This greeted me when I stepped out the front door this afternoon, after being in continually since this morning:
Spoor left by a lying UPS truck driver who did not even knock.
I thought I had left this sort of crap behind when I left Kings Hill in Portland. I guess the behavior is more widespread than I had thought. Perhaps it’s spreading.
From what I’ve heard, UPS is a pretty awful place to work for as a delivery truck driver. Management continually sets unrealistic quotas, and then disciplines drivers for failing to achieve the impossible. So I guess it’s not a surprise that some drivers are retaliating by filling out batches of UPS spoors during their lunch break, and then shaving time off their routes in half-minute or minute increments by dashing to doors and slapping UPS spoors on them instead of knocking and waiting for someone to answer.
I may soon have to revert to my past policy of refusing to accept UPS deliveries. My worry is that since the Postal Service is losing money, some idiot who thinks that capitalists have all the answers will appoint an expert from UPS to “reform” the Postal Service into doing just this sort of crap (first to its letter carriers and then to customers as a logical end outcome).
Update: If you Google “ups leave note without knocking”, you will see that I am hardly the only person to have this sort of experience with UPS. Guess it’s back to insisting on Parcel Post of FedEx Ground for me.
They misrepresent you to the prospective employer. They misrepresent the prospective employer and the position to you. Typically they do so by selective omission; they only list the best things about you or the job to the other party, to give the impression that you must match in all other areas, too.
If one is following the low road (and many pimps headhunters do), there is every incentive to do so, because having once engaged in representing you to an employer (no matter how poor the match, and misrepresenting encourages both you and the employer to show initial interest even for a job that matches poorly), they have a much stronger case for claiming an existing business relationship with you. And once they do that, they can leech off your salary for a job they did not even help you find.
Really, can there be any other succinct summary of the highly dubious practice of cybersquatting (or “domain investing” if you’re a fan of the Newspeak of the pro-cybersquatter crowd)?
If you don’t need an Internet domain name yourself, simply don’t buy it and it will be available for purchase by someone who does. Buying a domain just because you think someone else might want to buy it later and be willing to pay an inflated price contributes absolutely nothing to society. In fact, it harms others, by complicating the process of obtaining a domain and compelling them to pay more than they otherwise would have.
Sure, it’s legal, but it’s neither ethical or socially useful.
It’s not even near Mendocino County. It’s several hours drive, minimum. Over freeways that have a well-deserved reputation for horrendous traffic. Likewise, Bothell is not on the Olympic Peninsula.
Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to the two or three functioning neurons in your skull, recruiters, but people interested in Emeryville jobs are much more likely to be looking in the SF Bay Craigslist site than the Mendocino County one. That’s true even if they currently happen to be living in Mendocino County. Likewise, people interested in Bothell jobs are much more likely to be looking in the Seattle Craigslist site than the Olympic Peninsula one. If someone’s looking on a particular Craigslist site for job listings, most likely it is because (brace yourselves, this is going to come as a shock) they are interested in jobs which are actually in that region.
(Now, if it’s a job in Olympia being posted to the Olympic Peninsula site, that I can understand. Olympia, despite being within the purview of the Seattle area Craigslist site, is right where the Olympic Peninsula begins, and the peninsula town of Shelton is within reasonable commuting distance of Olympia. But Bothell or Redmond? Please.)
Recruiters, you do realize this sort of thing makes you and your ilk look like precisely the sort of clueless sleazeballs you have a bad reputation for being, do you not?
I read the text of one of their spam messages before emptying my spam folder this morning, and what they’re offering to do is let you franchise an agency with them. So it’s not all that difficult to engage in a little conjecture and figure out what’s probably going on.
Franchises come with franchise fees, of course. Such fees get at least partially collected up front, regardless of how well a franchise does. (That’s supposed to serve as an incentive for a franchisee to try hard at the job of making the franchise successful.)
In Farmers’ case, however, they don’t particularly care if your franchise does all that well or not. They earn money mainly on the up-front fees, so they’ll doubtless sell a franchise to anyone with a pulse. This ensures that the landscape is literally crawling with Farmers franchises, which in turn ensures that your franchise will have a lot of competition.
Unless you’re a natural-born salesman (and most people are not), good luck. More than likely, most franchisees end up like Amway affiliates: their business is mostly limited to friends and family, who purchase based mostly to avoid the social awkwardness of saying “no” to someone who’s close to them. Thus the commissions earned (and, being a franchise, it’s all commissions; in the eyes of the law, you’re a business, not an employee) doubtless do not come close to recovering the franchise fees paid up front.
But why would Farmers care? They’ve got your money, and they’re operating under the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.
That’s my theory, at least. But I’d be surprised if it’s terribly far off the mark.
