The RE factor

I’m in the process of upping sticks and moving to the Silicon Valley to seek my fortune. This means I’m simultaneously dealing with two categories of the dregs of humanity: realtors and recruiters.

My own real estate agent is fine (although I really wish Craig Lilly could suddenly sprout a license for Washington and see me through this process). But the number of other agents you have to accommodate for showings that never actually materialize is astounding. And then there are those who don’t seem to be able to tell when Mickey’s hands are on the hour they themselves set for the visit.

There was even one who just barged in unannounced with an entourage of clients—she claimed they were in the area and “I thought this place was vacant”. Meaning she saw the for sale sign and never bothered to call my agent. All she’d have had to do would be to look in the window to my office to realize that it’s actually, you know, occupied. Since no one would stage a place with that number of books and a cat in the armchair.

Really—if I ever decided to buy a house again, I’m not going to leave it until they carry me out in a bag and my heirs have to manage the sale.

As for recruiters—Jeez Louise. I’ve had several bites from scum running job shops; recruiting for contract positions. They trawl job sites for CVs, presumably doing key word searches. They don’t bother to read any further, otherwise they wouldn’t be contacting me for marcoms or project manager jobs.

Conversations with them are fairly consistent—there’s a carny-type fast-talking pitch for this ab-fab job, accompanied by assurances that I’m a perfect fit for whatever it is. One spattered “that’s great, that’s great” throughout the call, at least in every other sentence.

Some of the jobs require experience in areas I’ve never even heard of. In my view that reduces my qualifications considerably, but it doesn’t seem to bother them.

Basically they’re just flinging CVs at the client hoping that one of them will stick. & evidently going for quantity rather than taking time to filter for quality is the way to go.

Well, it has to be borne. &, truth be told, I see them pretty much as nothing more than a channel for job leads. They’re just humanoid versions of Monster.com. And powerful incentive to find the right job for me sooner rather than later.

Material girl

I’ve found a place to rent in San José—a townhouse in an “apartment community”. More like a freakin’ apartment megalopolis, but having walked into the model and observed how the leasing agents interact with current residents, I’m pretty confident I can live there with some degree of comfort for the ten month term of the lease I signed.

(I have to say that it wasn’t that easy finding a place in the Silicon Valley. Evidently there are so many people seeking rentals that landlords and property managers can be pretty cavalier in their dealings with prospective tenants. More than one apartment complex wouldn’t even show you the units coming available until they were vacated. This works against someone relocating from another area. It would seem that people do rent accommodations sight unseen.)

So now I have the challenge of trimming down my possessions from 2000sf to about 1300sf. (Actually, from more than 2000, because I currently have a garage. While it’s not crammed with things, its walls are lined with cartons, many of them from clearing out “clutter” for staging my place for sale.) Even though I’ve already gone through an exercise and had the Salvation army pick up two bookcases &about 15 cartons of stuff I felt I could live without

I’ve decided that this paring down isn’t a bad thing at all. I know for a fact I still have many, many things in closets and cabinets for which I’ve had no use for years. Clothes, dishes, linens. And stuff weighs you down. If you have 2000sf of possessions, you have to find a place with 2000sf of space to put them in.

I’ve already cleared out my books, and I’m down to 12 bookcases. However, I know I can put about seven or eight of them in storage, along with most of the volumes. I did this when I spent three years overseas; I can pick carefully and live out the next year with ones I’m ready to read.

Besides—I’ve already scoped out the local libraries in the San José area.

Of course, going through the sorting exercise is probably going to bugger the staging. That’ll be a bit of a trick. But I’m actually looking forward to seeing how much of this excess baggage I can leave behind me.

It’s time for unburdening. And leaving Seattle behind is the perfect occasion for doing it.

Marketing at home

I’m about to put my house on the market, which is a pain in the neck in any case. But these days, you have to Stage it.

This is an experience I’d wish only on the most disagreeable of human beings. It’s the most gobsmacking, insulting and humiliating thing outside of a frat house.

The whole object seems to be to make your house look like you moved some things in, but never actually, you know, lived there.

First, my realtor told me to clear everything off horizontal surfaces. Well, fair enough. Then she made me remove a photo of the Children of Lir statue in the Garden of Remembrance (Dublin) because “it looks prehistoric”.

Whatever.

But then The Stager got involved. My agent and The Stager were here for two hours on Friday and I’ve been clenching my jaw ever since.

She really wanted me to pack pretty much all my books, but when I told her there’d still be the bookcases around, she backed off. Instead, I’ve had to remove about half of the ones in the living room, “arrange [the remainder] by size” and lay a bunch of them on their sides. That way you can add “objects” to the shelves. Evidently so it won’t look like you actually have the books for the purpose of reading them.

(Same with my night stand: have to remove the night-time reading stack. Although they’re creating a “nook” by the window, with a chair and table, and there’ll be a couple of “colorful” books on the table.)

I’m allowed to have my coffeemaker on the kitchen counter, but that’s it. As for the kitchen island—that has to have stools and two “place settings” set up, regardless of the fact that the dining table is four feet away. Oh, and the place settings have to be “colorful”.

I now have plastic plants in my house. This is a first, and I can’t imagine what it would be about fake shrubbery that would make prospects proclaim, “Hey, honey—plastic! This is definitely the place for us!”

Turns out that “colorful” means “gaudy”. They’ve brought in orange towels and some sort of puce knobby bath mat. The dishes are to come on Monday when they reconvene. Evidently buyers have the color sense of teenagers and I have to pander to that.

(The Stager declared that there must be A Picture over my bed. I shudder to think what that’s going to look like, but I’m sure they’ll be borrowing whatever it is from a down market motel chain.)

I believe they considered having me ship out the two cats for the duration: there was some discussion that ended with a reluctant mutual assurance that “well, people have pets—they’ll understand…”

But I suppose the low-class coup de grâce is a fat plaster chef-like creature in an anatomically-improbable position. I’m guessing it’s meant to hold a bottle of (cheap-ass) wine. Whatever, it’s going to scream “cheesiness” from my kitchen counter to all who enter the house.

The realtor and staging artiste are returning to finish up their transformation of my house to something Al and Peggy Bundy would snap up. I hope to God the place sells quickly because I’m not sure how long I can live in a chiropractor’s waiting room.

Oil & water

It seems that BP’s stock price has taken a drubbing in the past couple of days, as even investors realize that the oil leak off the Louisiana coast is going to cost more than 11 human & untold animal lives.

Oh, boo-hoo.

Feeling Lost?

The US this week marked the death of a couple of TV programs. I’ve already written about NBC cancelling Law & Order. The final episode aired Monday & I’m trying to work out what the appropriate period of mourning would be. A month in black? & then three more in dark purple? Veil or no veil? It’s hard to know.

Also this week, “Lost” broadcast for the last time. In case you missed any of the chapters, here’s a summary of the series’ six years.

It probably helps to follow if you ever actually watched a single episode, which removes me from the enlightenment. But I put this forward as a public service.

Anti-social media

One of my colleagues…No, not really.

A person who works in the same business unit as I do has sent me a connection request on LinkedIn.

I’ve never worked with this guy, never exchanged emails—shoot, he couldn’t even pick me out of a line-up.

So what is it with people who just go through lists and start indiscriminately trying to “link” with you on these sites? He doesn’t have a clue who I am; what could he possibly hope to gain from such a connection?

Except another “connection” in his profile.

On a related note, I have thankfully found a way to block all those damned game updates from my Facebook friends. No more Farmville, Fishville, Mafiaville or other villainous “news” for me to wade through. I’m really appalled at the amount of time these games must suck out of people’s lives, & I sure as hell don’t want them sucking me into that stuff, not even by having to move my eyeballs beyond the colorful announcements on the page.

For both the LinkedIn and Facebook offenders, three words come to mind. Get. A. Life.

Economics du jour

The Euro is at a four-year low against the US dollar, at one point today clocking in at a skosh below $1.23.

I am so tempted to find a flight going somewhere in the Eurozone & just ad libbing once I get there.

L&O: RIP

Damn! NBC has cancelled Law & Order (the progenitor of Criminal Intent & SVU). It’s going to finish out sweeps month & then I guess TNT gets it for good.

I suppose in the age of fake reality that’s cheap to produce L&O was marked for life support at best. & the Nothing But Crap network (also known when I was associated with it 20 years ago, as Nice But Cheap) needs to keep ahead of the bailiffs when it comes to finding any programming that will appeal to people who are texting or playing video games while the TV is on anyhow.

& I have to confess: the TV is pretty much a talking lamp for me. Just background noise most of the time. & yet every once in a while I want to actually, you know, have to think about the characters & plot. It's very hard indeed to find any of that floating around the networks. So I'm gutted.

I’m not sure which will be better therapy: ice cream or rum. Perhaps some sort of combination.

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation

Today being May Day makes me think about the marvelously lugubrious military parades the Soviets used to put on to remind the peoples of the USSR and the world that they really knew how to build arms.

I mean—it’s hard to choose between floats covered in flowers on 1 January and a gazillion attack tanks and truck-mounted rocket launchers four months later.

This year the Muscovite parades were apparently divided between those wanting to bring back Stalin (really) and those denouncing Vladimir Putin as Stalin.

That would be the Russian paradox.

Elsewhere, Greeks were comparing the IMF to the military junta that ruled from 1967 to 1974. The IMF being the source of the bailout to the collapsed Greek economy that seems to be taking down other Euro dominoes like Portugal and Spain along with it.

The French are protesting rumors of plans to undermine their job security system (under which a lot of companies find it’s cheaper to keep people on the payroll than to sack them) and state pension plan (I won’t even go there).

The Turks are just out in the streets celebrating the fact that there aren’t whack-job countrymen out with automatic weapons mowing them down (as happened around 30 years ago).

The US saw hundreds of thousands swarming the streets across the country to protest Arizona’s crackbrained immigration law. (“Not racial profiling”? As bloody if—are they going to stop me looking like I just got off the plane from Dublin to take an underground job as an au pair ro raise funds for Noraid? They are not. They’re going to stop anyone who looks like he might have originated south of Nogales.)

And in DC the self-proclaimed guardians of the somehow-Christian faith clogged the area around the Lincoln memorial to—well, I’m not sure what they were doing. Perhaps protecting us from the hurricanes and earthquakes that are caused not by meteorological conditions or seismic shifts, but by failure to adhere to this or that sect’s tenets. You can see the web site that was promoting this here, but it’s mostly full of solicitations for donations and tee-shirts for sale, so I can’t really determine what it’s all about.

Except the all-important anti-abortion stance, which always seems to crop up in the events of groups like this.

Me—I really miss those Soviet parades. I’m sure this Stalin/anti-Stalin schizophrenia is progress, but those suckers really were spectacular, even in the pre-Internet days. I suppose they’re too expensive to put on these days, it's hard to find the soldiers in impressive numbers, much less the mobile rocket launchers, and it’s much easier to expose their broadcasts as artfully edited propaganda pieces. (It’s not enough that you’ve got two hours of tanks going past? You have to loop the film to look like there are five hours?)

Anyhow—workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.

And your retirement plans.

Aftershock

So, the post-Boob Quake report is basically that even a day of conscious cleavage display doesn’t seem to produce earthquakes. Or, at least not in the same day.

Perhaps there’s a cumulative effect? So that in 2010 we’re paying for, say, the Mary Quant era? Or should we check for a surge in pestilence & plague?

At any rate, here’s the story from the woman who initiated the movement, Jennifer McCreight.

God bless social networking media. & pity that Iranians have their access limited.