Minimum wage

Update on my situation with my former employer. At last report, we appeared to be teed up to have me revise the project’s business plan so that the director could show potential corporate sponsors that it has a sustainable and realistic business model. You’ll recall that on that call I told the director what my hourly rate for that work is, and she seemed to think that was workable. (Possibly involving me fudging how many hours I worked to arrive at the monetary total. I was not entirely comfortable with this, but I let it go for the time.)

I hadn’t heard anything from her about moving forward; we were to have met next Monday to discuss what’s needed. So I emailed her reminding her that I haven’t received a contract, which I need before I can start work. She replied that she’s been traveling, and agreed that “we do need to resolve the part time vs on call temp issue…The articulation is not done via contract (which is more appropriate for a vendor) but we do need a statement of what work we need to do and that seems to be more appropriately worked through together.”

She copied JT, the business operations person, so I waited a day before replying and addressing the latter about my stated rate. And then we got to the heart of it in her response: “[Company] is unable to pay you as a consultant for a period of time after you are no longer an employee (typically 1 year). Therefore, our only option is to extend your employment through an on-call temp or temporary employee status. In either status, we are limited to the amount we can pay you based on your salary.” In this case, that would be about 33% of the going rate. And she asked how flexible I am about that.

Well, I thanked her for the clarification, said I’d already discounted my fee to get to the figure I gave them and noted it’s a pity that I can’t help them with what needs to be done. Since then I’ve heard nothing back from either of them.

Here's the thing: when they bring in a non-ex-employee as a consultant to get this stuff done, they’ll pay the hourly fee I wanted; there won’t be any problem with that. (Of course, anyone coming in from the outside is going to need to spend hours getting up to speed on the program and the environment, so it’ll actually cost them more than me doing the job.)

And to be perfectly clear: they’ll pay anyone/everyone else that much to do the job; just not me.

Good luck with that.

Autobiography

This week someone on Twitter posted this challenge: Describe yourself but don’t use words—only four fictional characters. 

Here’s my response:

Not quite frozen assets

Someone posted this meme on Facebook, saying that the thief would get plastic bags, onions and garlic.

I flashed back to the last century, when I was throwing a party and inviting colleagues. One of them, who is 6’ 9”, told me he and his partner had a previous commitment and were unable to attend. My response: “I’m sorry to hear that; we’ll miss you. But now I don’t have to clean the top of the refrigerator.”

Because it’s amazing how dust and detritus collect on horizontal surfaces when you’re not wiping them down a few times a day. Actually—I should probably go do that, using the industrial-strength cleaner, since that thing hasn’t been washed since I moved in more than two years ago.

I’ll have to move what’s on there, off course. Zip-loc bags, plastic wrap, waxed paper, aluminium foil and parchment paper. I don’t know where you’d keep that stuff if not on the top of the fridge.

Clear as glass

I was out and about a while ago and noticed this on the commercial van next to me at a stoplight:

I have no way of knowing whether the crackling running through the skin is on purpose or the result of weather. But I thought it appropriate that a glass company might remind potential customers of cracks in glass.

Also, I don’t know what a “fenestration system” is, exactly (maybe something more complicated than your odd window?), but when I hear that word, I always think of defenestration, a murder method favored by Czechs down through the ages.

But that’s just me.

Gratitude Monday: food for the soul

I met a friend for dinner on Friday; we’re both women in tech and we’re both in some stage of the job search. We try to meet up in person every once in a while to augment phone calls. Last month it was happy hour at a place in Woodley Park; this time happy hour at the Arlington offshoot of a Balkan restaurant in Capitol Hill.

Friends of mine who moved to Miami Beach from Capitol Hill used to be regulars at the D.C. Ambar, and before they left, they test drove the Virginia outpost. So before I showed up, I IM’d my pal to ask, “I want to play the ‘friends of J and M’ card—whom do I seek out?” He gave me a couple of names, which I tucked away.

My friend was late Friday, so while I was waiting, I asked one of the servers if either Uros or Zloti was around, as my friends J and M had recommended the place. Calling attention to myself in this way was is far out of my comfort zone, but—as you know—I’m #playingtowin these days. Well, as it happened, both Uros and Zloti were working that night at the restaurant across the street that the company is spinning up. The server offered to call him over, but I said, no, no—just please let him know at some point that a friend of J and M asked after him.

My friend showed up, and we got down to the business of ordering food and catching up. (Let me just say that my friend knows her eats. She chose everything and we ate like empresses.) We were in the midst of it when a fellow with a beard appeared at the table and introduced himself as Uros. My first server had either called him, or he’d popped by and she’d told him about me. We chatted about J and M, and he assured us that his team would take excellent care of us that evening.

And so they did—the food was superb, and the two of us got squared away for August. Then, as we were paying the bill, our server appeared with two glasses of rakia—Uros had said to bring us a brandy and left the choice up to him. So he’d picked an apricot rakia from Bosnia Herzegovina, because it reminded him of his childhood. (I’m assuming the apricots part; unless it’s the custom in Bosnia to give kids brandy. If so, I don’t judge.)

Well, the rakia was extremely potent—I was reminded of the 4^th of July sequence in The Great Escape where Steve McQueen keeps telling the Brits, “Don’t smoke after drinking this.”—but also subtly delicious once you got through the thousand-proof strength. And the whole Mediterranean concept of hospitality warmed me every bit as much as the alcohol.

So today I’m grateful that catching up with a friend gave me the opportunity to step out of my comfort zone, for the J and M connection, for Uros responding so hospitably, for a really scrumptious meal and for #playingtowin.

Seal of approval

Man, what a week in the whacky world of Kleptolandia. I frankly do not know how Repugs can manufacture the amount of foam that they proudly spewed—along with wild-ass conspiracy theories, outright lies and general rants—in the hearings Wednesday with Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Without exception, they showed themselves to be ignorant, terrified, incoherent, bootlicking lunatics, and apparently their constituents are happy with these performances.

Then, of course, Cadet Bone Spurs spent the evening raising money for his 2020 campaign and spinning the day as COMPLETE EXONERATION NO COLLUSION NO OBSTRUCTION.

In other words, just another day in Dystopia.

Well, there was the Chaos Monkey’s posturing at a meeting Tuesday of Future Klansmen of America (uh, “Turning Point USA”, a youth indoctrination group founded and run by RWNJ Charlie Kirk, so there you are). As WaPo reported Thursday, after a maximum-volume video intro, the Kleptocrat waddled out onto the stage and bloviated to the enthusiastic white crowd, in front of the Presidential Seal, which some master-level troll altered to truly represent this occupant of the White House:

The American eagle has only one head, but this one is two-headed, an imperial insignia most closely associated with the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. (In case you’re asking, both empires went extinct 101 years ago.) No doubt Bone Spurs would consider two heads more impressive than one, like two scoops of ice cream when everyone else gets only one.

Actually, he’s probably going to issue an executive order for a three-headed eagle, because no one’s eagle has three heads. That would be bigly.

For your reference, the official seal:

The eagle on the real seal grasps olive branches in one talon and arrows in the other, representing peace and war. The Turning Point one clutches golf clubs and cash (possibly on the latter), referencing his 198 golf outings since taking office. Instead of “E pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”), the motto reads “45 es un títere” (“45 is a puppet”; in Spanish). All of this is, in fact, perfectly appropriate for this lazy, grifting, greedy Russian asset, so I expect you’re going to see this meme a lot.

As of writing, the Kirk crowd were still desperately trying to lay hands on whoever inserted the updated seal. Oh, and trying to deny that anyone knew anything about it. Which seems appropriate to a know-nothing like Kirk and his Twittler Jugend organization that clearly has no one paying attention to anything but the ideology and cash receipts.

Whoever the troll is, the entire world is lining up to buy him/her a drink. Including me.

Raising the dough

Further to my adventures in baking, I decided that it’s time to stop squirreling around with little packets of yeast. During Amazon’s Prime Day extravaganza I blew $6.52 of my Whole Foods credit on a pound of instant yeast:

It’s what Alton Brown recommends, so I figured I should go with it. I tipped out some of it into a ziplock bag to go in the fridge. The rest I sealed up and stuck in the freezer. It should last a while.

Then I made Cinnamon Rolls 3.0, using a brioche dough. I have to say that I was a little scared about how runny the dough was—what with five eggs and half a pound of butter. Also, after the initial proofing, you leave it in the refrigerator for at least 12 hours. I kept peeking just to check, and blow me if it wasn’t rising.

It’s really, really soft to work with, but this was the output:

A great leap forward from Cinnamon Rolls 2.0.

I was talking with a friend about this—about the sourdough, pizza and cinnamon rolls—and how I freeze the portioned balls of pizza dough and individual cinnamon rolls. And, of course, there’s starting to bit of a storage availability issue. She said, “[Bas Bleu]—I want you to call me if you start buying a chest freezer.”

You know—like an alcoholic staring at the bottle of 22-year-old whiskey.

She’ll run me through a reality check. If I can give cogent reasons for the chest freezer, okay.

Meanwhile, I’m going to tackle sourdough bread and actual brioche.

Health pursuits

Folks, I have spent nearly eight hours talking with four agents on the phone over the past two days, trying to get healthcare insurance. It’s not enough that health insurance plans are purposefully arcane, byzantine and obscure. No—TransAmerica and eHealth have to use software that apparently dates from the last century. So there were system crashes, agent lockouts and phone failures.

(Full disclosure, I once interviewed for a product management position with the latter. It was not a felicitous experience, though I don’t hold that against the agents on the phone. I do find it interesting that each time there was a crash or lockout I asked whether the system was homegrown, and each time the answer was no—either TransAmerica or some application eHealth had paid a vendor to produce. What, then, do their product managers do?)

Anyway, about 75% of the way through yesterday’s call, I got some iced tea, because by then I’d already been on the phone for nearly three hours. Faith, the agent, heard the ice tinkling in the glass (which always reminds me of the opening of Vince Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, describing the summer night in the Hollywood Hills when Sharon Tate and four others were murdered; gosh—50 years ago next month!). She asked, “Are you getting a drink?”

“Iced tea! It’s iced tea! I don’t apply for insurance under the influence!”

Well, when it was finally over, Faith and I agreed that we both might well have a little slurp in the evening, because we’d by-God earned it.

I don’t know about her, but I certainly did.

However, I’m now covered by health insurance. I hope TransAmerica is easier to deal with than their application.

Birds in their little nests...

Still on the tech FUBAR front, let’s talk Twitter. Several months ago, @jack and his minions decided that what desktop users really, really wanted is a mobile interface. They’ve been forcibly rolling it out since about the beginning of the year. It hit me in the Spring, and it drove me wild.

It makes it more difficult to follow threads (as in the app, clicking on a tweet takes you to a new page, not a pop-out on the page you’re on), so you have to toggle back. Twitter chats have become excruciatingly tedious. It also, for some unknown reason, puts the Close X button on the upper left corner, when every other application in the universe has it on the upper right. It keeps defaulting to “Home”, meaning the tweets Twitter’s algo thinks I ought to see; apparently the fact that every single time I find myself at “Home” I click on “Latest Tweets” is meaningless to them. Since the transition I’ve been unable to see how many tweets I or anyone else have posted. And I see this several times a day, including every single time I click on a Twitter link on another site:

In short, it’s a load of shite.

Earlier this year there were some tricks on how to revert to Old Twitter. But by the time I found them, Twitter had plugged the loopholes.

However, over the weekend I checked the Webs again, and discovered a couple of new workarounds, including one that—blissfully—worked for me. Let me preface the solution by sharing a photo on the Reddit discussion that saved me:

Clearly, I am not alone in my loathing of #NewTwitterIsNewCoke.

The discussion is here, and the steps from @Bill_Clinton69 that worked are thus:

“Go to about:config. Then you right click and hit New -> String. Then put in general.useragent.override.twitter.com in the preference name and Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko in the string value.

“Also be sure to reset your cookies for Twitter.”

I had to re-sign in to all my accounts after clearing cookies, but seeing that old interface on Twitter was totally worth it. (Although Twitter will probably close this option at some point.)

Now—about that common cold…

Gratitude Monday: Print this

About a month or so ago my laptop stopped recognizing my B&W printer; it alternated between just not seeing it and throwing printing errors. And the errors were not descriptive, just “error printing” or “printer is in error state”. It’s like interviewing a Repug on policy; you get no useful information whatsoever.

After extensive Googling, I managed to fix the issue. I think I uninstalled and then reinstalled the printer driver. It didn’t like HP Pro LaserJet P1102w, but it was happy with HP Pro LaserJet P1102w (copy), so I let it go.

(And let me just ask this: has anyone in the history of personal computing ever once found Microsoft’s troubleshooting of anything to be of any use? Every single time I’ve used one of their troubleshooters for network connection issues, printers, devices or anything else, it basically has thrown up its hands and said, “Sorry; SOL. Would you like to give us feedback?”)

Well, on Friday, after an obligatory Win10 update, all of a sudden I was back in printing hell. Defaulted to printer offline, and then printer error. Neither HP Pro LaserJet P1102w nor HP Pro LaserJet P1102w (copy) worked. So I rattled around the Web and tried reinstalling the driver.

Only the Win10 driver installer Web search would not list the P1102, or even the series of which it’s a part. I pulled out the CD with the original driver (from five or six years ago when I bought the printer), but the computer wouldn’t recognize it. After several attempts, I tried a different device, and realized that the ONE USB port that Lenovo condescended to install on the Yoga series was just…dead to me.

Well, that’s going to put a crimp in my lifestyle, no doubt about it. And, yes—of course I rebooted the machine a few times. Nada.

I wrote a quasi-frantic email to a friend who has bailed me out of many similar situations and packed it in for the week.

Saturday morning, I took another SWAG at it, focusing on the USB port. I found some posts on a Lenovo forum; apparently this is an issue of long standing. One of the recommended solutions (which started out pooh-poohing the whole megillah about updating and then regression the BIOS) was to turn off the laptop, hold the power button for 30 seconds and then restart.

Well, blow me—that worked a treat. I had USB connectivity.

And once that was in place, suddenly Microsoft found the P1102 driver, so I installed it. Annnnnd…error.

Rats.

Somehow, as I was wallowing around Windoze, I accidentally deleted the device, but found my old friend (copy). And once again, Yoga was happy to send to print, and Pro was happy to receive. So I emailed my friend to stand down.

Order has been restored. I feel like Bones McCoy after he treated the Horta: I may be able to cure the common cold.

At any rate, today I’m grateful that I am able to print documents, spreadsheets and other miscellanea. Next up: find out why the color printer is apparently using invisible ink.