You know, given the events of this week—just the
most recent abominations in the run-up to the mid-terms—I feel we could all use
something different. So, have the latest recruiting video for New Zealand cops:
I say “latest”, because those clever clogs are
known for creativity in online recruiting; here’s the one from last year:
You’ll want to watch all the way through the
credits, especially for the exchange on this year’s video.
Someone in the neighborhood has a somewhat
original fashion sense. I’ve seen him around occasionally, and the question has
crossed my mind as to whether he’s a narcissistic jerk or someone who just
doesn’t like trousers. (This one is a tartan, but I've seen him in a gunmetal grey version, too.)
The answer could lie somewhere on that
spectrum, but in the meantime, I’ll just give you this photo I took of him
walking a dog.
I described my whole tax preparation
michegoss a couple of weeks ago. But that wasn’t the last word.
Because I received a letter from Virginia informing
me that—in an effort to cut back on “fraud”, they required further information
from me before they’d consider issuing my refund. (If I’d owed them money, there
wouldn’t have been any issue.)
Well, I went to their poxy site to “enter [my]
information” that would enable them to reluctantly and begrudgingly issue my three-figure
refund, but it wouldn’t accept the entries. After switching from Firefox to
Chrome, here’s the response I got:
Okay, 60 bloody days was unacceptable, so I called
the number on their letter. And—fair dues—I’d forgotten all about the issue of
inputting the property taxes I’d paid changing my tax liability. Because,
although I’d focused on the federal return, of course it also affected my state
liability. Which meant the refund I saw on my pre-property tax liability wasn’t
what was in Virginia’ system.
Well, Jamal cleared it up for me. I’m getting
$200 more back from the state—yay!
But I still don’t grasp where Virginia gets off
requiring extra “proof” when I’m due a refund. And they’re still pissing me
off.
Over the weekend I got a notification from my
pals at Facebook, announcing that I’d transgressed their “Community Standards”.
Well, I had no idea what they were on about, so
I clicked on the link and it only got worse:
Nudity? Sexual activity? Facebook has
standards?
Well, first of all, I had no idea what I could
possibly have posted that amounted to high crimes and misdemeanors against
standards of nudity and sexual activity. Bad language, sure, but...
But then I discovered that my transgression
occurred on 24 August LAST YEAR, and Facebook was only just now—14 months later—getting
around to telling me I’d been nicked.
And then when I realized what the post was that
had triggered this wrist slapping, my gobsmackedness just increased by an order
of magnitude.
So I clicked on “take another shot at this, you
cretins”, which resulted in them allowing as to how there was neither nudity
nor sexual activity in my post. (Here's the whole histoire.)
And they let it back up. A year and two months
after they hid it from the delicate eyes of my friends.
So, if you’re interested: here’s what got
Facebook’s knickers in a twist:
Autumn has finally arrived in the District They
Call Columbia. We don’t have the spectacular foliage colors, although my back
yard is a six-inch-deep carpet of fallen leaves. Pumpkin spice has been washing
over everything since at least the last week in August and CostCo is only now
starting to shift out some of the Halloween stuff to make room for Christmas
yard displays.
Even Neiman bleeding Marcus has had their
little Christmas shop up since the first week in September.
Because some people just need to ease their
credit cards into the season, I guess.
No—I know we’re well and truly into Fall
because the temperature and humidity have finally dropped, and you need long
sleeves or a jacket outside. This is the season I love, and it seems like it
took forever to get here—last week was the first time we could actually feel
like the heat and humidity finally gave up their grip on us.
So—despite some folks jumping the gun on the
various holidays—today I’m grateful for the snap in the air and the excuse to
make soup and light candles.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
