Some people laughed at Kevin Costner testifying before congress that he had a solid way to separate the oil from the water in the gulf. They’re not so much laughing now.

It makes me think of my former boss, Calvin. Calvin was an inventor that made most of his money off the patents. Well, he made money off of engineering and fabrication, but the only reason people hired him to build things was because he was the only person that could make his inventions. Though a man of many flaws, he was (is) a genius.

One of the things that he had been working on was a mechanism to prevent flooding in Colosse. Colosse is particularly prone to flooding, particularly when a hurricane or tropical storm hits. He claims to have figured out a system that, if implemented, would prevent the vast majority of flooding in the city. Furthermore, he wasn’t actually looking to make any money off this invention. He was trying to work through his alma mater, Southern Tech University, and all of the proceeds would have gone to their engineering department. While it’s possible that his plan would not have worked, he very much believed that it would.

But over and over again, he found that nobody (except Southern Tech) was really interested in his ideas. Then-mayor Ron Washington was mostly just interested in digging more ditches and other things that, according to Calvin, only really worked when the flood was never going to be a real problem. It’s all somewhat beyond me, but outside Southern Tech nobody gave it a hearing despite there being millions upon millions of dollars at stake and the city still recovering from Hurricane Adrianne.

Maybe it would have been better if he had been trying to make money off of it because they he might have lobbied Mayor Washington with money (as the contractors for the ditches were surely doing) and that might have worked. Maybe there was some devastating technical flaw that made it unworkable despite the various simulations and tests that were run. Maybe he’s just the wrong messenger, being something of a nut in some respects. Maybe if its website actually worked. Who knows?

Does how popular you were in high school affect how much money you make later in life?

The answer is an affirmative. Causality is hard to determine for sure. The initial response of skeptics is that it has to do with extroversion, but they found no effect on the basis of gregariousness. That makes sense. Nerds and introverts make too much of the role of introversion in popularity. Some people are very extroverted and very annoying. Some people that are unpopular that people think are introverted really just won’t shut up when they’re in a position where everything they say will be used against them.

I think that it comes down to social confidence and charisma. People that are used to getting what they want from other people ask for more and in turn get more. The charisma that comes with popularity is always a career-helper. There is also the matter that some of the things that make one popular can also help one make good grades, which can have a cascading effect on future earnings. Sorta.

A couple disturbing posts in the Huffington Post. The first is a trend among headhunters to be expressly uninterested in applicants that do not already have a job:

In a current job posting on The People Place, a job recruiting website for the telecommunications, aerospace/defense and engineering industries, an anonymous electronics company in Angleton, Texas, advertises for a “Quality Engineer.” Qualifications for the job are the usual: computer skills, oral and written communication skills, light to moderate lifting. But red print at the bottom of the ad says, “Client will not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason.”

In a nearly identical job posting for the same position on the Benchmark Electronics website, the red print is missing. But a human resources representative for the company confirmed to HuffPost that the The People Place ad accurately reflects the company’s recruitment policies.

What more can you say, really?

I’m tempted to go off on these employers for unfair discrimination against many people that lost jobs through absolutely no fault of their own, but they’re simply doing what makes sense to them. Some of the fault may lie with the unemployed community itself. The problem appears to be less that that they think such people are unsuitable for employment and more that unemployed applicants are simply flooding HR positions for any and every available job. That’s what they say, anyway. I think it’s at least partially true. I know that when you are unemployed and desperate their is the tendency to interpret job requirements very liberally. If you’re collecting unemployment, there is a chance that you have to in order not to be cut off.

A positive (the only positive?) way of looking at this, perhaps, is to compare it to something even worse. What drove me crazy back in the last recession was spending a half an hour filling out an application for a job only to be told at the end of it that they may or may not get back to me. In The World According to Will Truman, when you fill the position you send a cursory email to everyone that didn’t get the job. Oddly, they seemed to be better about this last year when I was looking for work and the economy was even in worse shape.

The second article points out that an unprecedented number of unemployed folks are long-term unemployed:

The proportion of people jobless for six months or more has accelerated in the past year and now makes up 46 percent of the unemployed. That’s the highest percentage on records dating to 1948. By late summer or early fall, they are expected to make up half of all jobless Americans.

Economists say those out of work for six months or more risk becoming less and less employable. Their skills can erode, their confidence falter, their contacts dry up. Their growing ranks also will keep pressure on Congress to keep extending jobless benefits, which now run for up to 99 weeks.

This goes back to my fear of unemployment being an acceptable fact of life for young people. That’s not just bad for young people and the economy, I think it’s bad for the spirit of a nation that has historically identified with work and a nation for which this has been a strong point. But you can’t blame people for taking jobs that aren’t there. You can always point to the convenience stores and whatnot that are hiring. While it’s true that as long as there are some jobs available people should not get too used to being unemployed because they’re “too good” for the jobs that are available… but at this point I am not convinced that even if every last one of those jobs was taken up there wouldn’t still be unemployed people left over.

There was recently some news about unemployment numbers that looked good at first glance. 430k new jobs! Woohoo! This qualifies for good news these days! Then, of course, we find out that 410k of those jobs are temporary Census Bureau positions like the one that I hold. But that’s still a lot of jobs and maybe we shouldn’t be so picky!! They’re being put to work doing something important!! But maybe not:

The inspector general’s memo said that the Census Bureau had “overestimated” the staff needed for the program to enumerate people at transitory locations. “During the ETL operation,” said the memo, “crew leaders overestimated the number of Census staff needed to enumerate transitory locations, thus increasing the cost of operations.”

The memo also said that there were so many people hired for the “service-based enumeration” that there turned out to be one Census enumerator for every seven homeless people counted, and that the inspector general’s office “observed significant periods of enumerator inactivity at certain locations.”

Okay, well at least people are getting paid just a little to take on a fraction of a job. That’s not all bad, right?

Then you start hearing that even that is skewed because the Census is hiring people just to lay them off and in some cases rehire them.

As you all know, I work for the Census Bureau as a courier. My job is to drive in a big loop of 150 miles or so. I can’t complain about how much I am being paid to do so. Beats sitting around the house for free. I’ve driven my route maybe two dozen times. Want to know how many times I actually delivered something? Well, 20 or so of that 24 times. Okay, want to know how many times I delivered (or received) something other than my pay sheet from the previous day? Two. And in one of those two cases, it turned out that the person I was supposed to deliver them to quit and so it went straight back to Alexandria.

So in essence, I have been getting paid to deliver my own pay sheets. I figure it to be a part of that front-loading that the article above mentioned. I also thought that, “Well, if they’re willing to pay me to do this, business is surely going to pick up at some point, right?” Eventually I resigned myself to “Well, I could quit, but they’d just hire somebody else to do it.”

I’ve also heard rumors of cases as is being discussed here. Specifically, they separate out the census-taking in waves. So the same person gets laid off after one wave and then replaced by a newhire a week later. Makes the job numbers look good at any rate.

Regular readers will remember FIREA, the Forward Intelligence Resource Employment Agency. They’re the former employer that threatened to blackball employees if they didn’t accept their reneging on their contract. After my employment there ended, they proceeded to play games with with my accrued vacation/sick pay so that they could get my unemployment terminated on grounds of fraud. Then they changed insurance administration agencies, leaving us temporarily uninsured during the changeover (though retroactively insured once the changeover was complete. And they prevented me from getting my old job back at Mindstorm unless it was through them (which, because of the above, I would have been disinclined to do even if I hadn’t been about to move - though, in their defense, they were within their rights and it was in the contract that I signed and unlike them, I don’t get to change provisions of the contract and then take a pound of flesh if they don’t accept them).

Well, now they’re at it again. I got a letter a couple months back from a company claiming to represent them announcing that they were doing an audit of insurance benefits. They would be auditing suspicious accounts to make sure that the dependents were eligible. Well, what do you know, we are being audited. So now I am going to have to dig up some tax forms or a marriage certificate to prove that Clancy and I are in fact married. If we can’t demonstrated it, we are once again guilty of that F-word. Fraud.

Of course we can prove it. It’s just a real inconvenience having just moved and still not knowing where everything is.

The whole thing at first struck me as bizarre because I am rather positive that they have made money on us. We’re not good rescission candidates. We didn’t get cancer and we’re not insured through them anymore so even if we did get cancer they would not be on the hook for it. However, looking at the documentation more closely, they don’t want to cancel me. They want to just cancel her policy. It’s possible that they lost money specifically on her (while they made enough on me to compensate for the both of us). I’m sure someone somewhere ran the numbers. The F-word is probably just leverage to get me to quickly admit that I am up to something (if I am) and then rescind her policy. At which point, we would have to pay for all the health care she has availed herself of minus what we’ve paid in premiums. It might be worth it if we could retroactively cancel my policy, too, but obviously that wouldn’t work for them. And it probably wouldn’t work for me, either, since it would open me up to a PEC problem.

My first day was relatively uneventful. I had to leave at a particular time and of course got a call five minutes beforehand asking if I could pick something up to take up to Ridge. I made it out in time and indeed got to drive 10mph below the speed limit the whole way with twenty minutes to spare. They apparently give us a lot of time to get there. The twenty minutes turned into forty-five because the guy I was meeting was late. As it happened, there was another guy at this particular government installation who was waiting for his wife’s ex-husband to drop off his kid for the weekend. We chatted a bit and I fiddled with my phone.

I was a bit more pressed for time on the road to Bass, so I actually drove the speed limit there. I would have considered driving faster, but the roads were twisty-turney and it required driving through Redstone County, which has some pretty aggressive traffic enforcement. When driving through on my way to Alexandria last week, they had a speed limit drop straight from 75mph to 35mph for a construction zone. Cops were of course waiting right behind the hill where the speed limit falls. They are obviously very concerned about public safety, though there were no construction people for the first two miles of the Orange Cone Zone. It’s not the only time I’ve noticed Redstone’s penchant for making the road ways safe. The four or so times we’ve driven through it, I’ve seen more cops on the side of the road for that county than all of the other Arapaho counties I’ve driven through combined.

Living in a smaller town means getting used to earlier bed times and close times. Only one of the four convenience stores in Callie is 24-hour (one closes at midnight, one at 10, and the main one at 9(!!). There is a gas station and a convenience store in Bass. One closes at 6 and the other at 5. Fortunately, I got to the former and got an ice cream sandwich to soothe my aching throat. Unfortunately, when I went back to get some milk to wash it down, I discovered their closing time. No more convenience stores until my eventual return to Callie. My Bass contact never showed, so I ended up waiting there for an hour.

I got lost getting out of Bass. How I can get lost with a GPS in a town of something like three square blocks is truly a talent of mine. Well, “lost” may be an exaggeration. I just couldn’t figure out which road I was supposed to go down for the direct route back to Callie. The GPS wanted me to go back through Ridge. The estimated time it gave me for what I thought was the road was twice as long as it should have been, leaving me to believe I was heading down the wrong path. Turned out the GPS thinks something is up with that road because it was the right way and just driving the speed limit had me knocking a minute or two off my ETA every minute or two. I am wondering if maybe it includes inclement weather in its estimations because it does not strike me as the type of road that would be a really high priority for the plows. Alternately, maybe it assumes you’re going to get stuck behind a slow driver.

Garrison was not in the cards today. I called Alexandria to find out the number of my contact in Garrison. When I called said Garrison contact, she told me she had nothing but might have something for me tomorrow. So I went straight back to Callie and that was more-or-less my day.

Cell phone reception was as expected. There was some iffy service between Callie and Ridge. At least I assume so because the phone never rang and I had a message waiting for me when I got to Ridge (the guy saying he was going to be late). I gave the Bureau my Google Voice number because I didn’t know what my new cell phone would be. The good news is that I get the transcribed message. The bad news is that listening to the actual message is more of a hassle than it would have been if I’d just given them my regular number. Reception went out on my way to Bass and never came back, preventing me from calling the woman who stood me up. It came back up about 15 miles outside of Callie. So I am out of reach for most of my trip.

The audio entertainment was finishing up the BBC production of Terry Pratchett’s “Guards! Guards!” The audiobook was better. Either they changed up the plot or there were some things I definitely missed the first time around. I find that I don’t listen quite as closely to Pratchett as I do other audiobooks. In fact, I am most inclined to put Pratchett in when I am not in the mood to have to follow every word. He goes off on a lot of tangents. Some of them are really quite humorous, though I find if I think I missed something funny and go back, it’s sort of like having a joke explained to you. Not as funny.

After finishing that I moved on to the fourth Jason Bourne novel. I knew that the original author, Robert Ludlum, died and the Bourne books were being written by somebody else. I didn’t realize, though, that Ludlum only wrote three of them. This is the first not-Ludlum one. Honestly, I may like the new guy better. Less melodramatic. This audiobook was done by a different company and so the voice actor is different. In fact, it was done by the same company that did the Ender audiobooks and one of the various narrators of those books is the narrator of this one. It’s kind of confusing. Then again, a similarity in narrator style had me thinking of Ender while listening to Barack Obama’s autobiography despite the fact that the voice actor does not remotely sound like Barack Obama. So I guess I’m easily confused.

In the end, I got paid over a hundred bucks to deliver two envelopes. One of which was an employment document originating from me. Your tax dollars at work.

When I was a younger lad, I knew this girl named Cheryl Krater. She was nothing to write home about it. She was pretty chunky, mean as an ox, and curiously and unbelievably somewhat popular.

I never really understood it. She wasn’t even mean in a charismatic way. She was mean in a just plain mean way. She thought she was better than everyone except her friends, but somehow she ran with the “in” crowd and always had a lot of people around her (rarely boys, though).

When I was in high school, there was a girl named Candace Lambert. Candace’s date to the prom (who was a mildly overweight schlub and nothing to brag about and beneath the generally affable Candace - the picture at the top of this post is a crude approximation of their respective presence and the mismatch) was unceremoniously arrested. Though he got out in time to go to prom, she had to scramble for a date at the last minute. He refused to go with her because, he told people, she was kind of a “b*tch about the whole thing”. I don’t know if she succeeded in finding another date or not.

Then of course, there was my high school friend Mick. Mick was a self-centered, racist, uncharismatic oaf. When it came time for prom, he never did get a date. He ended up watching rentals with his parents that night.

I mention Mick, Candace, and Cheryl because they all tie in with the last job I ever had in Colosse at a company called Bregna.

I had been unemployed for nearly five months by that point. All that time, there’d been an employer that I was pretty sure would hire me. I was always reluctant to ever mention it to anybody because I could imagine them thinking that I was unserious about my job hunt if there was a job for the taking. I didn’t have to keep quiet among IT people, though. They all knew of Bregna.

Bregna would have hired me because they always had a deficit of employees. They always had a deficit of employees because they scare them off like an old lady in a witch hat does preschoolers. By some estimations, nearly one in three IT people in the Colosse area (a very large pool of people) worked for Bregna at one time or another or at least resigned themselves to interviewing there.

To say that they’re anal is an understatement. I had worked for odd people before. Bregna was a category unto itself, though. Bregna monitors just about everything you do. Every four months you have to do an in-depth self-appraisal and if your appraisal is insufficient, you will be canned.

It’s as steril as the IMF headquarters in the Mission Impossible movie.

Here’s the thing, though: They pay. They pay well, all things considered. I needed something that pays well, if only for a little while.

So I decided to apply for a job with Bregna. My roommate turned in a referral (to give you an idea of how desperate they are for warm bodies, they give him $1500 if I work there for over four months) and then… nothing. I call them back and ask the status, they say they’ll call me and then… nothing.

I didn’t feel rejected or anything. It took them a whopping 5 interviews and six weeks to hire my roommate. But when I talked to my roommate Karl about it, he said that I’d have to pester them.

So I would have to beg for a job I have absolutely no excitement for with a company that I knew would make me miserable.

That’s what got me thinking about Candace, Cheryl, and Mick. The only analogy I could come up with was putting myself in Candace’s shoes, where you have high standards (which she did, her date notwithstanding) but because of a certain situation, she had to lower them drastically to find someone. Then I think of Mick, who never lowered his expectation and watched videos on prom night.

I think of myself in Candace’s shoes, scrambling for a date - any date! - and having to lower my expectations and taking back the guy who had a stint in jail or spending the night at home watching videos.

Then I thought of Cheryl.

It felt like I’d been dumped right before prom, and that I had to find a date - any date! - to avoid digging into my savings when unemployment runs out. The only people I could get a job with is Bregna, the only date I could get is the guy that went to jail. The alternative was brokedness and watching videos on prom night. It felt like I was reduced to asking Cheryl Krater, that annoying wench of a girl (and anyone that knows me knows I don’t use those words loosely), to go to prom with me to avoid the fate of Mick.

But I did anyway. I applied. Again.

But having applied, having not heard back, and being informed that I was going to need to pester them, made me feel like I had reduced myself to asking out Cheryl Krater and to which she responded, “You know I will probably go with you to prom,” followed by, “But you’re going to have to beg.”

Are geeks driving women away from IT? LiveScience thinks so and has a study to back it up. Different industries have different cultures and I can certainly believe that geek culture is off-putting to a lot of women. Indeed, the article cites it as a possible reason for the gender disparity within IT. Some people are tempted to chalk up the disparity totally to biology. While biology may play a role, I think that’s a mistake. Part of the decision of what to undertake a career is who you will be spending time with. Any workplace dominated by people of a particular persuasion, including gender, is likely to be less hospitable to people that break the mold. This is true in groupings outside of gender and also true in both male-dominated and female-dominated work places. And it’s true in male-dominated work places of the blue collar and white collar varieties, though it can be true for different reasons.

It all brings to light the question of whether or not it’s true that geek culture drives women away from IT, which I think is true, and more importantly the question of what can be done about it. On that point, I think the answer is “not much.” To my great relief, the article suggested at the end that the issue may not be the geek objects that were putting off the women but rather the female perception of the objects. Change the perception and you can make headway on the issue. There’s nothing inherently masculine about a lot of it. My response to that is… “You’re absolutely right… but good luck.”

Changing cultural perceptions of Star Trek or gaming systems is not a particularly easy task. Particularly since, for reasons pertaining to biology or something else, it really is guys that are interested in these things. But that’s not all that’s at issue here. It’s not just that it’s “masculine” stuff. Indeed, I would question if it qualifies as “masculine” stuff because they tend to be associated with the sorts of guys that are, shall we say, not masculine in the testosterone-addled traditional sense. A World of Warcraft poster and a New York Giants poster send two different messages. While it’s possible that women will be off-put by a work place dominated with either of them, my guess is that the former is more off-putting (and not without reason).

In its own way, anti-geek discrimination makes sense. Women that don’t want to work with geeky guys would do well not to work at places where desks have Warhammer figuring collections n them. It’s one of those cases where a message is sent and a message is received.

Which brings me to my fear when I read articles like this (sans the last few paragraphs). If it’s determined that the problem is the “masculine” objects and the solution is not to change the perceptions of these objects, I’m afraid the solution will be to kill the messenger. In this case, I mean “take down that poster!” That’s honestly where I feared this article was heading.

There are reasons for a workplace to ask its employees to keep office decorations to a minimum and I guess that’s fair (depending on the reason). Further, there are things that no office should allow because they will be perceived as offensive or distasteful by even quite reasonable people. My fear is that where this is all headed is a bridging the two concerns into something that that makes my stomach turn. The notion that decorations that are merely off-putting will be considered a special light sort of offensive. In other words, in order to please hypothetical women that might be interested in IT, pressure will be applied to sterilize the workplace. Not of all decorations, but of ones that might be off-putting to the hypothetical women. Realistically, the result will be curbing office decorations as a whole.

I see this as problematic not because it isn’t an employer’s right to do so, but honestly because I don’t consider it a particularly good idea. It’s one of those things that gives comfort to petty little management exertions of authority. Allowing employees to wave their geek flag allows the employees you already have to feel more comfortable. Forcing them to take that flag down saves the company not a penny and favors potential employees that don’t exist over the ones that you are relying on to contribute to your bottom line.

Further, even if you force geeks to not fly their flag so high, all you’re doing is taking away the signaling mechanism. They’ll discover that they work with a bunch of geeks eventually. In fact, it probably won’t take long at all. So consider the anime scroll on the wall something like Truth in Advertising.

Except the coke cans. You can make them toss those.

Last week I had a job interview in Arapaho. Clancy noticed that they were hiring a position in my general field. She doesn’t know a whole lot about what my field is except that it’s computer-related. Looking over the job, it’s basically an entry-level desktop support position. A little below my pay-grade… except that it pays quite well. Maybe a little less or possibly quite a bit more than I left Mindstorm making, in fact. So I decided to apply.

Then… nothing. I was a little puzzled not even to receive a call back. I sent them an email again letting them know I was in Arapaho and eligible for interviews if they were interested. Partially I wrote them to tell them that, but partially I wrote just in case my application fell through the cracks. I got a call and an email that day. Apparently, I left a bum phone number on the application.

Just in case there was an interview, I brought down varying degrees of interviewing attire: a suit, a colored dress shirt, slacks, and sufficiently uncomfortable dress shoes. I overlooked something pretty crucial, though: my suit doesn’t fit. It fit, more-or-less, forty pounds ago. Back then, the suit was a bit too big and the pants a bit too small, but it was close enough. Not so much now. So I had to figure out whether it was better to wear a suit that didn’t fit or a shirt and tie that did. After seeking counsel, I decided on the latter. Fortuitously, I had a shirt that fit perfectly. I had previously overlooked it because it has been too small since heaven knows when, but now it’s just about right. This is a particularly good thing since the other shirts are a mish-mash or white, gray, and yellow.

I’ve resolved to do some shopping.

The interview went pretty well. Their main concern seemed to be that I was drastically overqualified for the position. That didn’t bother me, though the lack of advancement opportunities did a bit. I could be the lowest man on the totem pole for quite some time. But it’s still a job and it’s in my field and it’s in town and it pays reasonably well. Except out of charity, I can’t justify not making an offer.

It’s funny how you get asked variations of the same questions over and over on interviews and can still fail to properly rehearse the answers. In this case I was asked about some big mistake I made and what I did to make it right. After an unduly long pause, I came up with a big mistake I made early in my career (which I could attribute to my youth) and a trivial mistake more made at my last job.

It sounds like they have quite a few applicants and they may well decide to go with someone a bit younger that they won’t worry about being bored. And honestly, I might prefer that they do that. It’s an odd sort of feeling that if I take this job I am really taking it away from someone else. Someone that may need the money more. We don’t need the money that badly. The tax men themselves say so since income taxes on my earnings will approach 40%. The hard-arse right-winger in me says that I would rather get paid less or not work than have Uncle Sam (and Uncle Buckaroo) take so much of what I make. The squishy liberal in me has odd ethical hesitation about taking a job that someone else needs more. Enough to turn down the job? That seems extraordinarily unlikely. But enough to whine about it on this site.

There were two rounds of interviews. Everyone there knew who my wife was. I suspect that helps, but I don’t know how much. Not sure when I’ll be hearing back.

Right before I left Mindstorm, my then-boss Shayen and I had our one-on-one exit interview. He told me that he was sorry to see me go and that I should definitely come back. That much I expected. Less expected was when he told me that when I do come back I should apply for a full time position because they are better than contracting positions. Well yeah, I told myself, but a position is only better if you actually get it and my chances of getting a full-time spot seemed pretty low. I had been surrounded by people that were on their second, third, and fourth contracts. Typically, it seems like the pattern is that you do two one-year tours and then you get a permanent contract placement and only then do you get any sort of consideration for a full-time position unless you bring very specific skills or prestige to the table.

But I nodded and smiled as Shayen told me all of this. It felt good that he seemed to have such confidence in me. Particularly since his group was not itself hiring any software testers. They were moving towards hiring a smaller number of development testers and away from having an army of software tester grunts. He told me to look into lab operator positions and the like because my position was being phased out. He gave me some names of people to contact when my mandatory 3-month vacation was over. It was something of a moot point because I was going to be leaving the Zaulem area, but he didn’t know that.

Flash forward to last week. Out of the blue, I got an email from Shayen asking about my availability. He wasn’t asking me to come in an interview, but rather wanted to make me a genuine offer. For a full-time position at Mindstorm. Apparently, either my position hadn’t been retired or he had something else in mind for me. On top of that, he actually said that even if I found other employment he was optimistic that they could make me a better offer. This was, of course, the day after I had dropped off Clancy’s employment contract for Arapaho.

So on one hand, I feel extremely honored to have been offered a position that seemed unthinkable to me a few months ago. On the other hand, it made what I was walking away from in Cascadia something a lot bigger than it was. I really liked working for Mindstorm. I liked working for Shayen. I was pleased with the work I did there.

Of course, I might not should feel too honored. It’s possible that there was yet another shift in emphasis. The first indication of this I got was when my mandatory vacation was up and Shayen contacted my contracting agency about bringing me back. So apparently they did need grunt testers. But still, that was a contract position. I half expected to get another one of those offers. That was why I terminated my unemployment insurance a few weeks earlier, so I wouldn’t be in a position where I needed to take it. This was a full-time position. My chance to not only be at Mindstorm, but as something better than a second-class citizen.

Of course, I still might not should feel too honored. It’s possible that Mindstorm is shifting away from contractors and so maybe there are a lot of people like me getting unexpected interviews and offers. Or maybe I just hitched my wagon to the right star. Maybe Shayen just happened to get promoted into one of the few positions that had hiring authority for full-time positions. That’s as much luck as skill.

Meh. I choose to feel honored.

It helps to feel honored when you’re unemployed.

I applied for the position at Wildcat on Monster.com. I was relatively certain that I wasn’t going to get it, but at three in the morning I sent off an email that was probably barely coherent saying something to the effect of “Hey, yeah, I got experience with Microsoft Access and I could probably look over an office fleet of computers. If you’re interested, give me a call.”

The next day I turned in some fifteen job applications to Southern Tech University for various tech positions and a couple clerk ones. I had also interviewed twice for a position with Worldtower, a well-respected company in the area that a couple years later would live in infamy, but at the time was was known for extraordinary pay and being an interesting and challenging place to work.

Between the Southern Tech, which would have been a great place to work because I liked the university, and Worldtower, which would have paid me very well and was always hiring entry level people, I didn’t really give Wildcat another thought. In fact, by the next evening when they called, I’d forgotten applying at all. In fact, I was so sure that they were UH that I wasn’t really paying attention when the nice woman started giving me directions and had to ask her to repeat them. I briefly wondered why Sotech had an office on the outskirts of town.

I had night class at the time and my cell phone went off during class. I’d forgotten to turn it off because no one ever really called me at night and the only person who might have was spending the evening with her father, so I was relatively certain she wouldn’t. It being past seven o’clock, it didn’t even occur to me that a potential employer might call.

When Nancy first began speaking to me for some reason I assumed that she was with Southern Tech. It wasn’t until she gave me the address that I realized that there was some strange company with an odd name that for some reason wanted to hire me. My self-esteem on the job hunt was not so high. I’d been unemployed for eight months and nobody was particularly interested in me. It was the equivalent of the wallflower being invited to the senior prom.

I got to the Wildcat offices about fifteen minutes early and was greeted by a very pleasant and nice woman named Edith. Edith gave me the application which I furiously began filling out. When I finished, I was directed to a computer in the back corner office where I took a DOS-based psychological profile program on a 486/25MHz Packard Bell computer that they still use to this day for various tasks.

As soon as I finished it began printing out. After about ten minutes or so of waiting, I was introduced to Calvin and brought into his office for the interview.

“I was looking at your psych profile, and I want you to know that ordinarily I wouldn’t even consider hiring you. It says here that you would spend all day as a social butterfly keeping people from working. It also says that even though you could be detail-oriented, you don’t believe that detail-oriented is a good thing to be. Why don’t you believe that, Mr. Truman?”

I went into self-sale mode. “I think being detail-oriented is important. You have to be able to take your abstract ideas and app-”

“It says here that you don’t think that being detail-oriented is important. Explain to me why.”

“I don’t know why it says I feel that way but I don’t rea-”

“Why would you spend all your time in my office chattering away and not allowing other people to work?”

“I don’t think I would do that at all. I’m really not that social of a per-”

“That’s not what the test says. The test says that all you are going to do is talk and ignore details.”

“I don’t think that test is right…”

“This test was designed by people with PhD’s in psychology. Do you have a PhD is psychology?”

“Well no.”

“Did you lie on the answers? Because if this was designed by experts and the results are wrong, you must have lied.”

“I… uh… well….”

“It says on your job application that you’re willing to work for $10 an hour.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Some idiot came in last week wanted $60,000 a year and you’re willing to work for $10 an hour?”

I didn’t mention that the job had advertised for $50,000 a year (which was why I didn’t believe I’d get the job and a reason that I forgot about it promptly after applying because nobody was going to hire me for $50,000 a year). Instead, I just said “I want to work. I’m tired of not working.” I was trying to fake having a work ethic.

“So you’ll take this job for a couple of months until something better comes along and then you’ll leave it and I’ll have to go through all of the trouble of finding someone new?”

“Sir, if I like the job I’ll take less pay to do so. I’ve passed higher paying opportunities before because I liked where I was working.”

“No, the economy is going to pick back up and you’re going to get a better job offer and I’m going to have to find someone else.”

“I really don’t think-”

“Can I be frank with you?”

“Uhhhh, sure.”

“You want to work here so that you can gab away and distract everybody and ignore details so you can just pad your resume and leave. Is there a single reason why I should hire you?”

By this point I was about ready to just walk out the door. It was obvious that he wasn’t going to hire me, so what was the point?

“Do you do drugs?”

“What?”

“You don’t do drugs, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Come with me,” he requested as he took me into the Nancy’s office. He then, with me standing right there, told Nancy to inform me that I got the job and to start Monday at 8am.That’s how I found out that I got the job. When Nancy asked about whether or not I had to take the drug test first, he explained that they were in a crunch and “Mr. Truman has assured me that he does not do drugs. We’ll take his word for it. Set up a test for sometime next week.”

In this post, Sheila evinces her pain at being called at by random people in the courthouse who think they can get her attention.

Working IT at Southern Tech University is a similar experience. We are given, oftentimes, a set of contradictory “instructions” from the clueless types on-high. To wit: “Be out there” and “Be visible.” If a help ticket is filed, my boss “prefers” that we go meet the person face to face (even when the issue is to be responded to with simple, sometimes yes-or-no, answer or is something that we need to resolve on the server end).

The problem with this is that we have a help ticket system for a reason. We need, REALLY need, for the users to, well, use it. We need to train them to use it. And so we are caught between a rock and a hard place. If we send an email back on the issues, we run the risk of being seen as “distant” or “unapproachable.” If we go out to their offices for every little thing, on the other hand, we can be almost certain that at least 3 people in the same office will pop their heads up, or worse yet hear “Oh the IT guy is here, great I’ll run out and bug him”, and all of a sudden while dealing with one issue we are being told about 5-6 other things that the users are sure “will just take a minute.”

The downside to this is: the performance of the low-level guys is tracked using the help system. If it’s not in the system, our boss doesn’t know about it. If it’s not in the system, they don’t get credit for it. If we tell the people “well we’re busy and working on things in sequence, so you’ll need to put it into the system” we get whiny and/or accusatory emails instead from them to their department chairs about how we are “uncooperative”, “unhelpful”, “not doing their jobs” for insisting they adhere to policy and actually put their requests into the system.

Also, the low-level guys are usually busy enough as it is. The “just take a minute” things never really take just a minute, and then they get some screaming nincompoop elsewhere in the building sending off an email about how they “took way too long” to respond because they were… wait for it… dealing with all the “just a minute” crap that wasn’t in the system.

So on the one hand, if we deal with what we can “remotely” (via email or server side) before going face-to-face, we can actually get our damn jobs done, but we’re not “visible.” If, on the other hand, we go out there for every single little thing, then we spend far too much time dealing with unscheduled crap AND the users learn that they can get away with not holding up their end of the bargain on using the help system. Then, when we are really backed up or dealing with something serious, they start bugging us when we’ve got our fingers inside something and really need to concentrate on the task at hand.

We have policies for a reason. My experiences with this crap make me feel for Sheila, truly.

The latest update in the whole question of whether FIREA owns my posterior. For those of you that can’t remember and don’t want to look it up, there was a question as to whether or not I could return to my old job with another contracting agency. Apparently, there was a non-compete clause in my contract for my first tour that would prevent me from using anyone else for up to six months after leaving. So that pretty much settled it. Except that I was sent documentation today that I have to sign giving them the “Exclusive Right to Represent” me in contract negotiations. But… don’t they already have that exclusive right? Why should I need to sign a document to that effect?

Relatedly, the guy from the other employment agency was not deterred by my noncompete clause. On the other hand, if I had been caught ignoring said clause, it wouldn’t necessarily effect them. The “penalty” is 25% of my wages, not that my contract with opposing agency would be void or anything.

It’s all a moot point now, though. I stopped collecting unemployment a couple weeks ago, so they can’t hold that over my head and I’m already telling potential employers (including FIREA) that I am unavailable for new contracts since I’m relocating. But… you know… I am still curious if I’d have had the ability to escape FIREA’s clutches. However moot the point.

A while back, Clint and I were plotting an independent movie script that he and I (and other people he knew) could write. They had a lot of good jokes about the thrift store that they worked at, but no plot. So we would have to come up with a plot. Clint figured that the most natural plot is one that followed his own life (write what you know, of course) regarding a thrift store worker with artistic aspirations and a theme of following your dreams.

That is simply a script that I could never be a part of. Not that there isn’t any merit to following one’s dreams, but the merits of the case are far, far exceeded by the number of stories that follow that plot. Makes sense, when you think about it. Writers are people that in most cases have followed their dreams. Or at least dream of the day that they can get out of the crappy job they have and live the bohemian life of someone that’s paid to dream and produce those dreams. People who think that there is a really, really good counterargument to following one’s own dreams are far less likely to write scripts on that basis.

So, in a way, I saw an opening. So I came up with a plot that followed a different course. Let’s have an artistic clerk who goes from the transformation not from clerk to artist, but from slacker to adult. Whenever this seems to happen in movies, the “adult” usually ends up with a cool job. I outlined an idea about a guy working at the thrift store aiming to get a job at corporate HQ. The job wouldn’t be satisfying in itself, but it would help him provide for his pregnant girlfriend. In my mind, it would also signify the transformation from creative slacker to bonafide adult.

Clint, someone that simply won’t make it anywhere but with his immense musical and creative talents, was unsold. “It’s like you’re saying ‘Screw your dreams.’”

That was, of course, exactly what I was saying. But I saw that it would be impossible to get him on board with that. So I proposed that we give it sort of an ambiguous ending. I decided to life it from the cut ending of Office Space. In the ending of Office Space, Peter Gibbons is working on a construction site and seems to be enjoying himself more than he did as a codemonkey. Good for him and all that. However, in the ending that they cut, his boss comes around asking him to work faster. His boss, of course, bears a striking resemblance to Lumbourgh. In other words, everything has changed but nothing has changed.

So the new ending was that he would get the promotion. He would put his heart and soul into some report that would correct a lot of the problems that he faced as a clerk and would help them make money and so on and so on. And he would deliver this report. And they would come back and lecture him about how it didn’t meet exact specifications. It was double-spaced instead of 1.5 spaced with 1-inch margins instead of .75-inch margins, and it failed to put the trademark symbol after every instance of the company’s name. The same sort of crap he faced as a clerk. But then he would go home and be with his girlfriend and would realize that a job is a job and there’s simply more to life than that.

He expressed the idea to his friends and they absolutely hated it. And so the proposal died.

Which is a shame, in my book. Not least of which because I thought (even in its diluted form) it would have made a point too infrequently made in film and art in general. Most “coming of age” stories seem to involve sex or marriage. Few involve unpleasant employment as a fact of life. Few reinforce the point that unpleasant employment can still lead to a pleasant life if one finds fulfillment outside of work. To be honest, the number of jobs that provide true fulfillment are so few and the queues to get those jobs so many that they usually pay crap. I’m not saying that people should take jobs that they abhor, but I think that part of being an adult is determining what, precisely, is acceptable. And that taking a job that is merely “acceptable” is not a complete betrayal of oneself but a component of adulthood. There really is something to be said for designing transmissions or writing code for some minuscule component of some software for a huge company during the day and then going home to a wife (who is likely also going out there and doing something acceptable) and some kids and enjoying a relatively debt-free and comfortable life that affords you the opportunities to find fulfillment elsewhere.

Sometimes I do wonder if I take it to far. There certainly are some people, like Clint, who may have the intelligence to do more but simply don’t have the drive to do anything that doesn’t involve music. If I had a son like that, I might rub both of us raw trying to get them to do something practical when it may not actually be in their best interest. The stereotypical father that demands that his father be a doctor software engineer. Or maybe not. When I look at what I would have done differently from his parents, I would more likely have nudged him to stick with music education so that he would at least have something to fall back on. Or, if he just couldn’t do anything that didn’t involve the creation of music, send him off to a vocational school so that he would have more practical skills than his music composition degree got him. So I’m not completely tone-deaf.

This all reminds me a bit of one of the fundamental differences between Clancy and myself. With the exception of dreams of moving to New York City to become a comic book writer, I’ve never put a whole lot of thought into what kind of career I would fulfill me. My father never cared much for his job and I think I viewed that somewhat as a fact of life. I knew that whatever happiness I derived would more likely be from a happy family life and the ability to follow my creative pursuits on my own time.

Clancy, on the other hand, always intended to follow her dreams of a fulfilling job and was very averse to ever expecting her happiness to be derived primarily or solely from having a husband and kids. In the same way that I didn’t want to follow my creative dreams when I could have absolutely no assurances that it would happen, she felt that finding the right husband and having kids were not something that she could rely on, though she could certainly rely on her intelligence and work ethic enough to make a career in the competitive field of medicine.

Of course, there’s a difference between “following your dreams” to try to become a doctor and following them to try to become a musician. While nothing is assured, the path to being a doctor is at least straightforward. You do certain things and you will become a doctor. Becoming a successful musician relies on talent but also connections and a good deal of luck. And of course a moderately successful doctor makes a lot more than a moderately successful musician.

But even the clear path with moderate wealth at the end of it, wanting to become a doctor is a risky proposition where if you fail you can be worse off for having tried. I think of a former peer of hers that made it all the way to residency and then couldn’t cut it there and so she was (I’m assuming) left with a whole lot of debt and not nearly as much money-making potential. My brother Oliver set out to be a veterinarian and ended up with a pre-vet degree that didn’t do him much good. Then again, he is a professional database engineer and does on a day-to-day basis what I did all the right things to become but fell short. So who’s to say?

If there is an overall point to all of this, it’s that there is limited utility in following your dreams against long odds. Artist-types that make movies and write songs (don’t get me started on all the songs out there about how rewarding it is to be a musician) won’t tell you that. They won’t help you succeed and they won’t help you land if you fail. Meanwhile, that jerk that points out that there are bills to be paid and this jerk that wants to make a movie about screwing your dreams sometimes are just trying to get you to avoid making an idealistic mistake.

Sheila called it. I have a no-compete contract that would prevent me from going to any other employment agency. The wording is in legalese and not entirely easy to understand. The rules are also not frequently enforced. But in a case like this, I am relatively certain that they would be. I don’t think that they would be able to enforce it to the extent that I couldn’t sign on to Mindstorm with any other contractor, but since this appears to be the exact same job, I would be offering a service in competition with them. I actually remember the clause in question because I asked my handler about it. Its wording suggested that if I were offered a full-time position at Mindstorm that they would have rights to 25% of my earnings. I objected to that, but was told that if I were offered a job by Mindstorm that they wouldn’t charge the 25% because the last thing they would want to do would be to get in the way of Mindstorm hiring an employee that it wants, because it reflects well on FIREA when they permanently hire a contractor from there, and I suspect (though they didn’t say) that they actually get a “finder’s fee” from Mindstorm.

For those of you that were following my unemployment commission fiasco, nothing new to report.

I did get a call today from Forward Intelligence Resource and Employment Agency today, however. Two calls, actually. They called the landline, which I declined to answer, then they called the cell phone, which I also declined to answer. The second time they left a message. Apparently Shayen, my former boss and Mindstorm, sent FIREA an email asking about my availability. He seems to want to hire me back when my mandatory 100 day vacation is up. An interesting development since when I left he said that they probably wouldn’t have anything for me and gave me some ideas of where I should apply when I’m ready.

It’s unfortunate that he chose to contact FIREA, because that means that now (a) I have to work through them and (b) they know about this job opportunity. Given how they’ve tried to put the kabosh on my unemployment compensation before, I have no doubt that if I am anything less than enthusiastic this time around I am in for some headaches. Their emails carry the tone that they have leverage. They say that I will be able to expect less or equal to how much I made before.

Practically, none of this is an issue. It is extremely unlikely that I will be going back to work for Mindstorm or anyone in the area. I don’t want to speak too soon, but there is a very good chance that Clancy and my vague future will be firming up in a few weeks. Even if that falls through, however, most likely my job hunt will (and my unemployment compensation) will end at about that time. I need to do some poking around to figure out the ramifications of halting a job search.

Also practically, I should just sit down and shut up. Tell them as my employment eligibility approaches that my wife and I have decided to relocate.

But beyond mere practicality, I’m still pissed off at FIREA and I still don’t want to deal with them any more than I have to. I don’t want to make this easy on them. The thought that, through absolutely no effort of their own, they can get me back in their stable and take money off the top, makes me want to spit. I think that Kirk is right that unemployment has made me more contentious.

As for their comment that my pay would be less than it was before, I’m honestly not sure why that’s the case. They didn’t track me down. They didn’t recruit me. They simply answered an email. Ordinarily the contractors can talk your wage down by being the gatekeeper to your getting a job. But Shayen asked for me. That doesn’t mean that Shayen and Mindstorm are going to pay FIREA any more, but it does mean that they can’t play the same games that they play with newbies.

Or maybe they can.

They have three things on their side. As far as I know, I am not under any sort of contract with FIREA that would require that they be my representatives. But the fact that Shayen contacted them may be significant. I don’t really know how that works. The second thing they have is the current economy. It’s possible - likely even - that had I come up to the area now that they would be offering me less than they will actually offer me. The thing and biggest thing is that they can hold unemployment over my head. They know that I can’t turn down the job offer on the basis of money as long as it’s comparable to what I had before.

However, #2 doesn’t really apply to me right now and if #1 is not applicable, then #3 can be minimized. If I sign on with a separate contracting agency and turn the job down from there, FIREA is less likely to turn right around and complain to the unemployment commission. The second I turn down a job offer I can’t apply for any more benefits (without risking fraud), but they’re less likely to come after what they’ve already given me because they’re less likely to find out about it. My hope is that I will turn down the job on the basis of Clancy finding one. That’d tie up a lot of loose ends. Otherwise, I simply claim that I stopped requesting unemployment checks because I could not continue to look for work because my wife and I have decided that we want to relocate. I am relatively sure I can sell that.

But ultimately, a petty part of me just wants to take the ball away from FIREA’s court. So I emailed another contractor that I’ve been in communication with and asked them what my options are. I don’t feel great about getting them involved in my little spat, but no more work will be required of them than would be required of FIREA.

The notion that all men are created equal and that results are determined by effort, discipline, and so on is what my former boss Willard referred to as “one of the great noble myths.” The subject came up shortly after two of my coworkers, Edgar Braughton and Charlie Belcher, were let go. While I had, up until that point, always known that raw intelligence varied from one individual to the next, and that there were people we euphemistically called mentally handicapped that biologically lacked the intelligence that most people have, I never fully appreciated the wide spectrum of intelligence out there until I met, worked with, had to checked the work of, and eventually had to team-lead Edgar and Charlie.

Edgar and Charlie were not mentally retarded in the obvious sense. There were some questions about Edgar, but a lot of those were attributable to a speech impediment on his part that gave the false sense of retardation. Willard, too, had a speech impediment, but is among the smartest of the guys that I know. Edgar could easily have been in that category if he were, well, less dim. But he was the dimmest bulb in our shop. Charlie was a little bit smarter, though not much.

Edgar’s and Charlie’s job was really what I would call straight-forward. For much of the teach, it was mundane. Tedious. Perhaps the hardest part of the job was staying interested in the job enough to do it right. It required an attention to detail, though as Freddie demonstrated you could get away with a lot of inattention if you were simply fast. So really, all you needed was some combination of careless speed or slightly more time-consuming accuracy.

Most of the OSI Team did not have a whole lot in the way of external motivation. I was one of only four longish-term OSI Programmers that was married or in a committed relationship though the only one without children. Simon had kids to support but they were his girlfriend’s kids and he was not under any legal obligation to support them. The other two married OSI Programmers were Edgar and Charlie. On top of that, Edgar had a whopping four kids with a wife that didn’t work and Charlie had a chronically ill wife whose medical bills (by his own telling of it) were considerable. Further, they had less in the way of marketable skills than did many of us and therefore needed the job at Falstaff more than the rest of us did. In other words, these were two people that had the most motivation out of any of us.

And yet, despite all of this motivation, they simply could not get the job done. They could not get it done quickly. They could not get it done right. We tried vigorously to teach them how to do it. We patiently worked with them and looked over their shoulder and tried over and over again to teach them. They had the background that suggested that it wasn’t beyond their grasp. Edgar had a couple years of coursework from DeVry and Charlie a degree from the local vocational school. So it wasn’t completely alien to them. Charlie had a bit of an attitude problem, but his problems far surpassed that.

At the end of the day, despite each of their motivations and despite the easy nature of the job, it was simply beyond their grasp to do it right. Though I had always known of variable intelligence, it just never fully occurred to me that something as simple as that job would quite plainly be beyond people that were able to otherwise live independently. We may squish and squeak and slide a bit and say that they didn’t have the right kind of intelligence. There may be some truth to that in that I could see (maybe, possibly) Charlie being successful at fixing cars or something else that melded one’s mind with one’s hands. But the job itself is so easy to achieve basic competence with that it seemed to me and others that even if your real skills lay elsewhere, it’s not something that somebody shouldn’t be able to at least do right. It’s not an easy job to excel at… but to do? There isn’t a reader of Hit Coffee that couldn’t figure it out in a week.

Of course, Hit Coffee has a self-selected audience. It primarily appeals to people of a pretty basic level of intelligence. To people that like to think about things. People with college degrees (which I think all of you that I know about have) or at least the intelligence to get one. And some of my surprise at what should have been bloody obvious is that I have for most of my life been surrounded by such people. I went to an upper-crest high school. Then I went to college and hung out with the Honors College crowd. My career is mind-based. And even those I knew from outside my circles tended to be self-selected. The people I knew that went to more working-class schools tended to be the smarter people there (I met many of them through a computer network). The warehouse workers at my first job that I talked to tended to be team leads and the odd young man or two that were simply working their way through college. In that sense, it’s no surprise that my relatively sheltered existence lead to a sanguine view of the strength of human intelligence.

And so I gradually had to accede the notion that even within functioning individuals that don’t require special care and that didn’t ride the short bus and weren’t ill-educated and that weren’t just lazy, there can be some pretty basic limits as to what they are capable of. These limits include things that I would have been capable of doing in the seventh grade. Maybe earlier.

A lot of people come to this realization. Some wash it away with notions that it was really how people like Edgar and Charlie were raised and educated that are the problem. That’s historically what I’d done. Even though there were always people that couldn’t do things that I considered pretty basic and that in some cases it might take more attention and tutoring, that they could get there. A lot of whether someone accepts it or declines to accept it depends on ideology. To the extent that it dovetails with what they already believe about people (that, say, poor people are poor because they’re less intelligent), they believe it more readily than others where it presents some uncomfortable truths that contradict the way that they see the world.

For some people, it adds a stronger element of libertarianism because it adds more a sense of justice to the segregation of the haves and have-nots. For me it does slightly the opposite. If people that are at the bottom of the economic latter are so because they made less of an effort or made poorer life choices, I have far less sympathy than someone that is stuck manning a convenience store with little hopes of making it into management simply because they were born with fewer neurons firing quite as vigorously as the next guy. In fact, it almost starts to make a socialist out of me in that I believe that people that lack brain-power (assuming that they work somewhere doing something!) are deserving of, if not everything that their sharper peers that contribute more to society, as respectable a standard of living as we can afford. In short, it makes the notion of wealth redistribution bother me less. It makes the wheat-and-chaff of capitalism overall less appealing.

On the other hand, my experiences at Belle Rieve, that occurred at the same time, which come to think of it included a number of people that probably wouldn’t have been able to do OSI programming work, counteracted this somewhat by demonstrating pretty clearly the dangers of subsidizing lifestyles that aren’t going anywhere. It may be too much to expect them to get jobs that pay well, but it’s pretty important that they work. If idle minds are the Devil’s Workshop, idle lives partake in a never-ending buffet of counterproductive habits. Further, on the subject of crime-prevention, if people that live among the poor are not just limited to those that made poor lifestyle choices, trying to keep those zones as free as possible from crime becomes all the more important.

But mostly, it gives me a little more sympathy for those that haven’t made it. Not enough sympathy that I want to move back to Belle Rieve or that I would raise children where we lived in Estacado or where we live now, but enough to feel a sense of sympathy rather than simply frustration when I bump into them on a daily basis.

-{Note: The setting of most of this post is Deseret, where 90% of the population is white (96% including white-Hispanic). The racial aspects of IQ are discussed at length elsewhere and I would prefer them not be discussed here. This post is about IQ. Not about IQ and race. Not IQ and immigration. Or welfare mommas. Or about how people that are not like you or don’t think like you are ruining our country.}-

I still haven’t heard anything back from the state unemployment commission regarding my alleged fraud. I decided to invoke my right to an interview and am assuming that they got my letter stating as much. I haven’t gotten a response. They were supposed to come to a decision on September 8, but either they didn’t (because of the pending interview) or they ruled in my favor because I’m still collecting and they haven’t asked for anything back.

I apparently forgot to submit my claim for last week. That means that you not only don’t get paid for that week but that you’re off the roles unless you call them and beg they decide to show mercy. I had to think long and hard about whether or not to call. My 100 Day Halo (the period of time I have to wait before Mindstorm can hire me) ends in about six weeks. After that, I may have to start worrying about getting calls from FIREA with interviews that if I don’t go to them and don’t accept the job could result in not only my being kicked off the rolls but in my having to repay everything they’ve given me.

I didn’t get the job with Arc Mobile. It was the best of every possible world, in a way. I didn’t get a job I wasn’t sure that I wanted and the reason they gave for not hiring me was not a reflection on my marketability.

Our hunt for temporary work for Clancy has turned up surprisingly difficult. We figured that with her skills she would have no problem being able to find temporary work that included inpatient and Obstetrics, but so far that has not turned out to be the case. We’ve got one possible locale a couple hours from where we lived in Deseret and another in the Great Plains. Sierra, where she worked some last year, is apparently looking for real commitments now instead of just accepting what they can get. Fortunately, we have money saved up, but we were hoping to at least refuel our bank accounts a little before the new year.

Over at Computerworld, Jeff Ello offers an interesting proposition - that the stereotypical IT person (antisocial, anti-management, anti-bureaucracy, etc) is merely a logical being who reacts in a logical way to their stereotypical environment. In particular, this quote caught my eye:

Antisocial behavior — It’s fair to say that there is a large contingent of IT pros who are socially unskilled. However, this doesn’t mean those IT pros are antisocial. On the whole, they have plenty to say. If you want to get your IT pros more involved, you should deal with the problems laid out above and then train your other staff how to deal with IT. Users need to be reminded a few things, including:

- IT wants to help me.
- I should keep an open mind.
- IT is not my personal tech adviser, nor is my work computer my personal computer.
- IT people have lives and other interests.

Like anyone else, IT people tend to socialize with people who respect them. They’ll stop going to the company picnic if it becomes an occasion for everyone to list all the computer problems they never bothered to mention before.

Without fail, not merely for myself but based on the experiences of friends/family I have known in IT, this is a major failing on the part of many organizations. IT people are “leaned on” constantly. They’re expected to fix their friends’ computers, neighbors’ computers, the computers of family members. Heck, they are sent questions by family/friends in other states who think that things can be fixed remotely. Co-workers piling on with this add to stress, especially if it’s done (a) often or (b) unappreciatively. Trust me when I say: we don’t mind, once in a while, helping someone out of a jam, especially if it’s something Worst Buy/Geek Squad/etc routinely screw up on or overcharge for. On the other hand, when we get 10+ requests for such help in a month, there’s a point where even we say “enough is enough.”

There’s another part as well:

Insubordination — This is a tricky one. Good IT pros are not anti-bureaucracy, as many observers think. They are anti-stupidity. The difference is both subjective and subtle. Good IT pros, whether they are expected to or not, have to operate and make decisions with little supervision. So when the rules are loose and logical and supervision is results-oriented, supportive and helpful to the process, IT pros are loyal, open, engaged and downright sociable. Arbitrary or micro-management, illogical decisions, inconsistent policies, the creation of unnecessary work and exclusionary practices will elicit a quiet, subversive, almost vicious attitude from otherwise excellent IT staff.

I’ve added the emphasis above for the basic point - people who go into IT, fundamentally, are (again) logical beings. They approach computers and technology, which are logical machines, in a logical fashion. They appreciate people like Will or Will’s normal working-environment types who, when they bring a problem up, bring the background research (error code, method to reproduce, etc) with it. They don’t appreciate Carol in accounts payable who sends in a request saying “this stupid thing doesn’t work come fix it while I go to lunch”, leaves no indication of what application is “not working”, leaves no recorded error code or method to reproduce the problem, and then has a screaming fit when she comes back to the office to find an email or note indicating that the IT staff would like her to inform them when she is available so that they can observe the problem and implement a solution.

IT people react quite well to Will-types, who we usually refer to by titles similar to “power users.” As far as IT goes, Will-types are collaborators; they respect us, we respect them, and when they ask for help, they’re willing to work with us to see that the solution is found and works well. Likewise, IT people react well to what I’ll refer to as “Joel”-types. Joels are people who know that computers are logical, have a little trouble grasping what they are doing, but are (a) patient about a response and (b) willing to be present and educated on what to do. Yes, we may have to answer the same question 2-3 times for a Joel in order for them to remember what they are doing, and occasionally they forget how to do something, but they recognize when their knowledge is insufficient and call for help rather than making things worse.

There are two other types we have to deal with. As I referred to a moment ago, there are the “Carol” types. Carols are the type who believe that somehow, with zero information and zero cooperation on their part, the magic box sitting on their desk can be made to do whatever they want to do. They believe that sending an email or help request along the lines of “this fucking thing isn’t working fix it” with an “available time” of ASAP and perhaps a threatening note about “reporting IT to the VP” if it isn’t done by the time they’re done with their noon “rendezvous” will somehow make it so that the fix “just happens.” Carol-types are also the type who insist their computer is “so slow” and “takes forever to log on”, but scream bloody murder if you want to remove the 10 different “IE Toolbar” apps, instant messaging apps, screwy spyware-laden screensavers, and other non-job-related miscellaneous widgets that they’ve put on their computer.

The final type I’ll refer to as the “Todd” type. Todd-types are the IT department’s nightmare. Todd-types, in fact, account for 99% of the aggravations that sparked my response to Farhad Manjoo’s column (hey, I warned you; we IT-types are anti-stupidity) earlier. The problem with Todd-types is that they are the portion of the world who overestimate their own competence. They believe (for example) that because they managed to plug in their DSL modem in at home and get their computer plugged in, they are competent to build and maintain a 500-machine network, or that because they managed to install “free” software package X at home, it should be used by everyone in the company (setting aside all questions of the legality, licensing, and security questions of doing so). Worse yet, when they encounter an issue, they don’t check in with us first. Instead, they flail around, delete this, rename that, alter this setting, alter that setting, and instead of coming in to implement a simple fix based on a known error code, we are then forced to work backwards through all the other things they messed up along the way. Todd-types are the type who jam in print cartridges without removing the packaging tabs or “rip-cord” tab first, damaging printers/copiers in the process. They try to remove a paper jam by hand the wrong way, turning a simple removal process into a 4-hour process of taking the printer half apart to get to the one scrap of paper still covering the jam sensor. They see an “error” and download a “driver search” package infested with malicious software. In short, Todd-types are the reason that many companies lock down computers and take “admin” (software installation) permissions away from most users in the first place.

Now, looking back above, what’s the difference between the Will/Joel and the Carol/Todd types? I’ll take them in sequence.

- IT wants to help me. Both the Will-types and the Joel-types recognize that IT wants to help them. IT wants them to be able to do their jobs well. When Will-types feel that IT is taking things away, it’s probably helpful to remind the Will-types that for every Will in an organization, there’s probably an even dozen Carol/Todds, and upper managment freaks out when they see “problems” like that (for example, when “Carol” screams bloody murder and IT’s only defense is to give the now-screaming VP a list of all the extraneous crap loaded to Carol’s computer or else see themselves subjected to the VP’s wrath).

- I should keep an open mind. Again, Will-types and Joel-types do this. When IT tells Will that they may not be able to be there instantaneously, or that they may need to do some research on a fix, Will knows they’re right - hell, he’s already been researching it himself. When IT tells the Joel-types that they would like to schedule ~30 minutes (5 to fix it, 25 to train Joel to better use the application), he gets it. Meanwhile, the Todd-types lie about their thrashing (lest IT twig them for what they did and start proceedings to restrict their access to prevent future damage) and then complain that IT didn’t “completely fix” their issue, and the Carol-types are just downright uncooperative from the start.

And, of course… the Carol and Todd-types are also the most likely reason your IT guys don’t go to the company picnic.