Nothin' says lovin'...

I’ll close out the week of Valentine’s Day with one more story of romance. Or a form of it, I guess.

NPR reports that there’s an annual event in Japan called Beloved Wives Day. The object (apparently) is that husbands publicly proclaim their love for their wives.

No, no—by “publicly” I mean they get up in front of a microphone on a Tokyo street & shout, “[Wife’s name], I love you.”

I have no take on whether or not the wives appreciate this. But I suppose it makes a nice contrast to the infidelity phones there that I reported on a month ago.

Romancing products

Romance is definitely in the air. It’s Saint Valentine’s Day, so you’d expect it.

Last year the TV channels were awash with commercials for Golden Corral’s “chocolate wonderfall”, And I was kind of underwhelmed. But we’ve moved way beyond that in 2013.

Witness this ad from the coupon section of Sunday’s paper:courtesy of Walgreens:

And this one, ditto (giving new meaning to their tagline, at the corner of happy and healthy):

To tell you the truth, the Libido-Max and Fresh + Sexy constitute TMI for me, but I’m guessing someone knows what they’re doing, promotion-wise.

But CVS has also got into the act; it’s nice to know that you can save a buck on your romantic evening.

Apparently a box o’ chox and a bouquet of roses just don’t get the job done any more.

How do I spam thee again?

Well, now I just don’t know what to say. I seem to hold some massive electronic attraction for Russian, uh, sociable-type women:

Is it that we’re almost to Valentine’s Day? Or that somehow all my Google searches and trawling of spas and military history sites has resulted in some meta-profile somewhere that just screams that I’m hankering after Slavic comforts?

I mean--vodka is one thing. This...

Whatever. I’m going to take a shower, now.

How do I spam thee?

Aw, so sweet—just in time for Valentine’s day, look who’s spammed me:

Really—so tempting.

Just not to me.

Two week notice

Holy smoke!

Pope Benedict XVI has just announced that he’s retiring, citing health reasons. His departure is effective 28 February.

This is kind of strange for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, normal notice period in Europe is a month, unless you’re going to the competition, when they walk you to the door. I didn’t see anything in the news stories mentioning the Pontiff taking up residence in a Tibetan monastery, or joining one of the Pentecostalist sects. So oughtn’t he hand in a full 30-day notice? Give everyone in the Church Universal time to pass round the good-bye card for signatures and maybe kick in a little something for a retirement gift?

What do you even give a retiring pope?

Because popes traditionally die with their boots-of-the-fisherman on, so to speak. They do not go gentle into that good night; neither age nor ill health nor illegitimate children nor really bad investments prevent them from hanging on to the mitre and the crook. (Hmm—that sounds like the name of a pub, doesn’t it?)

It’s not just a job, it’s a lifetime adventure. Leaving any way other than in a body bag (or a linen shroud, if you want to be technical) is just not the done thing. Abdicating is rather like getting a divorce, you ask me. Something Benedict ought to be opposed to on moral grounds.

The last pope to walk away under his own power was Celestine V, in 1294. That so pissed off Dante Alighieri that he had Celestine appear in the antechamber of Inferno. (Without giving his name. But everyone knew whom he meant.)  I’m expecting Benedict to appear in a skit on SNL.

So, not sure what happens now—how do you elect a new pope when you’ve still got one clearing out his desk? And will Benedict continue tweeting from retirement, or will his successor take over the Twitter handle? 

Stay on the lookout for white smoke.

Recruiters 30

As I was pointing out just a couple of weeks ago, recruiters constitute a special category of idiot. And recruiters for job shops are just freakin’ beyond the beyond.

My most recent experience validating this thesis was last week. I’m on a mailing list for a particular job shop and replied to one of their emails for a “Marketing Technology Process/Project Manager contractor for a client opportunity at a large, high technology company in Sunnyvale.”

To tell the truth, I’m not really into project management, but some of the technologies were interesting (social listening, anyone?) and it’s only for two to three months. (“With possibility of extensions!”) I figured that would be long enough to get some buzz words on my CV and give me something else to think about besides straining to rack up a thousand words a day on the novel.

First I got a chirpy email from a sourcer—the person who does the initial screening; it was a series of questions that needed to be answered before she could deign to speak to me:

1.       This is a 40 Hour Per Week / 2-3+ Month Contract (w/ Possible Extensions /Possible Perm Conversion opportunities). This role would be a w2 position with XXXX at the Major Client’s site located in Sunnyvale, Ca.  Are you willing to work onsite?

2.       What is your Current Hourly Rate (A Range)?  What is your Hourly Rate

3.       Describe your related experience in working with marketing technologies (e.g. email, social, web, analytics tools) within a large, global organization?

4.       Explain your Development of marketing system support process, metrics reporting and communication.

5.       Explain your experience of working in marketing technology Process or Project management, or marketing systems?

6.       Why are you interested in exploring this opportunity? (Are you currently working?)

I have to say that my answers were not particularly informative, because the questions annoyed me. In fact, my answer to #5 was “Not sure how this differs from question number 4.”

Evidently they were enough to get me to the next stage, and I had a 20 minute conversation with her, during which I elaborated on some of my process work (more than ten years ago) and how interested I am in social media. That prompted her to set up a call with her manager “the owner and president” of the agency, that afternoon. She wanted me to go into their office, but I said that wasn’t on, so we made it a call.

She wouldn’t disclose the name of the client company until I signed an NDA, which she sent with the meeting request. And when I sent it back to her, she was pleased to inform me that the client was, uh, a company I’ve had some experience with. I’ll call it PokerCo (as in, poker up their butts).

I’ve recounted my interaction with PokerCo here and here. So I thought about it and sent the sourcer an email saying that I knew that company and didn’t think I’m a cultural fit, so why waste the owner/president’s time.

Well, I got back an “I understand perfectly, but what’s your problem with them, they’re great!” response. I replied that I’d found their processes to be inflexible, and that since this job was all about process, I thought the deck would be stacked against success.

So she called. Again—“I understand, but everyone we have there LOVES the place!!” So, I agreed to speak with the owner/president—although I specified that I wasn’t interested in this one, but if she wanted to get some info from me about my capabilities in general, well, okay.

As you might imagine, of course, the owner/president was intent on interviewing me for this position, starting out by demanding to know what my specific problem was with PokerCo. I actually was spared having to reply that I had no intention of telling her specifics because she had to take another call. When she came back on the line, I asked questions about the role, the unit and so forth. She didn’t have a lot of information; kept answering role-specific questions with things like, “it’s a great place to work, financially stable”, etc.

We were interrupted again for about five minutes while she spoke to her cleaners. (She was apparently at home, so I’m wondering where the sourcer thought I’d be meeting with the owner/president.) Eventually, she told me in an aggrieved tone that I sounded like I had misgivings about this, so she wrapped it up quickly.

Which was fine with me, because the conversation wasn’t going to go anywhere anyhow. But I couldn’t get over how bizarre it is to try to push someone into contending for a job they clearly aren’t enthusiastic about. I mean—I’d be representing this woman’s agency, for God’s sakes. Why would she want me out there with her brand on me if I think the client is a collection of morons?

The owner/president wasn’t interested in any of my other capabilities, so I expect to never hear from them again. Too soon, that would be.

Spam in the queue

A slightly different sort of spam in my queue yesterday. Interesting that it’s pretty much identical from two different email addresses:

And:

I’m kind of wondering what the point of this is—variant of the Nigerian 419 scam? What's the deal with being 24 years old? What the hell's a "check assist manager"? 

On the surface, not too different from the come-ons I get from Farmers Insurance agencies in Fremont every time I update my résumé on Monster.

But I’m rather charmed by the name “Ollie Apple”. I’ll have to work that one into a novel or screenplay some time.

Yes, Virginia, they're just all idiots

I have to say that those cards in Virginia’s House of Delegates (the state Lege, as Molly Ivins used to call its Texas counterpart) are giving our Congressmorons a run for their money.

Actually—that’s what they’re literally intending to do: mint their own coins. On account of they think the Fed is leading us all into hell in a handbasket. 

(Look, don’t ask me how you get anywhere, much less hell, in a handbasket. 1. I don’t exactly know what a handbasket is, although I’m thinking probably looks like a dressed-down Easter basket. 2. It’s something my father used to say. A lot.)

They’ve not yet got so far as to start melting down the wedding rings of the wives of plantation owners. Just voted two to one to commission a study on how they’d go about doing that. The charge is being led by Republicans; whatever that might mean.

I know nothing, of course—I’ve been out of the Commonwealth since 2008. But apparently the good men at Richmond (or “the Holy City”, as my thesis advisor used to refer to it) haven’t read about the whole misery of the early US under the Articles of Confederation, when each of the 13 states could issue its own currency & none had to accept anyone else’s. Do they really think Amazon is going to take Virginia nickels?

Or they’ve forgot about that little dust-up from 1861-65 when they pretty much crapped out on the whole concept that individual states (even confederated states) could go their notional own way. I’m thinking Appomattox Court House, here, Delegates. Ring a bell?

Honestly—you just have to wonder whether these buffoons are smoking something besides tobacco down there.

Piteously slain and murdered

It has been confirmed through DNA analysis that bones of a man found last September in a Leicester car park are those of Richard III, last of the Yorkist kings of England, and last king to die on the field of battle. He was killed on Bosworth Field by forces of Henry Tudor in 1485, age 32.

I know it’s a chink in my Armor of Cynicism (okay—it’s a thumping great crevasse in my Armor of Cynicism), but I’ve always thought that Richard got an undeserved bad rep courtesy of Henry’s spin machine, which was then embellished by Shakespeare’s tragedy about the winter of our discontent.

Henry was a half-Welsh usurper who was trying to establish legitimacy for himself and his dynasty. Shakespeare’s patron for most of his career was Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudor line (it lasted but three generations), so he was basically sucking up to the boss when he wrote about a twisted hunchback who was the personification of evil.

He is presumed to have ordered the murders of his nephews in the Tower of London in 1483; sons of Richard’s late brother Edward IV, they were alleged to have been got rid of to remove any question of legitimacy to his wearing the crown. There’s a whole lot of hoo-ha about this—whether Edward’s marriage to the princes’ mother was actually legal, whether the boys were legitimate heirs, and who would benefit most from their deaths. There’s also a lot of hoo-ha about Richard being a tyrant, a madman and a disastrous ruler. But I don’t believe the facts that have come down to us bear that second lot of hoo-ha out, and I do believe that the hoo-hawers ought to take a good look at the early years of Henry VII’s reign when he was solidifying the throne.

(The hoo-ha has not come to an end with the discovery of Richard’s bones. The cities of Leicester—where he was killed/found—and York—his home town—have both laid claim to him, with rights to entomb him and get all the subsequent tourist business. I believe Leicester has won out—after all, they actually have the skeleton in their possession.

(But what I find fascinating is that, when she was sounded out as to whether Richard might be laid to rest in Westminster Abbey with other kings of England, Elizabeth II—whose dynasty possibly wouldn’t be sitting on the throne if Richard hadn’t been deposed—has made it known that she would not be amused by this. Talk about being a sore winner.)

Richard died with a sword in his hand; his body was mutilated and ultimately buried within a Franciscan friary (because that’s how you treat defeated enemies when you need to lay a foundation for your own precarious legitimacy).

And here’s what the City of York recorded at the time, ‘King Richard, late mercifully reigning over us, was through great treason…piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this city.’

Tweeting holiness

Here’s someone you don’t expect to find on Twitter: the Dalai Lama.

Well, maybe that’s not strictly true—why wouldn’t you find him on Twitter? I understand even Pope Benedict XVI is now on the social media platform. Although I’m laying odds that he’s got some cardinal/minion posting the actual, you know, tweets.

Of course, it’s possible that there’s some Buddhist equivalent of a cardinal—an abbot or the like—tweeting for His Holiness of Dharmasala. I mean, I expect that living in the moment would kind of exclude tweeting about it, since nothing says monkey mind like Twitter uploads from your iPhone.

Whatever.

What interested me about the Dalai Lama’s profile is that—as of the day I found it—he had more than six million followers. And he was following no one.

Well—I suppose…whom would you follow if you were he?

On the other hand, His Holiness the Bishop of Rome only has around 1.5 million followers; but he’s following eight people.

Only it turns out that the eight people he’s following are…all himself:

Make of that what you will. And peace out.