Being President is an extremely tough job but one of the reasons for it is the fact that pretty much the moment they get sworn on, they are the Man in Charge and have shit to do even if their email systems might not be up. From there on, they have their standard "100 Days" thing in which they propose the bulk of their legislation and deal with whatever foreign policy mess issues left by their predecessor. In a lot of ways, their first year in office is their most important because it's their best chance to get things done and change things and when the expectations are at their highest. This means that a President has to be at the top of their game at the start of their Presidency. Make a foreign policy or legislative mistake and they're stuck dealing with it for the length of their Presidency.

What's tough about this is that in the real world, nobody expects you to be at the top of your game when you start. You just started a job-- how can people expect you to know and do everything? Whenever you show up for your first day on the job, you're usually told to go sit at your cubicle and given a manual to read, something you're stuck doing for a few days or so because usually your phone and email isn't set up yet. Then you're trained by either your boss or the person with whom you're replacing and only allowed to do the job by yourself after a few weeks of being there. Then, for a month, maybe two months, you're allowed the excuse that you've just started and only then will you start being held accountable. And yet, you're still not considered an expert in everything and whenever something big or major happens, people either go to the person with more experience, more senior than you, or the most knowlegable one. It takes a while before you've become a go-to person for everything.

But if you're President, there's no sitting at your cubicle for a few days reading instruction manuals. You have advisers but on day one you're in charge of making decisions and you often don't want training from the person you're replacing because you've spent a year bashing them while running for office and in some cases, you have to spend the better part of the year trying to clean up the hundred messes left by them. And, even worse, you don't get much of a leeway in regards to you being new. Nobody says, well it's okay he bombed North Korea or well, it's okay he gave away too much in the stimulus bill in a stupid attempt at being bipartisan because they're new.

It is, in a lot of ways, maybe the only job in which you have to be at your best at the beginning of the job then the remaining part.

I'm trying to do something really crazy in Hotmail which is to set up a contact list of email addresses, mainly made up of people who aren't my contacts but with whom I need to correspond with. Because they keep on making Hotmail infinitely more complicated, thus suckier, I've had to click on the button for Hotmail Help to figure this all out. When you click on the button for Hotmail Help, a pop up window appears in front of your Hotmail page and gives you a menu of things to choose from in order to find the answer to your questions. The thing is that whenever you click on a subject, the first two things listed as instructions are to go to Hotmail and then log into Hotmail with your account information. This, of course, is really helpful information in that in order to get instructions on how to do things, you have to actually be logged into your Hotmail account.

Somebody in this household bought this week's US Magazine and on it's cover is a picture of the Kardashian girls juxtaposed with pictures of the Kardashian girls as awkward teens with the headline reading "Look at them Wow!" The story discusses the usual blather about how awesome their lives were as kids as rich kids in LA but there is a section discussing how they went from rather plain (and cute) kids to the borderline (and not so borderline) porn star looking D-Level celebrities. There's a lot of discussion about diets and gym exercises and the discovery of designer clothes but left out of the discussion is the big ole huge plastic elephant sitting in the room. Well, that's not true-- one of them happily admits to a boob job and how ambivalent they were when they got them but in a moment of true Grrrrl Power, admits that she loves them now! Kim, however, denies plastic surgery but only in regards to rumored work on her posterior. This despite the fact that even on the cover it's obvious that her nose was several sizes bigger than it is now. My guess is that Kim and her fake-boobed sister both had a lot more work done then that.

This brings up in of yet another pet peeves, that of celebrity magazines constant celebration of celebrity beauty-- especially in those who were either not as attractive as before, weighed a bit more than before, and are over 40. No, the fact that these celebrities are "beautiful" is not the problem but the problem is that they always treat it as if it's the result of some sort of personal triumph after months of endless hard work when in the reality it was often being about stomach stapling, botox, plastic surgery, and a publicist. Not to mention the ability to afford personal trainers and chefs as well as the time to spend hours with the both of them. But none of these stories really get into that, they never for instance say "Jen's new nose job looks great!" Or "Lose Weight Just Like Angelina Did-- Not Eat for Days!" Or "How Sarah Jessica Parker Keeps Looking Young-- injecting botulism into her forehead!"

The worst offender of these is Madonna who, as we are constantly told, still looks fabulous at 50. Which she does. But she's also (probably, according to rumors) had major work done on her face, injects botox like a Haight Street junkie, and does so much yoga her arms look freakish.

Even worse, every few months, one of those magazines will have on it's cover a "shocking" write up on which celebrity has had which surgery but then two weeks later will put one of those celebrities on it's cover to talk about how all their dieting and working out has made them look as wonderful as they do.

Stars. They ARE just like us.

A few random things

-As I never watched Conan or thought from what I saw that he was that particularly funny, I was sort of a passive observer through all this Late Night nonsense. In fact, I'm one of the few people who doesn't think Leno is Satan on earth and isn't to blame for all this (everyone's like "well why can't he just retire? as if Jay's being a dick for not wanting to). Considering Conan got $40 million as a severance package, it's too hard to feel bad about the whole thing. I'm also guessing that most of the people who are upset with him leaving either never really watched him or watched his 12:30 show as by all accounts, his 11:30 show kinda sucked. The reason I'm wondering if all the people who were doing some sort of protest had actually watched the show, the show would not be canceled. It also shows that as much as people like to think that everybody's online and uses Facebook and twitter, most people don't.

-I watched a few minutes of the first episode of Jersey Shore because I felt like I had to and thought it was kind of meh. Not because of the set up or the characters but because I've watched enough "Real World" to basically know everything that would help. In other words, I've already seen it even if the it did not involve crazy Italians from Jersey/New York. Yep, I've become jaded about reality shows.

-Worked on two post-interview thank you notes yesterday and spent about an hour/hour and a half on them. As I said about a hundred times elsewhere in this blog, I hate doing them because it's such a small thing to do yet one misspelled word or grammatical mistake and you could kiss the job goodbye. When I write them, I always think that it'll put me one step ahead of everyone else because I am the only one taking the time to write one of these things. I have a feeling that everybody else writes one and everybody else thinks the exact same thing. Because why else would anybody take the time to write those stupid things?

I suppose it could be said that being a Democrat is a lot like being a Cubs fan in that the team you root for always loses and will always be doomed to lose but no matter what they do, you still root for them anyways. And sometimes...sometimes... it looks like they've really put a good team together and you get really excited and think this year could be the year and the season starts going and the team looks as good as advertised and then things get going and it's all looking good and then...boom! the team does what they always do, chokes and falls apart and your stuck rooting for a loser yet again.

If being a Democrat is like being a Cubs fan, the election on Tuesday was the equivalent of the Bartman game. Not necessarily because everything all changed due to a fluke occurrence (special election on a weird January date that everybody forgot about, really crappy Democratic candidate, winning candidate appeared in Cosmo), but because of the total choke job that followed the play.

God damnit

Up in the Air

I saw "Up in the Air" last week and thought it was...interesting.

Here's the thing, on the one hand it might be one of the most devastating critiques of American Corporate/Economic culture in a recent movie, maybe the best since "Office Space." It's almost Marxian in it's takedown.

Here's what you get-- a bunch of corporations are going to lay a bunch of people off but are so lame about doing it, they hire "consultants" to do the work for them and lay all the people off. The "consultants" are shown not to be terribly concerned about what they're doing and it's implied that after the package they present to the person laid off is handed over with information and advice, they don't really want people to respond back and don't really care if they do.

Of course the corporation that lays people off would also like to make more profits, despite the fact they are said to be doing great what with the economic downturn and all, so decide that they need to cut their expenses. This means no more flying around laying people off and instead, they bring in Anna Kendrick's character to introduce a way to lay people off via video. Therefore, in an attempt to squeeze more profits than they already do, the company decides to do something that will only depersonalize the one service they do provide, a service that should in no way be done in any way that could be seen as impersonal. Later, it is shown that even though both Anna's character and George's character have disagreement's about the whole video thing, the company still sets it up and hires a bunch of youngish looking employees to lay people off while sitting in their cubicles.

And there you have it, everything that's wrong with our economic system excluding anything financial related-- downsizing, consultants (sorry certain readers), and increasing depersonalization in the name of increasing profits.

Now, this movie could be seen as a brutal takedown, and something more illuminating and entertaining than Michael Moore's last masturbation movie, but the movie isn't really about that. It's also part romantic comedy part character study of a man finding himself. As a result, the comment that the movie is trying to make doesn't last very long and becomes more part of the background then the story. And that's the problematic part of it.

Because it's a character study and a romantic comedy and because the main character is played by George Clooney we like the character. We root for him. Despite the fact he GOES AROUND THE COUNTRY FIRING PEOPLE. Not only that, he doesn't seem at all worry about the ramifications of what he does or care about what he's doing to other people. When you do see him let people go, he doesn't really come off as that good at it. The only time he expresses any issues with what he does is when they bring up the idea of video conferencing the layoffs and he brings up the issue of how it's always better to do it in person but he didn't do it as much for concern with the other person but because it would mean less time on the road. Now compare this with Kendrick's character who eventually can't take it and quits. In other words, she decided to save her soul-- Clooney's character doesn't. Yet we're still supposed to like him and wish for good things to happen to his character at the end of the movie. But this is not how we should feel. Instead, we should be hoping (as I was) that the movie should end with him being disembowled by one of the people he laid off.

Sent in a resume to a place and got an email back wondering what I was doing since the last time I worked. Which was awhile ago.

Now this is always a bit of a sticky wicket because if you haven't worked in a long time, you could come off looking like a loser. This despite it being the worst economic crisis since the '30's. Or despite the fact there are also millions and millions of people who would therefore be classified as losers too.

So you have to spin it a bit to make it seem like you did more than sit on your ass and watch every Law & Order and Law & Order spinoff episode ever made. Or spent that time playing World of Warcraft, hanging out on Lost message boards, and seeing "Avatar" thirty times. Which is the kind of thing some of us did (especially since it's not like there's a lot of jobs out there). So, you have to come up with something positive sounding to make it seem like you were productive. For instance, things like this:

-Took a bunch of classes to enhance my knowledge of blah blah blah
-Decided to make lemonade out of a lemon and so decided to take up life long dream of writing the Great American Novel/training for a Triathalon event in Nepal
- Went to India to help give aid to lepers
-Read all of Tolstoy's masterworks
-Spent time working on relationship with Jesus

And there you have it-- each answer has it's advantages (it all looks like you did something to make either you or the world better) and disadvantages (who wants to go deal with lepers?) but either way nobody can look at that and say "wow, this guy is not a loser. I should hire them immediately!"

It is often said that one of the best tools you have in order to look for jobs/switch jobs is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is, of course, like Facebook but for "professionals" which means it's like Facebook but without any of the fun parts.

The point of LinkedIn, we are told, is that it's really good for networking in that if you want to work at a place, you can go on LinkedIn and find which friend of a friend of a friend of a friend knows somebody who works at that company so that friend of a friend of a friend can get in contact with that person and ask them to spend some of their precious time and talk to that person's friend of a friend of a friend so that they're aware enough of that person to help them get a job at that company. Now, besides the fact it's often hard to rely on getting all of those friends of a friends of a friend to hook you up, all of this is important if you know of a place for which you want to work. If you want to just work and don't particularly care, this isn't that much of a help.

The other way this is supposed to help one get a job by having all those networks of connections somehow get a recommendation up to somebody involved in the place who is close enough to the job so that it could possibly help them. Which hasn't really worked for some of us yet.

This brings up another big thing about it which is the people you add to your connection list. Naturally, the bigger the network, the easier it is to use those connections to help get a job. That means that a lot of people just add you to their connection list no matter how tenuous the connection. As a result, I have a lot of people on my connection list who

-Worked at the same company but maybe emailed with once or twice while I was there
-People I worked with but whose main interaction largely consisted of saying hello to while on the way to the bathroom
-People I worked with who I thought were dicks
-People who I worked with and liked but subsequently realized were dicks.

So, yes, I have them as a potential "connection" to use as part of my network but how much help could somebody with whom the extent of my relationship was saying to them "hey, how are you" and "did you see the game last night?"

Of course, there's your profile and you could puff up your profile in case somebody is looking through profiles to see if they could find somebody to hire or any sort of thing like that. So people get "recommendations" put up on their site or write mission profiles or any sort of thing, all of which is important to a profile I guess but not nearly as being able to post pictures of your cat or a list of movies that you've seen over the past few months. I also noticed that you can't not recommend somebody or even diss that person in any way shape or form (like if you interviewed with them and they jerked you around or carried on a secret inter-office affair with and they dumped you because they were having another secret inter-office affair with their boss). What's the point of that, then? You're only going to ask somebody for a recommendation who would give you a nice recommendation. I guess somebody out there cares about the stuff and maybe recruiters care about that stuff but if I were a recruiter, I wouldn't even give much notice to Steve Jobs recommendation. I mean, sure, his products are what Angels would make if they built computers and mp3 music players but not even Steve would ask for recommendations from people who wouldn't give him one.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that out of all my years of being unemployed, LinkedIn's done shit for me.

I realize that all things considering this sounds kind of lame, but I'm kinda sick of it being cold. And yes, it's only in the low 50's in SF.

The problem is that nobody in California thinks the weather is going to be anything but perfect so the place isn't really built for handling any sorts of non-perfect weather. As a result, with the exception of people who ski, nobody really has any winter clothes. And most places that aren't brand new aren't really built for cold weather so apartments are really drafty. I'm in my fifth apartment in this city and all of them got butt cold at night and none of them had great central heating. So basically, you're stuck in a cold apartment until you go out into some cold weather wearing clothes that aren't thick enough to go to a place that's either over-heated (the bus) or perfectly heated (office building/stores).

Which, again, doesn't sound bad but when you're home all day in a cold, draft apartment and then go out and take a walk in cold weather, it's not so fun.

If you read through yesterday's unemployment numbers, you'll find some pretty depressing numbers. The numbers are even worse if you add what they call "discouraged workers" into the mix who are somehow dropped from the official totals because, well, you know..."quitters!"

But I think "discouraged workers" is an unfair term to call these folks because of the above reasons, that they don't count. By not counting them, it's sort of implying that they're "living on the dole" or just taking welfare money because they've lost their pluck. Therefore, I propose these titles as a way of maybe putting a better light on things-

-"Crawled on a couch in their pajamas softly crying into their whiskey glasses"
-"Busy packing to move back in with their parents well into their adult hood"
-"Taking a mental health break and catching up on all the previous seasons of 'Lost' before the new season begins."
-"Working on detailed and complicated revenge fantasies involving previous employers/bosses"
-"Contemplating ways to dumb down resume in order to get retail/admin type positions."
-"Trying to start revolution by posting on political blogs about impending takeover by Socialist/Corporatist forces."
-"Working on career change by thinking of all the professions that sound 'cool' only to realize they are completely nonviable and so start the process again to think about more completely nonviable career options."

While I was away, I got an email about setting up a time to do a phone interview. I emailed them back and let them know when I'd be around but have yet to hear back about when they'd actually call me. This happens sometimes and it could often lead to one of those mystifying deals in which a job is blown due to the fact I was not able to do the phone interview when they actually called about the phone interview. Or in this case, because I was unable to do a phone interview during the Holidays in part because I was in Montana. Actually, it could be something else. See the person who contacted me had a Korean name that could either be one word or two words and as I don't know Korean names all that well, I didn't know just how many words it was supposed to be. I looked throughout her email to see what it was and responded back to her making her name just one word. I later realized it's supposed to be two words. So now I'm wondering if I totally screwed the pooch on that one just because I didn't get her somewhat exotic first name correct. I mean, if she was a Sue or a Jane I could be interviewing with them right now

Also, had an interview last week and while taking the bus, had somebody reeking of booze and cigarettes sit next to me. Luckily, he didn't sit next to me long enough to be one of those awful MUNI moments, but I still wonder whether he was next to me long enough that the stench he emanated somehow got on my suit which meant that I conducted my interview with a bit of his stench on me. Not good.

As for the interview, the place I talked to looked like it had been recently bombed out. There was no receptionist when you entered the office and when you did, you saw what should have been a very large reception/waiting room now completely empty except for a few chairs, a couch, a coffee table, and a massage chair (?). There was also four TVs hanging from the ceiling but none of them were on at the time and the file cabinets that were to each side of the room were completely empty. When I walked through the office to get to the bathroom, I saw aisle after aisle after aisle of completely empty cubicles and offices and it felt like to get to the bathroom, you had to make your way through a graveyard. There was, I noticed, maybe ten employees at the most in the actual office at that time. I should mention too that the whole thing was eerily like a 2000 dot-com crash office in that they had a massage chair, TVs in the reception area, and a primo real estate state featuring a primo view of North Beach but had nobody working there.

Not that I've been pondering this that much, but... one point of debate is which job at Safeway would be better (meaning not suck as much) as other jobs. For instance, there's Stock Boy. They go around and fill aisles with food or put new items of food in the aisles. It would also (I'm guessing) involve going to the stockroom and meeting up with the delivery trucks to move the food items. The plus to this is that for the most part, you don't have to deal with the public or even maybe seen by the public as working there. On the other hand, you have to do a lot of heavy lifting and who wants to do that? Then there's the cashiers. These positions are probably the most visible of the positions and also the one where you get to engage the public the most. On the other hand, you are basically lifting up one item, waving them over some electronic device, and then putting them elsewhere. For hours. Upon hours. Upon hours.

Could it be any more boring? And unlock stocking where you could occasionally slack off or go slowly or people watch, you don't have a choice to do any of those things lest you get yelled out by some woman shopping while dragging her two precious kids along with her.

Then, of course, there are the baggers who I guess also sometimes work as cashiers. Anyways, they go from cashier to cashier helping out whomever needs help bagging a customers aisle. Now I can imagine this might be actually sorta fun because bagging has some element of thinking involved in that you have to figure out how to get which produce in which bag without destroying something. On the other hand, you have to do it quickly lest you delay somebody and if you slack on bagging items, you can throw the whole register aisle out of whack. That's bad. Plus, while it does take some sort of intellectual thought into putting items into a bag, it does not take that much of it.

So, the lesson in all this? Don't work at Safeway.

My New Career?

Found this job posting on Craigslist (parenthesis mine):

Cannabis Dispensary Seeks Purchasing Agent


California’s most professional and legitimate medical cannabis dispensary is seeking a qualified Purchasing Agent.

We are a rapidly growing medical cannabis dispensary. We offer a fast-paced yet congenial and warm work environment, competitive rate of pay & benefits(!).

This position requires extensive experience and an intense passion for cannabis (meaning, a stoner). The ideal candidate spends numerous hours on weedtracker, THCFarmer, and ICMag. This candidate anxiously awaits each new Cannabis Culture and High Times magazine (and a bag of Doritos). If this sounds like you, please read our requirements below.

Applicants must possess:

- Extensive knowledge of medical cannabis strains and applications (dude, this is some kind green)
- Extensive knowledge of different types of molds, mildews, pesticides, additives, and any other contaminants (dude, this is some kind green)
- Excellent communication skills (ever heard a pot head try to talk?)
- Emotional stability and maturity (ever met a stoner?)
- The ability to remain calm under pressure or in intense situations (isn't that one of the points of smoking dope?)
- Tact and respect for others under pressure (dude, mellow out, man)
- Medical cannabis production experience (had a hydroponic grower in the back of their closet in college)
- Complex negotiation experience (dude, you'd reduce the price of the bag for an extra slice of pizza? NO WAY)
- College Degree or Equivalent Life Experience (isn't having an equivalent life experience and going to college the same thing?)
- 3 years of prior experience in customer relations or retail (dealt pot in college to earn money to go to Phis shows)
- A passion to serve the medical cannabis community

Please do not respond if you do not meet all of the above minimum qualifications.


If you think you can meet our requirements, please send an email with:

1. The subject line “Purchasing Agent – [Insert Your Name]”
2. A cover letter summarizing
a. Why you want to work in a medical cannabis dispensary
b. Your previous experience as a Purchasing Agent
3. Your resume