right

After all the michegoss of my life last week, something arrived in the mail that perked me right up.

Yes, dear readers, my mail-in ballot arrived from the great State of California (which has overtaken the UK and now has the fifth largest economy in the world—suck on that, MAGAts), and I shall be casting my vote shortly.

As I wrote a while ago, I might have missed out, because the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters had moved me to inactive status. (It’s what I get for blowing off June’s primary election.) But I got it rectified, and I am now good to go.

Because every vote counts—every single one of them.

And, given the moves by Republicans at every level across the country emboldened by the Orange One to suppress voters suspected of not being right- (wing nut job) thinkers, I am grateful that I am able to cast my ballot. I hope to God that two years hence, we’ll still have enough of a rule of law left that I can do it again.