Weather report

On the eve of the Ides of March, I had my patio door open and made my first pot of iced tea for 2019.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be a blizzard next week, but I’m certainly enjoying it for now.

Law & order

Yesterday I was in the midst of following a BuzzFeed reporter live-tweeting the Manafort sentencing, when I had to dash out to a doctor’s appointment. Forty minutes later I returned to work to find 12^th Street blocked at H by cop cars, and actual police-line-do-not-cross tape. Our building guard was in the space between the outer and inner doors, but when I asked her what was going on, she said she did not know.

So I hightailed it to my office and spent the next forty minutes or so alternating between U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson not buying any of the faux contrition Manafort was trying to sell her (I absolutely loved her remark about his lawyers claiming that other criminals convicted on charges stemming from the Muller investigation got shorter sentences because the other judges recognized that the charges weren’t from the core of the investigation: “It’s hard to understand why an attorney would write that.”) and the events transpiring outside my window.

Some flavor of mom-mobile had been stopped (my colleague from three floors above my office said it had started around 15 minutes earlier). By the time I commenced watching, all the doors were open and a clutch of cops were very interested in its interior.

Then I noticed that the cops were not DC, but Secret Service:

I don’t know about the bike police—does the Secret Service have bicycle cops? Also, another colleague tells me that the devices on the trunk of 0336 are license plate recognition thingies.

Whatever—they brought in a sniffer dog (sorry, no pix), who did not seem particularly interested in any part of the van.

And then I noticed there were three people (one man, two women) standing against the building across the way, with three cops. At first I thought they might be witnesses, but then I realized they were cuffed:

My colleague said that weapons had been pointed at them while this happened.

Back at the intersection, car after car approached the right turn onto 12^th, saw the lighted-up cop cars blocking and waited for the way to be opened magically for them. Because “I’m only going just there.” They were disappointed.

As Manafort got his partial just deserts, the cops uncuffed the two women. A female officer walked one of them around the van, pointing at the front bumper, and then at the sticker on the driver’s side windscreen. She also retrieved a mobile phone from the passenger side and gave it to the other woman, who made a call. When I next looked out, the two women were walking toward New York Avenue. But the guy had his jacket pocket contents emptied into an evidence bag, and he was patted down. Eventually a Secret Service van drove up, and he was transported somewhere.

Another set of cops showed up, pulled stuff out of the van, and photographed the living daylights out of everything. They also removed the rear license plate.

And then I had to go to lunch with my colleagues. By the time we got back, all the law enforcement crowd (there were more than 25 of them) had decamped, along with the mom-mobile.

According to their website, the uniformed division of the Secret Service protects the White House, the Naval Observatory (VP’s residence), the Treasury Department building and diplomatic missions here in the District They Call Columbia. And according to a WaPo story from January, “Secret Service officers, in uniform and driving marked police cars, patrol an area around the White House and can make traffic stops and intercede in other crimes.”

Huh.

Whatever this guy is charged with, he faces way more time than Manafort. He’s not an old white man who spent decades engaging in multiple frauds totaling millions.

This year...

Man—2019 is a veritable Dalì painting.

The Kleptocrat in the White House just submitted a budget for 2020 that must have originated in a crack house. Prime Minister Theresa May has suffered another humiliating defeat in Parliament and the formerly Great Britain is about to pour over the White Cliffs of Dover on the way to a no-deal Brexit. And the once and future presidential candidate from Massachusetts and Utah marked his birthday in the Capitol by plucking candles from his Twinkie® cake and blowing them out individually.

And that’s only as far as Tuesday.

So, mood:

How much?

Every once in a while, it’s amusing to start an online search and see what Google’s idea of what you’re looking for is.

Viz:

Gratitude Monday: I get by...

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had two job interviews, one faux-electronic and one with an actual hiring manager. I wrote about the “video interview” a few days ago.

And, BTW, since writing, another objection to this format has arisen in my mind: while it’s true that given every candidate the exact same questions to answer, within the exact same parameters (time to prepare response, time limit for response, number of retries allowed) does give the appearance of an egalitarian approach. But it doesn’t eliminate any inherent bias on the recruiter’s part. Appearance, ethnicity, speech patterns—any number of things can spark a negative—even if unconscious—reaction in the viewer of the video, and your chances go straight to the bin. They haven’t solved any problems of diversity by this approach.

Well, nevermind. It’s Gratitude Monday and I’m not focusing on how pissed off this ploy makes me. I’m grateful that when I prepped for both these interviews, I had friends (who started out as colleagues) I could call on for expertise and encouragement. (The real-human interview was for a marketing job, and I needed some guidance on the vocabulary. Turns out I’d done much of what’s required; I just hadn’t known the official terms for it.)

In both cases, I went into the interview feeling much more confident. In the case of the video interview—meh, it turned out to be only about a 3 on a scale of 1-10 of ghastliness. But my friend’s guidance alleviated a considerable amount of my anxiety and made it easier for me to just crack on with it. In the case of the 60-minute call with the VP of Marketing, I spoke with assuredness and ease, which doesn’t happen all that often, because of getting a crash course from another marketing VP.

So—here’s to friends who come through in the clinch. I hope I’m that kind of friend, too.

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.