Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 07:59 on 15 September 2016
On schedule, my current (soon to be most recent) stint of employment is all over as of today. It’s a relief that it’s happening on schedule: I’m already starting to make plans for the next month or so, and a delay in the start of any free time would complicate them.
Published at 18:50 on 23 August 2016
Last spring, I had serious doubts my current job was a good match that would (or should) last. Some changes were made, it got better, and I persevered.
Recently, however, it’s been increasingly evident that’s not enough. I’m not really culturally a good match for where I am, plus the work, while better than it was, is still not as good a match as it could be. Plus I have some real doubts about the long-term viability of the place; it would not surprise me much if things suddenly collapsed, and in a way that tainted all current employees with a stench of failure.
Yesterday, in fact, I had been planning my exit during commute hours. I was going to break the news to them next month that I wanted to depart some time in the fall. Instead, they broke the news to me today. Nothing’s happening very soon, but it looks like my ideal target date of sometime in the first week of October will be my last day. There’s a final project I want to wrap up; once that’s in place I’ll be able to depart on good terms, having made a positive contribution during my tenure.
I don’t have anything lined up to replace it. First, the nature of my current job means I really haven’t had the time to do a good job search (I’ve done some, but not much). Second, I really feel I need some time to decompress. The risk is pretty low in my field, so I’m not that worried.
Even if the worst comes to past, my whole exercise of buying a house and trying to settle down was something of an experiment that I wasn’t sure would work, so even that would not be a huge shock. It will be nice if it works, but it won’t be the end of the world if it doesn’t.
Actually, the “worst” won’t come to pass; the real worst would involve me lying and saying I’d be happy to do the old work that bored me to tears so I could stick it out there (thereby throwing more of my life away doing something I absolutely hate).
Published at 10:17 on 14 August 2016
Not much going on. Parents are visiting, as are both of my sisters, which means this weekend is the first time all five of us have been in the same place in a long time.
As is typical, my parents made a heat wave materialize when they came. They must think temperatures in the 80s and 90s are normal here, based on their experiences during visits.
Published at 08:22 on 3 August 2016
In a recent Guardian article about changing (in the direction of less of it) sexual behavior, we find the following:
“The new sexual revolution has apparently left behind a larger segment of the generation than first thought.”
“Left behind?” Really?
Wasn’t the Sexual Revolution about liberating people from socially repressive restrictions that interfered with them following their desires? Haven’t such restrictions continued to vanish in the past decade or so? Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land. LGBTQ people can now serve openly in the military. And so on.
Just because some individuals choose to abstain from sexual activity is no evidence of their being repressed. Maybe those abstainers simply don’t want to be sexually active? If the Sexual Revolution isn’t about their right to remain celibate by choice, then it’s a revolution I want absolutely no part of. You don’t sexually liberate people by replacing an obligation to not have sex with an obligation to have it.
This cuts close to home for me because I’m less sexually driven than the norm, and the (by my standards) hypersexualized youth culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s and then the (again by my standards) hypersexualized gay male subculture always left me feeling out in the cold.
It took a long time for me to disentangle my internalized homophobia from my desire to not be steamrolled into conforming to a culture of casual sex that is simply not the sort of sex I desire. It’s why I identify as queer but not as a gay man; I fit in with the gay male subculture about as little as I fit in with the straight male one. Neither are geared to who I really am.
I’ve found the Millennials’ attitudes about sexual orientation to be much more in line with what I view as true liberation, in fact. They are much more likely to see sexual orientation as a multi-dimensional thing, not a simplistic one-dimensional gay/straight/bi axis.
So color me skeptical about the premise that less sexual activity automatically implies more sexual repression. It sounds like precisely the sort of thing an aging Baby Boomer who is clueless about what liberation really means would come up with.
Published at 07:59 on 13 July 2016
Those who most need help finding employment are those new in the market for a particular line of work, either as a result of recently graduating from school or a mid-life career change. But recruiters are hired at the behest of* the employer, and candidates with no experience are common as dirt, meaning employers need no special help in finding same. The candidates employers need help finding are those with specific, specialized experience.
But recruiters lack that experience, too, which seriously limits their ability to judge and match candidates with positions. Moreover, the positions being recruited for tend to pay better than the job of recruiting for them, so this state of affairs is inevitable. Thus if you’re an experienced candidate, recruiters are still of little or no help; they’ll just pester you with false lead after false lead.
I speak from experience here, having at one time been a freshly-minted CS graduate and now being a senior-level programmer. It went from recruiters being uninterested in me to me being uninterested in the (inevitably mismatched) opportuinities recruiters pestered me about.
Given that, is it any surprise that the low road dominates in the recruiting industry? Why seek people with any knowledge at all to recruit in a field? Just hire the cheapest workers in India you can find, even if they can barely speak coherent English.† They’re fated to do a bad job anyhow, so why even try? After all, doing a good job isn’t the point. Your business model is based on both candidate and employer making an unwise decision (i.e. to use you), not on providing value to either.
This leaves out the recruiters hired by busy employers whose staffing departments are themselves understaffed, of course. But when sleaze dominates an industry, the odds aren’t good. So if I see a recruiting agency’s name on a job listing, I pass. And when one cold calls me and leaves a voice mail, I just delete the message.
* Note I did not write “paid by”. That is because they are not. To claim otherwise is to state what I call the Recruiter Lie. Does anyone think employers have an unlimited orchard of money trees to harvest for paying wages and salaries? Of course not! They budget those costs, and the cost for paying recruiters ultimately comes out of the same pot for paying wages and salaries. One will come at the expense of the other.
† Which, given they are the cheapest, will be the case; competent English speakers will seek more honorable and better-paying work.
Published at 16:23 on 9 July 2016
Recently, it happened yet again. One of my old banes, canker sores, materialized.
Those who don’t suffer them don’t understand how bad they can be. The weeks of lost sleep due to the pain is probably the worst of it. Over the years, I’ve discovered various ways of both minimizing the chances of their happening* and the pain once they do.
But that’s not a complete solution. Recently I heard about honey showing promise as a treatment, so I decided to give that a try. I was a bit skeptical: wipe the sore clean and dry, then briefly apply honey after each meal, that’s it? The exposure to honey for a under a minute several times a day can do that much?
But darned if it didn’t seem to actually work. Of course, it’s only one trial, so it could all be nothing but coincidence. Time will tell, but as of this stage it seems promising enough to be worth reporting about.
* Which means finding out which sorts of foods cause allergies to trigger the sores, then avoiding them. Plus, avoiding toothpaste that contains sodium laurel suplhate has helped.
Published at 19:38 on 27 May 2016
Well, I’ve done it. I now have a land line after a little over 10 years of being cell-phone only. Two things precipitated this decision:
We’ll see how long this option lasts. Traditional analog twisted-pair landlines are slowly dying out, and that’s what I just got. Reason is that the electric power here is unreliable, and I don’t want a cable or IP phone that depends on some piece of equipment somewhere that in turn depends on commercial power. With plain old telephone service I can use a phone powered by the battery plant in the central office.
It would be a shame if I eventually had to settle for something less reliable, but it may come to that. It wouldn’t be the first time a less reliable new technology has eclipsed a more reliable older one. (Just think of all those fidgety electronic soap dispensers, faucets, and towel dispensers in public restrooms.)
Published at 13:15 on 15 May 2016
Yes, I was there for the action. I left early because yesterday I woke with a cold and felt the need to get back home and rest. I wasn’t planning on being arrested anyhow; my role was more of a support one. Which I did.
Given how I fell asleep at 7:30 last night and didn’t get up until 6:30 this morning and have been napping all day, I would say my assessment that I needed to get home and rest was a correct one.
Published at 08:21 on 13 May 2016
Published at 17:55 on 4 April 2016
The title of this post describes my current job. It’s still going strong, as far as my boss is concerned (so far as I can tell), but it’s winding down so far as I am concerned, and I plan to announce this to my boss at tomorrow’s regularly-scheduled meeting.
When I took it, I had my qualms that it might not be the best of matches. The screening process contained a surprising amount of front end Javascript questions (such coding is not my strong suit). Plus the more I heard about it, the more I had doubts the position could furnish the sort of engrossing challenges I need. I mentioned these concerns and was assured that my impressions were incorrect.
The past six months have served to convince me that I was in fact correct. It’s getting to the point where I dread new assignments. It’s clearly time to start thinking about moving on if things can’t change dramatically (and I frankly doubt they can).
The only real question is what kind of ending can be worked out, which largely depends on their needs (if they only or mostly have a need for someone to do the sort of work I regard as unpleasant drudgery, the end will come sooner rather than later).