Fashion forward, with roomy pockets

This Craigslist job posting for a “personal assistant” came across my Twitter feed Wednesday, and it’s taken me all this time to plumb the depths of its narcissism and oblivion.

Even with the help of the lengthy stream of comments on the original poster’s feed.

Here was the original posting (since amended, which I’ll get to in a bit). I broke it down into chunks; if you click on each, and then click on the resulting screen, it should enlarge so you can actually read it. I can't believe these people got all this verbiage in a Craigslist ad:

A few thoughts:

They have nothing against sloths, but no dry senses of humor need apply? Are they fearful that someone might be mocking them if they think something funny was said, but they have no visual or auditory clues to that effect? I think they might be…

Happy to clean up dog shit and diarrhea; that seems a little unreasonable. Willing, I understand, but if I came across someone who was happy to do that, I’d frankly steer clear of him/her. As for the ability to lift a 40-pound dog up several flights of stairs, that seems like a red flag. There’s not an elevator in their SoMa abode?

It’s okay to be fashion forward, but leave room for the dog’s potty bags in your pocket. Huh. I guess that means that a fanny pack wouldn’t do it? Because there’d be room for the potty bags, but that’s totes not fashionable, y’know? I also wonder about the single hour a day scheduled for cleaning. Maybe their fifth-floor walk-up is very, very tiny?

(Someone on Twitter also called out the one hour per day that was Doodle-the-dog time:)

Also, their limit of five drinks per week seems unrealistic, given the list of duties and expected requirements. As everyone on Twitter pointed out, you work for these whackjobs, you need to drink.

Not quite getting most of the “bonus” characteristics, like:

Multilingual—what languages would these be, I wonder?

Knowledge of how to brush tangled hair without causing pain, starts down to Creepy Town, but it shifted into overdrive with “enjoy giving mani/pedis”.

The full spectrum of cookery seems quite ambitious for someone only being paid around $20/hour (the scale kept going down, and then up, but even the top end is below what a good cook gets), especially when that person is also cleaning, dog rescuing, providing personal protection, running errands, detangling hair, negotiating contracts, and a manicurist. Also, who’s up to date on GoT and Silicon Valley.

As you read through this Russian-novel-long posting, it’s interesting the number of times the writers insist that an applicant be willing to admit s/he is “not perfect”, “can own up to mistakes”, etc. And by “interesting” I mean “pathological”. At no time is there mention that they themselves might not be capable of doing the same.

Well, of course you have to jump through a serious of mindless hoops to apply for this job (including making a five-minute video explaining how you meet 100% of the requirements; yes, 100%), but the good news is they’re interviewing daily.

Now, here are a few interesting nuggets:

The original posting listed an hourly rate of $25-$35/hour. Which is certainly more than minimum wage, even in San Francisco. But it’s nowhere near what a top-notch PA gets, much less the dog wrangler, cook, meal planner, contract negotiator, body guard and all the rest of it.

And there is no mention of PTO or health insurance.

But throughout yesterday, the ad was apparently amended a couple of times, lowering the wage twice before raising it to a wider range.

And the last time I looked at the posting, they’d also included a very interesting datum about what they do that makes them unable to have a life:

They’re in biotech, folks. They’re #PharmaBro, x 2.

 ,

We can only hope that whoever takes this job doesn't give them enough time to reproduce.

And someone should rescue that dog. From them.

Birds of a feather

A funny thing happened on the way to nuclear Armageddon: a guy bought a large,  inflatable chicken with Klepto-like hair for $1300, and installed it behind the White House. No word on whether it's associated with Klepto's love of KFC, but I like to hope.

You know—some days, you just put your inflatable chickens in the win column and close the door behind you.

But also: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team staged a pre-dawn raid on Paul Manafort’s home and seized a shedload of records. That and the White House chicken make it a good day, all in all.

Off pitch

Okay, campers. The good news is that the pitch is over. We had a number of very good, business-viable ideas, with an interesting mix of old tech, new tech and new business models, and the double conference room was chockablock with people who came to watch.

So, hurrah.

The bad news is that I am, once again, a “finalist”, which means I once again have to make a [expletive modifier] video.

I think my mistake was in using an attention-getting visual aid, in the form of Alex, here:

Alex was one of the similarly-clad spokesmodels that Dice.com used on billboards around the Bay Area. Dice.com was proud of Alex. So they put him as a mural across an entire wall in their headquarters, in an open office, where everyone could not help but see him.

I should have just told my story without trying to doll it up.

Oh, well—live and learn.

Don't call me...

Sorry folks, but yesterday I was in full-on pitch panic mode, so this is all you get today.

I just thought it was funny.

Perhaps by tomorrow I’ll be capable of being amusing on my own. But perhaps not.

Gratitude Monday: Spirit of the pitch

I’ve been dodging the knowledge that, come tomorrow, I’m going to have to once again  Pitch an Idea as the culmination of the ideation course we’re running at work. As I (as always) would rather swallow ground glass than go through this, I’ve just been doing my Scarlet O’Hara imitation and putting off thinking about it until the next day, and the next.

Look: I have an idea—a good one—but the challenge is to make your case to a panel of judges inside two minutes. I can’t even set the stage for the problem to be solved in two minutes.

But on Friday I just couldn’t put it off any more, and the enormity of my shortcoming hit me, and my commute home was not uplifting.

So imagine my delight at finding a package on my doorstep, and picture my happy dance when I unwrapped the contents, an amazing give from one of my spirituous advisers:

Point of origin, from left, Ireland, Scotland, North Carolina.

(I opened the latter during my biweekly call with the giver, and let me just say, it was mighty, mighty fine. The aroma filled my living room, even with the windows open, and it went down a treat.)

So mega gratitude today for friends with superb taste, for unexpected gifts, and for getting this bloody pitch over with.

You think I still have feelings?

Hoookay—as Bette Davis would say, it’s been a bumpy ride, hasn’t it, here in Kleptolandia? And we’ve only just got into August. What will it be like when it really starts heating up?

In case you’re not a subscriber to the Washington Post, I’m linking to a story they ran on Tuesday about the events of last week, as seen through—and told by—various players and observers from all walks of life. (Well, no Benedictine monks or Roller Derby mamas, that I could see, but there is a generally representative sampling of Americana in the quotes they give.)

They describe it as “An oral history of the Era of the Mooch—condensed and edited for clarity—as told by senators, Boy Scouts, soldiers, journalists, parents, talking heads, Wall Street traders and the CEO of an arcade-game company in Florida.”

So, yeah—Americana.

And it’s exhausting to realize that all this mishegoss happened in the space of Monday through Friday (with a bit of an epilogue). The thing is—aside from the desire to guzzle popcorn and gin that going through the non-stop rollercoaster news cycles of last week inspired—collecting these snippets of immediate responses as each event occurred is a mother lode for future historians. The Post may or may not have skewed the narrative, depending on which snippets they chose to include, but this is pretty much how we in the historying trade go about trying to patch together a reasonable quilt design when we practice our craft.

There are some bodacious quotes here; you owe it to yourself to read the entire story. A couple of my favorites are from Jesse Ferguson, former press aide for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, on the first Senate vote on some unknown quantity of a healthcare repeal bill (“How did I feel about [John McCain’s] vote? You think I still have feelings? Those died a long time ago.”); and Melissa Hanham’s description of the Slack channel for North Korea. You should read that.

Then there’s… Naw, just read them all.

With or without gin.

Brain STEM

I’m feeling kinda geeky today, so here are a couple of STEM visual jokes.

You’re welcome.

Déjà vu

Y’all know George Santayana’s axiom about the past—those who don’t remember it are condemned to repeat it. That sucker pops up periodically, but it seems particularly appropriate in the regime of the Kleptocrat, who can’t remember what he said or did seven minutes ago.

I was reminded of this when a friend in the UK sent me a political cartoon from The Times of London, published at the time of the Kleptocrat’s meetings with Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit:

This cartoon is a brilliant reference to one by political cartoonist David Low, published in the Evening Standard on 20 September 1939, depicting the cynical collusion between ideological opposites over the carving up of Poland:

I just wish to God we would learn these lessons.

Job posting

Fortune 100 companies really ought to be careful about using social media, and in particular about how they advertise on a platform that’s meant for engagement.

Only last week, someone stuck with the weekend Twitter shift at Verizon got the piss taken out of them. But sticking your promoted tweets in people’s timelines is just asking for it.

Viz. this from a while ago:

I could have predicted the first responses. In fact, I only paused to leave my own snark before I blocked their butt, for essentially the same reasons spelled out here:

Seriously—they never learn.

The Bloody Fields of Flanders

It is the last day in July here in the District They Call Columbia. We had a break in the heat and humidity hell; yesterday as I was running errands I actually had to remind myself, “Self—it’s only 70 degrees. Roll your windows down.” And I could leave my patio door open most of the day and actually listen to the birds chowing down at the feeders.

But as the heat index rises to its customary triple digits, I’m casting my thoughts back to fields in Flanders, where one hundred years ago today, the Third Battle of Ypres began. Perhaps to distinguish it from the others, this one is known as Passchendaele, and it lasted from 31 July to 10 November, 1917.

By summer of 1917, the fields around Ypres were already a grotesque, ghastly charnel house. That part of Belgium is basically a thin strip of soil spread over clay. Nearly three years of artillery bombardment combined with repeated rain storms had churned Passchendaele into a god-awful potage of mud, in which the bodies and bones of men and animals churned to the surface and then roiled back into the soup. Trenches flooded, foodstuffs rotted and men and rats went mad.

Imagine, if you will, being one of those soldiers, peering warily over the top of your trench and seeing a vast expanse of that grey-brown churning mass, and knowing you were being ordered to climb over the parapet, in your woolen uniform and carrying your rifle, pack and other combat essentials (60 pounds' worth), and wondering how many yards you’d make it before the mud grasped your legs and pulled you down, making you an easy target for German machine guns. It is a fact that both men and horses drowned in it, although not always immediately. For more than three months.

In the end, the British had gained roughly five miles of territory, and suffered around 275,000 casualties. The math works out to just over ten men per foot of ground.

A few years ago I walked those fields around Ypres, and visited the endless cemeteries maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. They are beautiful places now, but even so, I was grateful to know that I had a hotel room with a bath and clean sheets to return to at night. If you think too hard about what it looked like a hundred years ago, you won’t sleep at all.

I’ve written before about the confluence of art and history, using artistic media to shorten the distance to the past. We’ve seen several instances of it during the centenary of the First World War: the Lights Out commemoration on 4 August 2014 of the declarations of war; the “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” installation at the Tower of London—one ceramic poppy for each British and Commonwealth soldier killed in the four years of war; the haunting appearance last year of men dressed in World War I kit at train stations in cities around England—each representing a British soldier who died on that first day, 1 July 1916.

This time, a Dutch artist sculpted a British soldier out of Passchendaele mud, and installed it in Trafalgar Square last week. You can see in his drooping shoulders and the expression on his face how bone-weary he is.

But then, through artificial rain, the soldier has been slowly disintegrating; in a few days, he’ll be just a pool of mud. It seems the most fitting depiction of this particular battle we could see.

A second artistic commemoration of Passchendaele is this pipers lament, known as “The Bloody Fields of Flanders”. “Bloody”, in this case, can be taken to mean both covered in blood, and as an intensive modifier, along the lines of “fucking”. Either way it would be accurate.