Mitch McConnell vs Pan's Labyrinth

Something's been on my mind ever since both the success of Pan's Labyrinth and the emergence of Mitch McConnell on the national political stage: Mitch reminds me a hell of a lot of the saggy-skinned, kid-eating monster from the afore mentioned movie. Check the pictures.

And then there's the monster from Pan's Labyrinth. Who can tell them apart?

More On the Transfer

Last Tuesday I had the interview to transfer to the full time program. Unlike interviewing to gain acceptance the first time around, this little exercise in self-indulgent blather about oneself was much less nerve wracking—much more a general chin-wag. All told I think it went well, although if I did what I was supposed to do and impressed the person with whom I interviewed, I'll be left having to make a decision and that's not something I'm necessarily looking forward to doing.

The problem is that I kind of like my current predicament; I've got oodles of time on my hands to dive into my studies and I feel a strong connection with the rest of my class. Switching to an all day, full time regimen will ruin both of those little comfort spots. The playing field will be levelled and I'll no longer be the sole person in class who's done the homework and researched the cases.

Then there's the prospect of actually finding meaningful employment once again. After taking the last week or so off to focus squarely on annihilating the exams I sat last Saturday, I cast a couple of applications out into the ether today. There's no reason to believe that they'll illicit a response any different to what has transpired in the past: silence. You know, were it not for all the pressure of study I'd probably be quite depressed right now.

And when is that ridiculous Selective Service status letter going to arrive? I can't keep paying for this education out of pocket like I've been doing. It's killing me.

Going Full Time

It's been seven months and something has to give. Since June I've been on the warpath, searching for a better way to fill the hours between 8am and 5pm without any luck. In fact today I uncovered a job opening at Adobe. With the help of an inside operative I discovered the status of the job: an offer was about to be extended and the person was going to take it. This is a common script, one that has played out for me over and over in the wake of my layoff.

So what's next? The MBA studies have keep my brain afloat and lent purpose to what might otherwise have been very aimless and purposeless days. Perhaps it's time to embrace that frame of mind to its fullest extent. Perhaps it's time I jumped off the weekend MBA train and went full time. It's something I'm seriously considering.

Honestly, I'm doing more than considering it—I'm going to do it; apply that is. Around five transfer spots are made available each year for evening and weekend students who for whatever reason would like to make the hop. Don't think of it as a sure shot, it's not. The transfer requires the completion of forms describing the reason for the request, explaining in detailed terms exactly what the prospective full time student might bring to the program. While the powers that be are considerate enough for forgo another round of GMAT examinations (rejoice!), the process is tantamount to a re-application. But I'll do it.

I'm not actually required to accept should I be offered the transfer, but at this juncture I'd probably take it. The tuition fees are significantly cheaper—I could claim in-state rates—I'd be out faster and the career launchpad provided by the program that much more lifting. With the rate at which I'm not finding any interest in my resume that last point is amongst the most attractive. Watching my limited funds dwindle away is far from pleasant. Retreating to the cloisters while the current financial tempest wreaks its havoc might be exactly what I need.

The Seventh and Deadliest Sin

I guess I'm allowed to swell with pride every once in a while.

I had the chance today to catch up with one of my former direct reports. He was laid off at the same time as me. Although nobody could ever actually prove this in a court of law, anyone considered to be loyal to my former manager was excised as part of the layoffs. This former direct report was one such person. We'd worked together for about 10 years. I'd in fact played a strong hand in hiring him back in 1998. He's good guy.

For Rocko—as we'll call him—luck appears to be swinging his way. After wandering for seven months in the unemployment wilderness he's throw himself at the depressed and depressing job market only to find that he's got a potential taker: Adult Friend Finder. It's basically a prostitution service with a bit of an extramarital twist thrown in for good measure. The good news is that they're hiring and Rocko's due to front up for an interview on Tuesday. He asked me to provide a reference and I'll be geniuinely honoured to do it.

You see, I get a kick out of doing that sort of thing. Another one of my former direct reports, who for identification purposes shall be referred to as Carne Asada, recently landed a web analyst position with the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco. Carne Asada was assigned to my corporate care back in about 2002. With no college degree under his belt he'd been performing what amounted to clerical duties at the old company. He was a blank slate but he showed aptitude and enthusiasm and those characteristics are what I think really count.

Did he want to go down the path of becoming a back-end developer? Not really. How about front-end? No, not particularly. Ultimately Carne Asada took the path of web usability analysis and the kid's pretty darn good at it. He led the charge at the old company, shoving the web interface kicking and screaming out of the nineties and into the not-so-nineties. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, the site still needed a lot more work.

At any rate he was pretty good, but he had no college degree. The lack of a degree was always going to present a professional barrier, so I urged him to undertake a certification program offered by Human Factors International. He nailed the exam and got the cert.

Like the rest of us he got the chop back in June and I was kind of worried about how things might work out for him. I needn't have been too concerned. I provided a reference for him with the 9th Circuit and he's just wrapped up his first week. It makes me proud; proud in a kind of paternal sort of way. I had a long-term impact on someone else's life and that gives me the warm fuzzies. I'll gladly do the same for Rocko. Sure, he wasn't as much of a protege of mine as Carne Asada—I started managing Rocko much later in the game—but I derive an immense sense of pleasure from helping other people succeed. In light of that management's probably the right game for me.

Moreover, what goes around comes around. Even though I'm still thrashing in the open waters of unemployment, there might soon come a time when one of the people whom I helped to find work is in a position to return the favour. Should it come I won't refuse it. It's a tired old cliché, but you really do reap what you sow.

Wish me luck in my operations mid-term tomorrow.

How Many Recruiters?

Here's a cultural subset who've become a somewhat regular part of my life since being given the chop at work: recruiters. They're a strange breed, collecting resumes and frantically doing whatever they can to add that one extra contact to the LinkedIn profile. Some are good. Some will take the time to actually read a candidate's resume and attempt to come to a set of reasonable conclusions about what that person has done and most likely wants to do in the future. They're kind of rare. The majority simply run a few quick keyword scans, leap at any matches, no matter how tenuous, and start making calls.

Well I'm glad they call. It's good for the ego. When the days at home alone grow long it's kinda sorta nice to get someone on the other end of the line asking if you're interested in a position, even if it's something that's totally orthogonal to your current career direction. At least you feel loved.

Well, this morning I received a call about a web development manager position. The scenario went something like this.

The phone rings. It's not a number I recognise but it might be about a job. I answer.

"Hello sir, is now a good time to talk?"

The voice is accented and female. By the sine curve intonations my guess is that she's calling from India. A lot of recruiting companies are now located there and use IP phones to obtain US-based area code phone numbers. I think that's a decent strategy. I really don't care where the recruiters are calling from. All that matters is whether or not they've done any work before they call.

"Sure, now's a good time."

"I wanted to find out if you're interested in a web development manager position in Mountain View, California."

Ah, yes, the Mountain View job. I know all about this job and how to end the call quickly.

"Is this position at a company called Skyfire?"

"Yes, sir, it is."

You see, most recruiters don't like to tell you which company they're representing when they first call you. For whatever reason, the big reveal isn't executed until some further sign of commitment has been made. But in this case I knew what was coming my way.

"Yeah, I thought so. My resume was sent to them a couple of days ago by another recruiter. They took a look at it and apparently thought that my skills tend too far towards management. They wanted someone with a more hands-on coding background."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"No, no, don't be sorry. They're well within their rights to pick and choose."

These conversations are pretty commonplace. More to the point they've happened nearly a dozen times over the past week. Skyfire, is a company that produces a mobile web browser—I used it for a while on my shitty, old Windows Mobile 6 phone while it was in beta—that tries to bring a fully-fledged browser experience to handheld devices. It's actually not a bad product. The company might actually have some legs. They're obviously on a bit of a hiring spree and in order to meet their needs they must have reached out to every recruiting firm in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Within the span of a day I fielded multiple calls and emails all asking the same thing, all pushing the same position. Therein lies the sad jaundice of our ailing economy. When every starved, bony-ribbed lion pounces on the lone carcass in the desert, fighting for the scraps, you know that times are tough. Skyfire is one such carcass.

At any rate, they didn't care for me so what does it matter? I'll must mosey along and seek love elsewhere. Any takers?

Anatomy of the Day of an Unemployed Man Part 1

Being unemployed can really suck. The bank account is ever dwindling as the sum total of your life's work slowly ebbs back out into the economy from which it came. Unemployment checks help stem the losses but there's an itchy feeling under the skin that receiving a dose of cash injection from the EDD tends to leave. I think it's got something to do with the stigma of being a leach on society. Sure, I know, I put into the system for over a decade so it's only fair that I be allowed to draw something back out, but it's still not the sort of thing that generally boosts one's ego. Quite the opposite, in fact. It would be a mark of shame if only there weren't so many others drawing from the same communal largesse.

Nevertheless, my impecunious predicament is gradually spiralling downward, compounded by a bleak job market punctuated by layoff after layoff after layoff. Like I mentioned, I've got plenty of friends in the EDD club. Despite the overall shittiness of the employement landscape I've thus far remained resolute in my efforts to find work. Word to the wise, the resolve is beginning to crumble, but that's a separate post.

So how do I go about accomplishing this commendable goal of rejoining the work force? How does an unemployed man's day get filled? Surprisingly easily. Shaking off the effects of a night's sleep interrupted repeatedly by feline shenanigans usually starts at about 8am. Then there's more coffee from the magical siphon and the "productive" part of the day begins. Honestly it's productive. There's less Guitar Hero involved than one might think.

A good chunk of my morning was spent tracking tailoring my resume for a job I found posted on McAfee's site. The job involves serving as a Web Marketing Manager; a role similar to what I did at my former place of employment. I could probably run rings around the job, but that's now what really matters. What matters is getting access to the right people. Submit the resume without any target softening at the intended company and it disappears without any word or trace. Trust me, this is how the job market currently works. Fortunately a former direct report of mine, someone whose career I had a strong hand in developing, picked up a contract job there about 6 months ago. He's my mole in the organization. I'm relying on him to ensure that my cover letter and resume find their way to somebody who might actually care.

But there's a snag, and it only dawned on me when I was at the gym a little earlier this evening. The cover letter is a revision of a cover letter I used for a cold-call job submission at Hotwire, a job for which I actually received a kindly worded "piss off, you suck" response. Even getting a "no" from a submission should be chalked up in the success column. Ninety percent of the time I don't even get that. The snag in this instance is that I forgot to change the reference to Hotwire in the first paragraph. Visions of the recruiter or hiring manager barged into my brain. His or her eyebrows twist and furrow while my hopes of gainful employment are tossed into the "not on your life" pile. Quickly phoning my mole I discovered, as I expected, that he'd not really done much to shop the thing around, so time was on my side. I've got the chance to put the right name in the letter.

To be honest I don't expect anything to come of my efforts. Just last week I went through the depressing agony of finding a job at Apple that was appropriate for my background. Kicking my intelligence network into full gear I wheedled my way into a phone screen—which went exceptionally well—only to be told via email, after a too-long wait for a good response, that the hiring manager was opting for an internal candidate. "He quite liked you," the email read, but that doesn't really count for much when there isn't a job hanging on the end of that stick. The hiring manager got a "gee, you're a nice guy, perhaps you'll give me a job later" email that will never illicit a response. It's good to feel loved.

These experiences temper my expectations, and with McAfee it's no different. They lack the glamour of Apple. They lack the Jonathan Ive shininess and rabid fan base, but they're hiring and they've got a revenue stream. Perhaps they'll take me on.

How else does a bum pass his day? Getting his homework done. I'm taking two classes for this supposed part time MBA that's bleeding me about $4,000 per month. One of which is Operations. Unlike the rest of my class mates I've got ample time to study the living shit out of the subject. People want me in their study groups since they sleep assured at night that when they show up for the meeting the next day they can feel confident that at least one of the team members has made some decent headway with the problem sets. My GPA rises up in testament to the power of having more time than the rest: 3.925. There's plenty of time for that number to drop. And in the meanwhile, as the layoff announcements keep flooding in, the ranks of students suddenly exposed to too much time continues to swell. I'm not so lonely anymore.

Urgently Needing Roots

For any Australian this sort of thing is both unfortunately and funny. In the Australian vernacular "root" has a meaning directly analogous to "screw" in the American vernacular. So the plumbing section of the yellow pages takes on a whole new dimension if you know your way around Aussie slang. Gems such as Mr. Rooter, Super Rooter and the above depicted Urgent Rooter just leap of the page and swim around inside the reader's imagination. Rooter Bong on the other hand just defies explanation.

Bruce Beresford's 1981 film, Puberty Blues, does a great job of putting the word in context. Scoot forward to 1:30 and take in the root reference, particularly relative to the mention of the panel van (and that's a whole different discussion).



And while we're at it, any Aussie can't look past this...


To help those a bit in the dark understand the humour, "coit" is an Australian slang term for one's anus.

Self Righteousness On the Back of the Car

I love a good dose of self-righteousness plastered across the back of a vehicle for all to enjoy. It must feel great to soundlessly roll around the hilly streets of San Francisco while the electric-hybrid motor does all of the heavy lifting. You can glance out of your window, hold your nose high and think to yourself, damn, I'm awesome! I'm driving a hybrid. Sure, if I really gave a shit about the environment or the funnelling of funds to those evil terrorists I'd give up driving a gas powered vehicle altogether and switch to biodiesel or just ride a bike but no, that's too much effort and would eliminate too much of the god-given convenience rightfully mine as citizen of the United States of America.

Let it go.

For some odd reason it really irks me that people feel compelled to fly their "I'm better than you" flags in the most cowardly ways possible. While darting about city streets who's likely to apprehend the hybrid driver and attempt to engage her in a debate about the merits of her decision to still consume gas while hypocritically splitting hairs about which gas powered vehicles Osama Bin Laden purports to love or hate? I think that's what shits me most about bumper sticker propaganda; the purveyor of the propaganda is rarely there to defend his position. You slap your statement in place that only people whom you've passed or who are behind you can actually see. And even if they did care to call you on your crap you're too neatly sequestered away in your hermetic coccoon to be reached. It's the very definition of passive aggressive behavior. And even if someone did you actually penetrate the defensive barriers you'd probably be petrified of the results.

Lay Off the Botox, Please!

Ladies, gents, everyone... Think carefully before you start jabbing syringes full of Botox into those ruffled furls of flesh on your forehead. Case in point: Laura Tyson.

Laura's an accomplished woman; former Dean of the Haas School of Business, former Dean of the London School of Business, blah, blah, blah. The list goes on. She's also a not-so-secret Botox fiend. Watch the following video and compare the degree of expression emanating from Laura's face versus Rachel's.



Those eyebrows don't move! They don't shift, edge or budge one angstrom left, right, up or down. Meanwhile, Rachel's facial expressions are going every which way, as is her style. Hang on, at about 30 seconds into the clip Laura's high arch brows tick up a touch, revealing for the first time a crack in her frozen countenance. And those Saint Louis Arch type brows... Always a tell-tale sign of a grand or 12 forked over to a scalpel wielder somewhere in one of the snootiest burghs around. Perhaps I'm simply too young at this point to fully appreciate just how youth-oriented our culture has become, but why do it? Getting loads of plastic surgery doesn't make the recipient necessarily look younger, it just makes the recipient look like she or he has had loads of plastic surgery. Like Sylvester Stallone's mum. Urrrgh! Looking at her gives me the willies.

It kind of looks like her face is made of putty, doesn't it? I wonder how much Play-Doh has been injected into those cheeks?

Now let's give credit where credit is due; Rachel Maddow is probably 10 or 15 years Laura's junior, so The Beauty Myth probably hasn't quite caught up with her yet. Or maybe Rachel's self esteem is a little more robust. Who cares? Just let those eyebrows roam. Set them free. Allow those furry caterpillars to crawl up and down. It does a face good, even a professorial one.

A Doomed Strategy

John McCain screwed himself. At this point the games is pretty lost due in no small part to his poor positioning within the electorate.

If you're John McCain, you're facing a Republican base that's not particularly jazzed about your rather centrist track record. The base slaps you with the RINO moniker and claim they'd rather sit out an election than cast a vote for you. Curiously enough that centrist attitude puts you in good stead with independents; the same people who probably would have voted you into office had George W. Bush not pulled nasty, racist stunts in North Carolina back in 2000. But that's all water under the bridge now. Your solution: pick Sarah Palin. She's a dicey pick but she stands a good chance of winning over all those women, and you just might get a crack at making history with your presidency, trumping the half-breed in the process.

But it didn't turn out that way. Sarah Palin wound up revving up the base and only the base. Injecting an air of creepiness into the campaign, the woman you picked to excite the female vote has instead become a masturbation fantasy for die-hard Republican men. The women you sought to bring into your camp with the pick are just kind of grossed out. And you can't really blame them. Meanwhile you're forced to go along for the ride, feeding the racist sentiments of a base that represents and ever shrinking percentage of the American demographic. By the time you become aware of the monster you've created it's too late to back out.

On one side McCain is forced to distance himself from the naked hatred and racism boiling over from his ostensible base, while on the other side he's forced to push back against Obama in order to secure the independent vote. Caught in a vise, McCain is getting squeezed and the poll numbers reveal it.

We've got just over a week to go and much can change between now and then. Just wait for the White House to release a judiciously timed Bin Laden video. But this is not 2004 and the zeitgeist has mostly moved on. It's hard to see how McCain can release himself from the situation he's created.

It Burns Me Up

Politics is my baseball. I don't much care for most American sports aside from the perennial squabbles between the Democrats and the Republicans. My only wish is that a third party were more viable, thereby making the spats more interesting. Getting to the point, right now we're in the middle of the American political World Series. I'd say we're getting to around the seventh or eighth inning, the Republicans are down by about four or five runs and they're looking pretty tired.

Anyway, the last debate spat forth a particular remark that didn't get picked up in any of the many media channels; in most instances it slides right past those paid to care about such things. Perhaps they were too distracted by all the other memes and catch phrases that emanated forth from the mouths of the aspirational. But I caught this one and it really burns me up...

Why do some anti-abortion types refer to their opponents as being "pro-abortion"? I think John McCain mentioned it his previous nationally televised chin-wag with That One. I skew pretty left of center when it comes to my political beliefs and I know a lot of people who would prefer not hunker down and get greasy with the anti-abortion/pro-life faction. The thing is that not one of the friends I keep would consider his or herself "pro-abortion". I can't think of a single woman who's so pro-abortion that she deliberately gets knocked up just because it's fun to drop a fetus or two on the floor every once in a while. That's pro-abortion. She's most likely pro-choice, meaning that if a woman really feels the need to do something with her body then she's free to do it, even something as unpleasant as an abortion. That doesn't mean she's really into it. It just means free to choose for herself. Nowhere implicit in that concept is any notion of being pro-abortion. To use that term is to conflate the issue at hand. In fact most people waging war over abortion are really arguing about two very different concepts that just happen to intersect on some pretty dangerous ground.

All this abortion garbage is, as George Lakoff has gone over, just a surrogate for control over women and enforcing a strict social order. At the core of it is a desire to ensure that women stay in their gender roles and remain largely subservient to male masters. When a woman is free to choose she's free to choose in the absence of any male oversight, and I think that makes a lot of people really, really scared. The rationale goes something like, "Shit, if women start making decisions for themselves what might happen next? And why stop there? Women making decisions for themselves is about as crazy as a black man becoming president of the USA!"

The Microsoft Tech Support Rabbit's Warren: Down We Go

A couple of weeks ago, lost in my unemployment funk, I ran an experiment in customer service. Here's how it went...

Microsoft Vista includes with it a suite of shitty widgets, gadgets or whichever name MS chose that hadn't already been snagged by Apple. I'm pretty fond of the clock gadget since I've got friends and family members scattered across the globe. Courtesy of the clock gadgets I'm spared the task of having to remember time zones. I needn't explain more.

Ordinarily they should look something like this:

Its a clock. Pretty simple, huh? Big hand points to the minutes, little hand points to the hours.

Well, I booted my system on night to find that the clock instead looked like this:

Totally unreadable, but the clock gadget is hardly a necessary component of the operating system. Other gadgets, such as the Contacts gadget and the System Monitor gadget exhibited similar corruption.

I poked around on the web for a while, searching for any documented evidence—and more importantly fixes—relating to this kind of problem. There were a few, I tried them and none of them worked. Later that night the corruption miraculously disappeared after I did what amounted to nothing. The Microsoft fairies has swept through my machine and righted all wrongs. I could go to sleep a happy man.

The next morning I fired up my machine to find the corruption, like a nasty case of genital warts, was back in full bloom. My fixes had failed, even my attempts to roll back to a previously working image of my discs had met with poor fortune. Then I had an idea.

These components come native with the OS, I thought, so Microsoft should be able to solve the problem. I'd never contacted Microsoft's customer support line before; I've always had a natural aversion to dealing with Microsoft in that manner, but this time my logic went something like this:

1. It's not a critical component of the OS
2. Microsoft should be able to support their own software, even if I'm sure they can't
   
3. The problem is going to be a tricky one to resolve since it involves the corruption of a set of files—these sorts of problems always push tech support staff to their limits
4. I'm unemployed and I've got loads of time to waste on such a fruitless exploit

So I rang the hotline and got routed to the land of blue, multi-armed deities.

"If they can't fix the problem you won't be charged the $60," I was informed.

"Let's do it," I agreed. And down into the rabbit's warren I went.

The first tier tech to whom I spoke was a very personable woman. She patiently listened the problem I was encountering and asked me a few probing question. Had I restarted my system? Yes. Had I attempted to use the gadget restore feature? Yes. Had I checked for solutions online? Yes. Had I attempted to re-register my DLLs? Yes. We could both see where this one was going. "Would you mind if I took control of your system?" she asked. Of course I didn't mind. She then directed me to open IE and navigate to a particular page that would invoke an ActiveX control that would in turn let her view my system. That's when things went pear shaped.

"I'm telling it allow the ActiveX control but nothing's happening," I told her.

"What are the menu options you're seeing?" She then described a list of menu items that should have been visible but in fact weren't.

"The one you want me to select isn't there," I told her. "Shouldn't this be easy?"

She let that remark hang while she laboured further with me on trying to get the remote control app installed. This tête-à-tête continued for what was about another twenty minutes, neither of us getting any closer to solving the problem, we were too embroiled in trying to solve the problem of installing the tools that were supposed to help us solve the original problem.

"I think your tech support needs tech support." If she found the remark amusing she didn't let me know it.

A few minutes later I told her I'd solved the problem; not with the corrupted gadgets but with the installation of the remote control app.

"How did you do it?" she asked.

Heh, I thought, this is going to be great. "I used Firefox."

Yes, Firefox worked better with Microsoft's website than Microsoft. Oh the irony.

What then transpired was about two more hours of being repeatedly put on hold while the pleasant yet overwhelmed tech support agent ran my issue up the food chain in an effort to get to the root of the problem. Her final solution was to have me download third party clock gadgets that would in fact work, despite the fact that the native Microsoft gadgets remained corrupted.

"No, no, no," I told her, "that's not a solution, that's a workaround. I called to get a solution to the problem, not to be told about a workaround I already knew about. You're going to need to try harder."

"I'd like to transfer you to an escalation engineer."

"Okay, let see what else can be done. Thanks."

So there I was, two hours lost for nothing, and I'd been shunted to another part of the call center. The next person assigned to my problem was nice enough, but beneath the veneer of concern was a hint of resentment. After all it was 1:30am where he was and I'm sure he didn't care to be dealing with these problems at this time of night. In an effort to break the ice and get him to deal with me on a personal level—really build a stake in the issue—I told him that was soon to travel to India. I asked him about southern India, the place where I'll be going, while we ran a series of hard disc checks. He really didn't give a shit. Okay, I thought, we'll have it your way.

His way was ultimately just like the first tech's but longer. After a further three hours of aimless meandering the final solution was proposed: reinstall the operating system.

Think about that for a moment within the context of the "deal" proposed by ringing Microsoft's tech support in the first place: they either fix it or you don't get charged. What the OS reinstall represents is a bogus deus-ex-machina. No matter which problem you have with Windows, Microsoft can always, as a final resort, declare that your only remaining solution is to reinstall the OS. We'll take our sixty dollars now, please. No shit I can always reinstall the OS. The reason why I called was to fix the problem WITHOUT reinstalling the OS. The corrupted components shouldn't corrupt in the first place. And if they do, then Microsoft should be able to fix them without placing undue burden on the affected customer. Apparently that's not the case.

And neither was I surprised. For years the tales of Microsoft's tech support have swirled around technology companies. Most of us working in the tech industry are savvy enough to support our own equipment without having to resort to hotlines. On this occasions the reasons for my deep-rooted suspicions of Microsoft's tech support were confirmed. The company itself is as needlessly complicated as the software it produces, so much so that the software itself is in fact a replication of the complexity of the company played out at a different scale. It's all one big mess with a powerful marketing arm. If you get caught in the labyrinth, like I did, don't expect to find an easy way out.

The Cut

My employer finally got around to enacting some layoffs. They've been a long time coming.

Ever since the company's inception, layoffs have been eschewed at every turn. "It's not a part of our culture," or so went the mantra. The company weathered the catastrophic downturn of 2001 without retrenching a solitary employee and the corporation was probably better for it. It maintained the warm fuzzy reputation that had hovered above it's corporate head like a halo since the day it was founded.

Now that's changed. There's a new sheriff in town and he's got different ideas about these things. The shareholders demand value, and that means heads must roll. Mine was one of them.

I'd been lurking the hallways of the company for over 10 years. Plucked out of Australia after finishing my studies in electrical and electronic engineering, I arrived for my first day of work sight unseen. My first role at the company was as a lowly hotline engineer. Sometimes cranky users of the company's products would phone in to rant about whatever was on their minds at the time. Like the bedridden elderly, most of them simply wanted someone to listen to their tirades. Treat the person first and the technical issue second. Most of the time I never got to step two.

Wind forward ten years and I'm a Senior Manager of the company's web site, an aspect of the business that it hardly considers central and with the new broom sweeping through considers largely expendable. I'd liken to situation to a dysfunctional romance, one that kept itself going based on the memory of glory days long in the past. The company hadn't broken up with me yet and I lacked the stones to break up with the company. Finally someone took action.

The writing was on the wall long before we were dragged into the executioner's chamber. The Director to whom I reported was being conspicuously dropped from any discussions of the future state of the company and its web site; the Senior Director to whom he reported had espoused her views of a smaller, leaner web group at the company. To be honest I tended to agree with her approach. So when the hammer fell on over 60% of my team it came as no surprise. Most surprising was the people the powers in charge sought to remove. Two of the developers on my team prop the site up in ways that senior management will only truly understand once they're gone.

But as I've repeated to myself over and over under my breath in an effort to reprogram my mind, it's not my problem.

My problem now is how to fill my days until business school starts at Berkeley in August.

Corporate Life - The Exodus

The department for which I work underwent a sort of reorg a couple of weeks ago. Marketing absorbed a huge chunk of sales and support. My career started out in support, staffing the hotline and troubleshooting the bullshit problems of pissed off engineers. Always fix the person first, then fix the technical problem. It's always easier that way.

So now we're a honkin' big organisation, full of over-inflated egos that demand perpetual assuaging and reassurance. Those of us in the rank and file, namely me, spend our time scratching our heads in an effort to work out why the hell the move was executed in the first place. Better alignment? Maybe. A parting gift from the outgoing CEO to his man with marketing plan? Now you're getting warmer. Redundancies? Ah, we're starting to hit the mark.

Even still, when I strolled into a meeting this morning I was kind of surprised to overhear that the VP who came over to Marketing as part of the shift was splitsville. Yeah, not more than a month after the move was made official she bailed. There are a couple of rumour sources in the company that I like to check on this sort of stuff, and in this instance he knew nothing concrete. Bear in mind that he reports into this woman's organisation, so the cone of silence around the exit wasn't exactly shocking. Two hours later it was confirmed.

This kind of thing is going on all over the place now. Nobody should be reclining back in his or her Aeron chair, picturing the long, safe career at the company that stretches out ahead. It's time to put the spit shine on the resume, kiddies, nothing is certain anymore.

Corporate Life - The Exodus

The department for which I work underwent a sort of reorg a couple of weeks ago. Marketing absorbed a huge chunk of sales and support. My career started out in support, staffing the hotline and troubleshooting the bullshit problems of pissed off engineers. Always fix the person first, then fix the technical problem. It's always easier that way.

So now we're a honkin' big organisation, full of over-inflated egos that demand perpetual assuaging and reassurance. Those of us in the rank and file, namely me, spend our time scratching our heads in an effort to work out why the hell the move was executed in the first place. Better alignment? Maybe. A parting gift from the outgoing CEO to his man with marketing plan? Now you're getting warmer. Redundancies? Ah, we're starting to hit the mark.

Even still, when I strolled into a meeting this morning I was kind of surprised to overhear that the VP who came over to Marketing as part of the shift was splitsville. Yeah, not more than a month after the move was made official she bailed. There are a couple of rumour sources in teh company that I like to check on this sort of stuff, and in this instance he knew nothing concrete. Bear in mind that he reports into this woman's organisation, so the cone of silence around the exit wasn't exactly shocking. Two hours later it was confirmed.

This kind of thing is going on all over the place now. Nobody should be reclining back in his or her Aeron chair, picturing the long, safe career at the company that stretches out ahead. It's time to put the spit shine on the resume, kiddies, nothing is certain anymore.

New Tunes - No Wait, These Are Old

I've been spending on music again, such is my wont. For reasons I can't adequately explain, This Mortal Coil leaped into my head about a week or so ago. I'm not sure why. Their main hit was a version of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren", which The Cocteau Twins' Liz Fraser warbles forth with her usual hyper-produced gloss. The first time I heard it was probably back around 1990 or so; my brother and I were getting into all of that stuff at the time. We taped most of Triple J's Hot 100 for that year, which was an attempt to collate the listeners' favourite songs ever. The list was peppered with plenty of alt-rock gems from the eighties, most of which rounded out the top ten. Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" took the top spot, but the video tape spooled out its final millimetre three songs before it aired. We never got to catch it.

Seventeen years later (ah crap, it's been that long) I'm drawn back to it. Unsurprisingly it holds up. TMC were ahead of their time, just as were the bands from which the members were drawn.
Right now track 9, Barramundi, is concluding. Lisa Gerrard is belting the notes out of her considerable pipes and my ears are loving it.

I've missed you, This Mortal Coil. Let's slip on our gothiest outfits, blot out the sun and talk about spiders in a dark corner. It's good to have you back.

Back to the Corporate World

I took three weeks off from work over the Christmas/New Year break. The company I work for was closed from 21 December until 2 January, but I took both the preceding week and the subsequent three days off. My parents were in town. I kind of had to do it. Everyone at the company was compelled to take three vacation days on 25, 27 and 28 December. We're in cost-cutting mode right now and we've been in that mode for a really long time. A really long time.

Budgets are getting slashed across the board. This quarter my department's budget is down 4% over last quarter, which in turn was reduced about 4% over the quarter before. It's a cycle that's been going on for some time. Each quarter we tell ourselves that the next quarter will be rosier, better but sure as we all need to shit, the next cut comes around. We're left little else to slash now. There are no more training dollars, no more money left for entertainment or travel. The only things left are essential services and heads.

Which leads me to the rumour I heard today: layoffs. You won't have to scrutinise the coffee grounds too deeply to come to that conclusion. When you've cut just about everything else but people and your CEO is calling for a significant ongoing reduction in costs then what else can you cut?

But it's not going to happen on the current CEO's watch. He's too avuncular for that.

Which brings me to my next event at work today: I met the new CEO. He's an affable enough guy. My first meeting with him left me impressed. He talked about the need to boost sales, which is true and I told him we're all looking forward to some new leadership, which is also true.

I reduced my inbox from about 400 unread emails to about 200. Our intranet was given a new lick of paint and it's not particularly good. I ate a salad for lunch.

Bizarre Behaviour at the Gym Part 3

Don't wear tight little shorts made of spandex. Especially if you're male. Especially if you're male and over forty. Especially if you while away your hours under the glow of a melanoma-forming solarium lamp. Especially if you feel compelled to let the spandex ride high enough up groin to split your nut sack in two, revealing the full form of your meat and two veg. Just don't do it.

I Can Has Balls?

Emasculated, androgynous wuss-pop? I love it. I put mustard on it and eat the shit. See how I love it.

Good news, mopesters, the navel-gazing quartet from Brooklyn, Dirty on Purpose, have dropped the bioavailability of their SSRIs to the point that has allowed them to spit forth a new slit-your-wrists worthy ditty. And they'll take absolutely none of your cash money for the pleasure.

Check it: http://www.rcrdlbl.com/artists/Dirty_On_Purpose/download/Leaving

Yep, hop on over to the oh-so-hip www.rcrdlbl.com (dropping vowels = tres hip) for your helping of corner-cringing slow-pop.

Early impressions: The crushed-scrotum vocals complement the morose melody like a stout cabernet sauvignon complements a slab of rare porterhouse. Deeelicious.

Bizarre Behaviour At the Gym - Part 2

I don't ever want to see an erect penis at the gym. Ever.

But of course I did, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this now.

The other day I was busy washing the stench off my body after a particularly sweaty workout. Having offended more than enough noses with the rancid odour of my sweat-soaked t-shirts, I've since learned to give my drenched workout garments a solid rinsing with Dial soap in the showers once I'm done. The anti-bacterial sales pitch of Dial ain't just a sales pitch, boys and girls.

So I was getting my scrubbing done when I caught a glimpse of the person in the shower stall opposite mine. As he pivoted to access a touch-to-reach part of his body I swear I saw a boner making itself known to the world at large. Nobody wants to be the guy in the locker room showers staring at another man's potentially erect cock, so I quickly turned away.

He pivoted again, somewhat self-consciously, making a half-hearted attempt to disguise what, in a second flash, was revealed to be an honest-to-goodness stiffy. Worse yet, he was looking back at me!

Look away and pay him no mind, I thought to myself. Dry yourself off and leave. Empty your mind. Empty your mind.

And I did.

The odd thing here is that the gym is located in San Jose, not San Francisco. You'd expect that kind of thing in the San Francisco gyms, but not in San Jose. I've never seen such a thing in the SF gym I go to, but then again, I never shower at the gym in SF. Perhaps there's a reason.