Women's rights are human rights

On International Women’s Day 2019, I’ve got two things to share.

First, this memento of the Women’s March in 2017:

Second, Aretha and the Eurythmics singing this anthem:

New form of hell

If you’re not in a job search you may not know about the “video interview”. But it’s a thing.

No, it’s not a Skype session with a recruiter or hiring manager, it’s a series of questions posed to the candidate, who has to respond on camera—you give the HireVue application access to your web cam and your audio. If you don’t happen to like how you appear on camera or what your voice sounds like, it’s misery on a stick.

But it’s a cheap way for recruiters to screen out applicants while giving the appearance of caring. It's all handled by software, like their applicant tracking systems (ATS), so it's basically no cost. They put you through it before they even drop a dime for a phone call.

(Okay, there are mitigating factors—primary one being that everyone “invited” to the video interview gets asked the exact same questions, so everyone has the exact same opportunity to respond. There’s no human intervention on the recruiter side—distraction, interpretation, etc.—so there’s an equality in the process. But it’s disconcerting to answer questions in a vacuum, and on top of it to have to record yourself. Ugh.)

I actually bailed once on a job I was lukewarm about in the first place because they wanted me to do the video interview. This time, I felt I needed to give it a go. The invitation came on Monday, and it was good for three days.

I had a long conversation Tuesday with a friend and former colleague who now works for this company, and she talked me down from the ledge a couple of times. I researched the hell out of “HireVue” and “video interviewing”, as well as my usual on the company. I could have strung it out for another day, but I decided to just get it the hell over with.

Yesterday afternoon I resentfully put on makeup and “interview” tops—cashmere sweater and jacket—although I kept my at-home sweatpants. (They were all shades of grey, anyhow.) Because long ago my BFF had assured me that whenever one of her friends wore a scarf to an interview, she got the job, I added a scarf from Liberty of London. I set up with a neutral background behind me, whizzed through the practice questions and just bit the bullet.

The questions were not outrageous—why are you interested in this company, what’s your take on product management, what’s your proudest accomplishment, blah, blah, blah—I just would have preferred giving my answers to a human. (It occurred to me afterward that I could have invited a friend over, sat her across from me and spoken to her over my monitor. Next time.)

I pretty well ripped through them, hit Submit, then scrubbed the makeup off. It’s in the can, for better or worse.

Next.

Hog on the street

A while ago I came across this vehicle in the People’s Republic.

It’s interesting on so very many levels.

Par avion

I went to the Post Office yesterday to mail a packet to the UK. The USPS employee said it would take three weeks to get there.

Me: “I want it to go by air.”

USPS: “It will take three weeks.”

Me: “Is there something faster?”

USPS: “Three- to five-day. But that will cost around $70.”

(Note that this packet was in a medium-sized manila envelope. It weighed 4.8 ounces.)

Now, the fact that this is a Christmas present, which I’m getting around to sending the first week of March is my bad. Entirely.

But—I seriously do not know how it can take three weeks for something to go by air from Washington, D.C., to London. Is it riding a balloon? Do the Wright brothers have the contract? Is it going by way of Beijing?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Gratitude Monday: Power to the people

March being Women’s History Month, today I’m grateful for the women in both houses of Congress, who are making history. Women comprise 25% of the Senate (17 Democratic, eight Republican) and 23% of the House (89 Democratic, 13 Republican). It’s not a full representation of women in America, but it’s not only a start, it’s a major step forward.

(US News & World Report has given us photos of the women of the 116^th Congress, which I find fascinating—a vast range of ages, backgrounds, colors…)

In particular, I’m in awe of the freshman class in the House. Here’s a photo of that class:

You’ll notice that Republicans basically sent more of the same of what they’ve been electing since the Hoover administration. But the Democrats—whee doggies. They look like…America.

And those freshmen women are stepping up to do the job their constituents elected them to do. They are not standing around waiting to be asked, they’re digging in and getting it done. Just the public questioning of klepto-fixer Michael Cohen was inspiring. In her five minutes at bat (and in stark contrast to the screeching pearl-clutching and middle-school taunting of every R on the committee), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s focused queries elicited names and details that will keep phalanxes of state and federal investigators on the hop for months.

They’re brash and outspoken, these women, which royally pisses off the political old guard, who are, let’s face it, old, white, male Rs. You can’t go a single day without one of them shaking his old, white, male conservative finger at AOC or Ilhan Omar or Ayanna Pressley, who are irrefutably guilty of being not old, not male, not white, not Republican and even not “Christian”.

Yes, their youth and brashness lead to sometimes cringeworthy moments. But I’ll take them over those fossilized parasites any day. They give me hope, which is always something worthy of gratitude.

Blast from the past

Just for ducks, I’ve watched a couple of the TV movies of the 1980s Perry Mason reboot. I can’t say much about the plots, because when I use the term “watch” it really means “I have it on while I’m doing other stuff”.

However—the hairstyles and the shoulder pads. Holy crap!

Shades of Watergate

More than 40 years ago, my mother was glued to the TV during the Watergate hearings in the US Senate. That was pre-cable, so she probably was tuned to PBS, one of eight channels we got in LA at the time. I didn’t quite understand what the fascination was back then, but after following the appearance of Michael Cohen before the House Oversight Committee yesterday, I think I get it; maybe.

In my case, it’s not so much Cohen’s testimony about the criminal and repugnant activities of the current occupant of the White House. He didn’t reveal anything we didn’t already know. It was the gobsmackingly rabid behavior of the Republicans on the committee. As Representative Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) pointed out—they have been running from the truth ever since they fell into line behind the Kleptocrat.

Lynch's Democratic colleague from Maryland, Jamie Raskin, clarified: They’re not outraged that Cohen has lied about Bonespurs in the past. They’re outraged because he’s not continuing to lie for him.

I wonder what Mom, a lifelong Republican, would make of that?

As little as an hour

Grocery stores have been delivering groceries since the days of horse-drawn wagons. Following World War II, at least in the US, we’d pretty well moved on to self-service, and I well remember my mom poring through Wednesday’s LA Times food section for sales and coupons to be deployed on Thursday. But then, maybe eight to ten years ago, the notion of ordering all your food online and having it delivered reshaped the whole landscape.

One of my neighbors in the Valley They Call Silicon had a regular delivery from Safeway; the driver had to schlepp crates of food up because my building had no elevator. Perhaps that’s precisely why my neighbor used the service.

These days there are multiple services, both supermarket-specific and just-in-general ones. There’s an app; of course there is.

Wegman’s, the New York-based chain, is one of the markets that will fill your order for pick-up or delivery. I often see their proxy shoppers using the app throughout the store. But recently I saw an entirely new take on the whole delivery schtick:

Now, that’s a service whose time has come.

One for the books

I think we all need this story:

When the owner of an independent bookshop in San Diego unexpectedly had to have open-heart surgery—with his wife in attendance at the hospital and their one employee out sick with the flu—people in the independent bookseller community kept the shop open for a week, until the sick employee was back.

They came from shops around San Diego, and from as far away as LA. To help a competitor. The customers never knew anything at all was wrong. 

And they’re still filling in while the owner’s recovering.

Book people, FTW.

Gratitude Monday: bills

Yesterday was bill-paying day. It was an extra-big one on account of paying the Amex bill that included the major work on the car last month, the Visa bill that included the invoice for last year’s tax prep and the annual extortion by the People’s Republic’s “association”. (I wouldn’t be so resentful about the last one if all residents of the place had to pay, but the massive high-rise developments that are bringing in thousands of well-heeled yuppies are exempt, so I’m basically subsidizing their use of the amenities.)

But as I lined up the electronics to pay them all (including Comcast, which I intend to trim back considerably), it occurred to me that I have the money for all of it, plus the final payment for the crown work I had done last year, and to get more needed repairs done to the car next month.

And even though I have a very uneasy relationship with financial things, I realized that it’s a matter for deep gratitude that I can pay my bills—even (within reason) the surprise ones. I consider the millions of federal workers and contractors who have taken serious and to some extent irremediable financial hits at the hands of the current administration, and I’m also grateful that I have enough (even in my anxious mindset) that I can make contributions to funds to help them out.

That’s a good Gratitude Monday.