Not Maru

These feline amusements have come my way, and I thought I’d share.

First: Bing as kitty-TV. You know, Microsoft’s search engine landing page du jour, which certainly looks better than Google’s. Although Google probably doesn’t care, given its market share.

Second: the family cat gets to the phone before the answering machine.

They’re not Woody Allen, and they’re not Maru. But still, it's Friday.

Consequences of cool

I have an Android phone, so I’m unfamiliar with the Siri application. I suppose it’s swell.

However, someone has taken the “Tell my wife I’m running late” use case and taken it a few releases further.

One can dream.

Recruiters 24

<Frustration Alert>

Had a phone screening yesterday afternoon with a recruiter for a major enterprise software company. Went through the usual drill and then we came down to The Question: what’s your current salary?

Now, first of all what you’re earning from your current employer is only mildly relevant to what the prospective one should be paying you because each situation is different. Your role is different; your compensation package is different; your benefits are different. Even if you have the same title, your duties could be wildly different and so should the compensation; you’re lucky if you’re talking about the same bowl of fruit, much less comparing apples to apples.

(It’s made even more ludicrous when your current job is in a different market, although that’s not the case this time.)

And then there’s the contractor-vs-FTE shift. It’s just patently absurd.

But what completely ate my lunch was the recruiter explaining to me that this company (which is almost as large as its CEO’s ego) has to have my current comp because “we have to justify any increase over what you're making now.”

Well, it’s not an “increase”, because they’re not paying me now. And to say that any offer they make is pegged to whatever you’re being paid by a different company, in different circumstances, for a different job is completely whacked. What if I were unemployed? Would they have to justify paying me 20% more than unemployment insurance? Or 10% more than what I was making at my last job, which might have been years ago in another state? What if I were waiting tables? Or clerking at Target?

Look—you don’t pay someone for what they did before they got to your organization, you pay them for what they’re contributing to your success now. You pay what the job is worth to you. (Which means that someone with advanced degrees or years of experience in X typically doesn’t get paid for those qualifications unless advanced degrees or years of experience in X are germane to doing this particular job.)

But I have to say I don’t find it particularly surprising coming from this company. When I worked for them eight years ago they were every bit as blinkered, bureaucratic and tight-fisted as they’re coming off now.

What’s interesting is that, in the process of sending them my CV, I saw what the top of the salary range is. And it’s a whole lot more than 20% over what I’m getting now. But clearly, unless I were already making 90% of that figure, I wouldn’t ever see it from them.

Well, I’m not going to worry about it—since every offer extended has to be approved by the above-mentioned CEO, it’ll be a long, long time before this might ever be an issue.

Surgical strike Pt 5

I finally got the sutures out of my knees yesterday, thank God. They were driving me nuts—itching and catching on fabric. (They’re some sort of stiff plastic thread.) And one of them actually came out on its own.

I can’t think why they don’t use the self-destructing stuff that vets use on our four-pawed friends.

Both my PCP and my physical therapist are impressed at how well I’m doing. I’m actually being pretty good about doing the PT exercises, since I want to get through this.

Actually, I scared the cleaning guy at work this morning. He came upon me lying in an empty cube doing leg lifts. Sorry about that, but I needed an unencumbered stretch of floor to run through the routine, and he was in the process of doing the conference room when I went looking.

I'm sure he'll be psychologically prepared tomorrow. In fact, I bet he peeks into every cube on the floor just to make sure there's not a body lying under the desk.

Royal carriage

Interesting license plate frame, spotted on El Camino Real in Mountain View. (BTW, El Camino Real is literally "The King's Highway"; originally the route of the Franciscan friars who built the missions along it. It's also the main drag through the Silicon Valley's several counties.)

The driver actually was a woman, but I didn’t notice any signs of royalty or even nobility in her mien or her driving.

11.11.11 In service

Living in the Valley they call Silicon, which is at some distance from any military installation, there’s nothing here except department and furniture store sales to remind one of Veterans Day. Without a big federal workforce, the traffic won’t even be lighter than usual.

But I’m still thinking of the men and women who do the dirty and dangerous and dreary jobs that encompass providing for the common defense. Those in the service.

I often wonder how it is they stick it out, because in general we (through our elected officials) underpay them, begrudge them healthcare, welsh on financial commitments wherever possible and pretend we know nothing about them at all.

Except today, when the pols will be waving flags and declaiming their undying gratitude And blah, blah, blah, because it’s a sound-bite photo-op. Tomorrow they’ll go back to fundraising and obfuscating and relishing their self-importance.

The rest of us—unless we know someone in the armed forces—probably won’t think much of it at all. Especially if we’re in urban areas and don’t see the uniforms.

But they’ll feel it in the small towns, where any loss is marked and remembered. For the day, let me give you the funeral procession of Specialist James M. Kiehl, of Comfort, Tex., who was KIA in Iraq in 2003, age 23.

Kiehl made the ultimate sacrifice, along with, well, untold hundreds of thousands over the years. And you should think of him and those others.

But also spare some thoughts for those who wore the uniform and bore arms in our behalf. It’s called “service” for a reason.

Business box

I’m not going to be able to hear the beaten-to-death biz phrase, “think outside the box” without picturing Business Cat’s take on it.

Actually, every time I hear another bit of jargon endemic to the organization I work for—like “deep dive” (for “go into detail”), “solve for that” (like we’re in a chem lab instead of yet another bleeding con call), “tee up” (instead of “prepare”), “decrudify” (meaning “refine”) or “have all the hooks in place” (I don’t even know—possibly a replacement for “get your ducks in a row”, even though the only application I know for lining ducks up is to shoot them)—I’m going to picture the box that Business Cat at least can put to good use.

Recruiters 23

In the past few days I’ve been contacted six times by recruiters about an "urgent requirement" for a part-time contract product manager position with Adobe.

Four of the emails have come from a single job shop.

Two of them were from the same recruiter, each time as though he’d personally just discovered me.


(Here's the sad thing: even part-time, with the rate one recruiter said it would run, I'd still make $200 more a week than I am now.)

This whole business is just whacked.

Surgical strike Pt 4

Arthroscopy report, continued:

As the saying goes, so far, so good.

As long as I don’t put weight on a leg and then twist it, I’m fine. No problem using the clutch in my car. (Oddly, I had to shift the position of my right foot on the gas pedal because I had it at an angle from the ankle, which must have put some torque on the knee. Once I straightened it out, I was fine.) Which is good, because I had to drive up to Redwood City to see the nurse practitioner.

(For my DC readers, that’s like having to go from Annandale to Bethesda, with the beltway being the crapshoot it is. I did a lot more shifting gears on the 101 than I’d have liked because of traffic.)

She removed the pressure and gauze bandages, so now I just have four square band-aids over the actual incisions. She was surprised that I was driving the manual transmission and that I clocked 4500 steps on Sunday (more than 5000 yesterday). But it’s not like I’m power walking; I’m paying attention, so I’m okay.

(BTW, I did finally get a check-up call from the surgery centre. Two of them. Yesterday at 0824 and 1036. More than three days after the procedure. By that time I could already have had maggots munching the wounds.)

I start PT on Friday and can now shower with the aid of Glad Press-n-Seal. And, since my PCP can remove the sutures next Monday, I don't have to return to the Redwood City office of AJ, MD, which is even more of a factory than the San José one is.

I will say that I was hunting out some green tea yesterday afternoon in a lower cupboard, and I quickly aborted my attempt to kneel on the floor. Fortunately, I found the tea before I had to floor-flop on my butt. Getting up again might have been a challenge.

Money games

I have to say that I don’t get Zynga—they’re the instigators of those God-awful –ville games that infest Facebook. FarmVille, FishVille, MafiaVille—whatever. Until FB enabled blocking the damned “I need a sack of manure for my farm” and “I iced t’ree hoods” status updates my only recourse was to block the people who sent them out with unbelievable frequency.

(And does it seem odd that FB regularly allows crap to circulate, or crappy UX, only to make a big deal out of fixing it “because we value our members”?)

A while ago I read somewhere that the biggest players of Zynga games are women of a certain age, which I also find astounding. I expected better of them.

But now NPR reports that not only does the Zynga portfolio account for squillions of hours of wasted time online, it’s raking more than a billion of actual, real dollars. Because people who play those moronic games are buying virtual goods with real-world money. The company's obviously headed for a great IPO.

I just do not get it.