Plenty to say

On one of my walks I came across this car parked in one of the People’s Republic squares. The owner clearly has a lot of opinions.

Either that, or there are a lot of holes that need covering up.

Gojira returns

Someone on Twitter posted that adding Godzilla to any movie would make it a better movie. Now, maybe it’s because the tweet had footage from an Avengers film, but the entire thread was extremely shortsighted, IMO, because everyone was focused on Marvel-related stuff. But I expanded my horizons into rom-coms, viz:

When Harry Met Sally and Godzilla

Sixteen Candles for Godzilla

Godzilla’s Best Friend’s Wedding

Godzilla Jones’s Diary

You’ve Got Mail, Godzilla

And one I’d possibly even pay to see in a theatre: Godzilla Swallows Love, Actually

Seriously—this idea has legs. Scaly ones, but legs.

Interesting...

I had a doctor’s appointment in the District They Call Columbia yesterday, so on the way to it I met up with a couple of ex-colleagues. We three had a standing meeting every two weeks to go out for coffee and chat—it’s one of the few instances of cross-department communication in the organization.

Not much has changed in the six weeks since I left. Well, except the CEO, who’d been set to retire on 1 September, left suddenly. I mean—he was speaking at a users conference on a Friday and on the Monday there was an all-hands meeting at which the board chairman announced the CEO was gone and a former CEO would be filling in until a permanent one is found.

If anyone in the company knows why the sudden departure (without so much as a farewell email), they are not sharing the information.

Oh, and my ex-colleagues JC and LW have demonstrated their utter (and completely predictable) inability to understand anything about the IT system that’s necessary to launch the program. So, without me there, all those billable hours that the consulting company they hired spends with sock puppets and words of one syllable are going to mount up to serious money.

A lot more than they’d have spent paying me market rate to run the show.

I’m actually glad I’m no longer wrapped up in all that nonsense.

Between the pages

I came across a meme a while ago that reminded me of how Archie Goodwin described Nero Wolfe’s reading habits:

"I divide the books Nero Wolfe reads into four grades: A, B, C, and D. If, when he comes down to the office from the plant rooms at six o'clock, he picks up his current book and opens to his place before he rings for beer, and if his place was marked with a thin strip of gold, five inches long and an inch wide, which was presented to him some years ago by a grateful client, the book is an A. If he picks up the book before he rings, but his place was marked with a piece of paper, it is a B. If he rings and then picks up the book, and he had dog-eared a page to mark his place, it is a C. If he waits until Fritz has brought the beer and he has poured to pick up the book, and his place was dog-eared, it's a D. I haven't kept score, but I would say that of the two hundred or so books he reads in a year not more than five or six get an A." (Plot It Yourself)

I don’t recall whether Wolfe has ever not read a category D book all the way to the end.

Gratitude Monday: Getting up

This weekend we apparently had an equal number of white supremacist terrorists’ bullets and politicians’ thoughtsandprayers flying around, so it’s a tough Gratitude Monday and I’m taking it micro.

I was talking with a friend and former colleague on Friday, lining her up in case I need an employment reference, and I told her about #playingtowin. I commented that it’s a little bit late in the game to have learnt this; she shot back, “It’s not too late if you can still get up.”

I’m adding that to my arsenal, and that’s what I’m grateful for today.

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.