I certainly am. There's nothing I like better than being passionate about utilizing my core competencies to effect strategic outcomes. Except, perhaps, for utilizing my core competencies to effect strategic outcomes and win-win solutions.
I'm also passionate about recognizing diversity in the workplace. I'm passionate about embracing diversity in the workplace. Hell, I'll make out with diversity if that's what makes you happy.
My life is amazingly good. I'm thankful to be alive, and that makes this period rare in the history of Rory. I'm also thankful to be in mostly good health, as being in mostly good health is not how I've been spending my year. Believe it or not, I still haven't fully recovered from my problems in June. Fortunately, nothing's wrong enough to detract from the quality of my life, and the relative difference between now and life in June is enough to have me thinking I'm a perfect specimen of humankind.
However, since it's apparently vital to the continued functioning of the universe that something in my life be all bust up and crapsticks, I'm looking for a job.
The plan was to keep on keeping on the way I've been keeping on since quitting my job in October, but when I rebuilt my life around savings rather than income, I didn't foresee the arrival of the bidniss that would bring to my life something all bust up and crapsticks. It was unexpected. That means I didn't see it coming. Put another way, if I were psychic, I'd have known it would happen, but I'm not, so I didn't. I know there are tons of people in this world who call themselves psychics, but, despite their ability to connect with the spirits of dogs in doggy heaven to see how things are going, they're terrible at predicting stuff. If it weren't for all the concrete proof that they can and do listen to the whispers of kitty phantoms, I might even say they aren't psychic at all. Not that the discrediting of psychics is a priority for me. Even if it were, I'd keep my findings private, as I don't want to be the one to have to tell all the weirdoes that nobody really knows if Mr. Fluffles is having an A-Ok time up in the heaven. Let these people have their comfort.
The nature of this unexpectedness is familial. "Familial" is a fancypants word that means "people you can't date." It refers specifically to your family. That's people who are related to you, many of whom have genetic abnormalities similar to your own. If you have a giant horn instead of a nose, and if you live with someone who also has a giant horn instead of a nose, that person is very likely a member of your family. Don't date this person. It's the fact that someone up your ancestral line was "indiscriminate" with another family member that got you a face-horn in the first place. In fact, don't date anybody. Don't reproduce. Keep indoors and watch TV until you pass from this world to the next. We don't want abominations like you walking among us. We don't even want you hidden among us. Just go away. I'm sorry I brought this up.
Because the issue isn't mine own, I shalln't produce its mysterious ways in word form upon this screen. What I will share is that it involves someone I'm very close to, and that something is going wrong in this someone's life that will, sometime in the next few months, make this person's life much more difficult, and it's something from which this person is unlikely to recover.
It doesn't involve jail time or pregnancy or any of the other things that would normally ruin your life (though I hear prison isn't actually all that bad). The one bright side is that this problem can be dealt with in part through money. A lot of money. Probably more money than I could produce, but not more money than other members of the family, in cooperation with The Smartest Man in the World, could produce together.
According to my original plan for post-Microsoft life, I was going to hang out, recover, write, socialize, and decompress from years of madness and stress. Despite a couple periods of suicidal depression and too much time spent in hospitals from an allergic reaction to meds, I think I'm getting there. Like I said, my life is amazingly good.
A side-effect of this leisure is boredom. Most of my friends work, so I'm left alone during many hours of each day. I've been passing the time by working out an easy, single, unified math to replace all known forms of the mathematics. I used it last week to prove that light is neither particles nor waves. It took fifteen seconds and two symbols, and looked quite elegant on paper thanks to my math's wingding-based notation.
You can understand why I'm so bored.
So, because of a looming financial issue and growing boredom, I started looking for "normal" work around the beginning of July. Something where I get up in the morning, make my way to a place where people I don't want to see are waiting for me, sit down at a desk, and wonder what in the hell I'm doing with my life.
Of everything I've done, I miss public speaking the most. You'd think it'd be easy to find such work since most people fear public speaking more than death, but there's not much out there. I found a position for United Way that sounded good. United Way guilts people out of their money and then distributes that money among various charities, local and national. The fact that it paid so little that its employees are probably more in need of donations than the charities they're collecting for was offset by the coolness of using talking skills to improve somebody's life at the expense of someone else's.
It was shortly after finding that job that I learned of the familial predicament. Fun is no longer the primary criterion. Gobs of cash. That's the new one. I need gobs and gobs of cash. I'm putting my soul on eBay. I've never understood what people mean by the term "selling out," but I like the sound of it. I'm ready to compromise everything I believe in for ingots of gold and silver and anything else valuable that can be shaped into an ingot.
You might wonder why I would put any of this on myself when it's someone else's problem. I don't have an answer. I think you either get it or you don't, but one way to try to understand is to ask yourself if you love anybody. If you do, what would you be willing to do to help them? When it comes to people I care about, I'm generally willing to go much further to help them than I ever would for myself. Don't know why. I feel like it's hardwired. To stand by and do nothing is much harder than to work like mad to help, and that's just the way it is.
These new priorities widened my search significantly. I told myself back in October that I'd stay away from tech, but I've been taking a look along with everything else. The two things I'm working on hardest are writing and music. Everybody tells me that both lead to destitution, but I've noticed that the writers and musicians who actually have talent also have a better shot at making gobs and gobs of cash. Plus, I have excellent connections on the music side of things. Not so much for writing, but I'm trying to figure out how to change that.
Still, I figure it's smart to have something to fall back on. Something, you know, like a job.
I've looked through a ton of tech listings, and although I'm qualified for everything, I don't think I have the patience to go back into a corporate environment. Seeing all the corp-speak turned me off. When I'm dating someone, I need to be able to respect her. This is not, oddly, a requirement for some people. Similarly, I need to be able to respect the people I'm working for. If I take a position with a company I don't respect, it gets hard to respect myself, and I like respecting myself.
I don't see how I can respect a company that employs people who communicate in corp-speak.
The lack of imagination kills me. The qualifications necessary are insane (you must have every skill, five degrees, ten years of experience, an IQ of at least 70, be able to type 300 WPM, and run the entire business with your smallest, least useful appendage). The language used in the postings is horrific.
Check out this BS:
Do you have a passion for collaboration and customer service? Do you love public speaking and delivering group presentations? Do your strengths include initiative and innovation? If you answered yes, then you'll want to explore this exciting entry level opportunity.
What is it with the word "passion" nowadays? My dictionary defines "passion" as "strong and barely controlled emotion." Is that really a quality you want in your employees? Particularly when it comes to "collaboration and customer service"? When I think of passion and collaboration, the word "orgy" comes to mind.
Continuing with the alliterative theme, what's the deal with "initiative and innovation"? What happened to passion for collaboration? Initiative, by most definitions, is something you do on your own. It means that you can, on your own, get things started. Or that you can, necessarily without the help of others, take charge of something. That's not collaboration - that's domination.
Then there's my favorite word: innovation. It has been so abused by corp-speak that it doesn't mean anything. Looking at recent years in tech, innovation seems to involve buying someone else's product, branding it, and then selling it in your own box. I've also heard the word used in reference to the creation of a feature nobody wants, needs, or can figure out how to use, but that hasn't been seen before. Again, do you really want that?
Come join a team that is cross-trained, goal oriented and eager to see everyone succeed. We recognize both individual and team contributions to success. We're seeking creative candidates who are out-of-the-box thinkers with a passion for problem solving, utilizing win-win solutions.
The first sentence is meaningless, brain-dead drivel, but also a sentence you'll see again and again relatively unchanged. Isn't it a given that the team is "goal oriented and eager to see everyone succeed"? Is this to imply that other teams strive for failure through aimlessness?
It's good to see they "recognize both individual and team contributions to success." I feel good about it. I really do. Really, really good.
What does it mean?
The word in that sentence with the most impact is "and." That's creepy.
The phrase "out-of-the-box" is dead. It never made sense. It's incompatible with corporate thinking. It's hard to have passionate collaborators when they're all moving in different directions. In the old days, if you were an "out-of-the-box" thinker, you knew it because your ideas were greeted by, "She's a witch!"
People don't like "out-of-the-box" thinking. Even when they believe they do, they don't truly accept it. When someone asks you for out-of-the-box ideas, you're really being asked to leave your box for a different one. It might be a bigger box, but it's still a freaking box. The reason HR pushes so hard for "appreciating diversity" is that most people hate diversity and need to be told what to do with it.
There are so many people who claim to be out-of-the-box thinkers that out-of-the-box is the new box.
Continuing, the word "passion" returns, but is overshadowed by what might be the most horrific word of them all:
Utilize
It doesn't mean "use". It's heading that way, but only through constant abuse by... well, by pretty much everybody.
It's an ugly word. There's a reason you won't find it in any good poetry. Or, for that matter, any good writing.
It's a faux-scientific, faux-technical sounding thing.
To "utilize" something means that you're using that thing effectively, typically for a purpose other than what was originally intended. You would use a flashlight to see in the dark, but you would utilize it to knock somebody out. If you say that you're utilizing a flashlight to see in the dark, it tells me that you don't know what flashlights are for. Or, more likely, that you don't know what the word "utilize" is for.
There are cases where "utilize" is appropriate, but they're few. For example, you would utilize your degree in psychology, business administration, art, or English, as there are no known direct applications for them. If you're unsure which is correct, and you probably are, go with "use".
If you're "passionate" about "communicating effectively," then the first thing you need to learn is how to deliver your message as simply as possible. Go read some Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut. Some of the most well known authors in the world, and their styles are so similar that you might think one copied the other. My money's on Vonnegut copying Twain, but that's only because Twain died before Vonnegut was born. Other evidence isn't as conclusive.
Maybe it's academia that does it, but there's a bountiful and plethoric superfluity of sesquipedalianists out there who have recourse to their thesauri in an oscillatory methodology and you already don't know what I'm saying.
In human language, I'm saying that there are tons of people who write with big words, possibly because they think they sound smarter. As with anything, the more complex something is, the more skill you'll need if you hope to avoid biffing it up, and most people are bad writers. You aren't qualified to pilot a 747 just because you can make a paper airplane.
We are a dynamic and flexibly adaptive organization with a focus on continuous process improvement. We embrace and reward resourcefulness, innovation and dynamic thinking.
Stop! Just stop! I've been driven to use exclamation-points. Do you know where the exclamation-point is located on a keyboard?
NEXT TO THE BRINK OF MADNESS. THAT'S WHERE.
Allow me to translate that text into normal human language:
We are constantly finding new ways to suck. We suck so badly that we've gotten really good at climbing out of the pits we dig for ourselves. It's lonely in those pits, and we're looking for someone fun who can do shadow-puppets down there to keep us entertained while we figure out how to climb back out. You must be able to do shadow-puppets of animals, celebrities, and funny violence.
If your shadow-puppets are good, we will hug you and pay you for it. Bonus points if you can figure out how to make shadow-puppets without a source of light. We're convinced it can be done, but we need an out-of-the-box thinker to make this dream a reality. Something on wikipedia called "physics" says we can't have shadows without light. We don't know what box they're living in!!!
We can't wait for you to join our team. When we finally get ourselves out of the last of our pits, we look forward to figuring out what our actual jobs are.
Also, if you're too smart, and if we figure it out, we'll fire you so that our own positions aren't threatened by your ability to do work.
Incredibly, the posting goes on. And on.
And on.
With the exception of one more snippet, I'll spare you the remainder. I just can't stop without this bit. It's up there with the "utilize" problem:
Working collaboratively with Recruiting and Employee Relations teams to ensure smooth processes for candidates
I could write as much about this one sentence as I did about the previous few paragraphs.
I won't. I'm just saying I could.
These morons have such a boner for the hot words of corp-speak that they can't stop. They're out of control. One might even say they're passionate.
"Working collaboratively with Recruiting and Employee Relations teams..."
Can anybody tell me how you could work "with" other teams without collaboration?
It makes as much sense to say:
"Working with with other teams..."
But this observation draws attention away from "Recruiting and Employee Relations teams..."
Exactly how much infrastructure is necessary to hire someone and put him to work? It sounds like I'd need a lawyer, a lobbyist, and a favor to get anything done.
Sigh.
When I got my first contract, I was intimidated. I was very young, surrounded by people who'd been playing adult for decades. I assumed they all knew exactly what they were doing. I eventually found out that, working part-time and alone, I replaced an entire team of other contractors. I got the job done for about 10% of what they were being paid. Before learning this, I thought I was doing terribly - that I was constantly in danger of getting dropped. Instead, my contract got renewed a couple times, and what was supposed to be an eight day job turned into nearly three years. I call it my Gilligan's Island contract. In addition to getting dough and experience, I learned a lot about business from someone who became a sort of mentor. I don't know why he helped me, but he completely changed my life by being one of the few people I've met in business who wasn't totally full of it.
One thing I learned was that nobody knows what they're doing. They just try to get better at hiding it.
Big words, clumsy florid prose, uncritical attachment to stupid ideas that sound good... that's what the corporate world, for the most part, really is.
Rather than blowing money on bullshit positions for teams like "Employee Relations", this is the type of job posting they ought to be putting together (with some honesty thrown in for fun):
Looking for a skeptical critical-thinker who can spot BS, root it out, and destroy it.
Your efforts will probably lead to the firing of half the company. If you're OK with this, drop us a line. You can send us your resume, but the truth is, we don't know what to look for in those things. Generally, we throw away any written with Comic Sans Serif font. The remaining pile is looked over by someone trained to squint and go "Hm..." at intervals that make us think there's a pattern to his thought process. One of your first tasks will be to figure out if we should fire that guy.
We could make up some numbers about goals and whatnot, but it'd only make things harder on us later. There was this one time when we renamed all the columns of our office Fantasy Football League spreadsheet and used it to support a plan for an innovative, collaborative something-or-other, but we got asked some questions about the numbers that almost exposed our fraud. We saved our fannies by assassinating the nosy VP behind that inquisition. Since we already have a ratio of five VPs to each regular employee, nobody noticed his absence, but the body started to stink after a couple weeks. We pinned it on someone's old yogurt in the employee fridge and got the stench under control with 300 strategically placed boxes of baking soda, but we'd rather not go through that again.
So how about it? Come save us from ourselves. We'll give you some money while we take credit for your success. Win-win!
Unfortunately, for reasons that are too numerous to address in this post, skepticism and critical-thinking are not among the skills that are "embraced" and "rewarded" around here. Nor are they "recognized". Most people don't even know what they are.
Back to writing songs and stories and other silliness...