No More Twinkies, But At Least The Union Survived Intact...

I've said it before, and it bears repeating: Unions exist to ensure that complete, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, addle-brained doofuses can manage to get and keep overpaid, underworked jobs that their feeble abilities to simply breathe, eat, shit and occupy a particular and unique point in space and time would otherwise make them unqualified for.

Union Big: Hostess out of business, but this only proves the union's power and resolve.

Because, let's face it: it all would have been for nothing if people had kept their jobs in this time of great economic uncertainty and rising prices, only to see the union get busted in the process. That would have been a fucking tragedy.

I'm sure all of those people who are now without a job are so happy they could shit, because that's exactly what they were talked into going on strike for in the first place: to save the union.

Something To Keep Y'All Busy...

I will be quite busy for the next few days, and shall not be stopping in to blog. I know...it's sad, ain't it? There's a few familial obligations to attend to this weekend, and a whole lot of 'networking' to be done at a few so-called Job Fairs, which are more like cattle calls for gray-haired, middle-aged male PhD's and MBA's who are apparently so desperate for a job that they'll sink to selling Green Energy door-to-door.

Been there, and done that. Oh, and of the two so-called Job Fairs or Job Seminars that I've been to in the past two weeks, they're all selling the same type of job;

You work on a "commission-based system"  (that is, for free) for a company that is a fly-by-night subsidiary of a Fortune 1000 that doesn't want to hire you because you cost too much -- what with Social Security taxes, unemployment insurance and fucking ObamaCare. Hopefully, you manage to sell whatever bullshit product they're pushing -- it's such a good product that the company doesn't dare send out it's professional, full-time-pay salesmen to do it for fear of taking them away from the actual lucrative products they normally sell -- to at least recoup your bus fare this week while you're "getting the hang of the sales' thing", and in the meantime, the "company" is either sold without a word, the government-financing runs out, or it goes into bankruptcy, always unexpectedly.

No wonder 30 million people have given up looking for a job.


Anyways, to help keep you entertained for at least a few minutes, I've collected some bits of news and some links for you.to look over. This is all stuff I normally would have blogged about, but for the time constraints and the busy past week, and soon-to-be busier week to come. Enjoy!

Jammie Wearing Fool has moved. Like an idiot, I did not know this. I used to visit JWF just about every day, but then forgot they existed. Which was a big mistake! Visit them today, and have a look-see, or else something seriously bad might happen to your pet Yorkie in the dead of night. Blogroll, belatedly, updated.

Also, it's good to see that Greasywrench has returned to blogging after a long hiatus. You should visit his site, too, if only because you never can quite tell who it was that accidentally-on-purpose cut your brake lines because you didn't. Grease was once an avid supporter of this diseased rant, and this is where I get to pay him off. Go visit.

It goes without saying that if you're STILL not reading Iowahawk regularly then you deserve a big, sloppy tongue kiss from Nancy Pelosi...post her garlic chicken and fried onion luncheon, and only then, after she's licked her own balls as only your dog can.This week's fare is a rib-ticklin' funny-but-sadly-all-too-true Masterpiece of sarcasm and satire.


The American Spectator goes to the Heart of the Sickness Within the Obama Administration. A must-read for those of you who still haven't grapsed the amateurish depravity, or detected the simple-minded, mile-wide Leftoid Fucktard streak in President Odoofus that causes him to go all gay and shit.

John Derbyshire tells the truth about The Establishment Right (and you know who you are, Rich Lowry, and the rest of the frat-boy wing of the conservative movement!). I did not know Derb was ill, and wish him well. I am a big fan from his days at National Review. Between the trust-fund-prep-school Right and the Godbots, this GOP of ours is gonna be royally screwed up one day.

We finish things off, appropriately enough, with a double dose of Professor Hanson. First on just why California is royally screwed if Obama remains in power (as if that wasn't obvious enough?), and then with a classic explanation of why Barack Obama will lose the rhetorical war -- and the election -- to Mitt Romney.

I know there's more that has happened this week, but I'm kinda swamped. Promise that next week I'll get on some things (like the Obama Administration airbrushing the biographies of other Presidents to make their man look like he has clue-fucking-one), and I'll have something to say about snoring...yes, you read that right: Snoring.

See you next week.

UPDATE: Apologies, but on the John Derbyshire thing: you need to read a few of his columns back (and read this here column that started the whole thing) to get the entire gist of it. Derb apparently was denounced by his former "friends" at National Review for...gasp!...speaking his mind on matters of race. Which lead one reader to wonder (paraphrased) "Why do the people at National Review even bother to grovel on questions of race when they will only be called racists, anyway?"

Maybe They Should Call It a White-Old-Man-Cession...

Yes, yes, I know: I've been absent for a while, but I have been quite busy. Looking for a steady job in the blasted heath of what used to be the economic capital of the world can be quite the time-consuming task.

It's also becoming a damned-near futile one. Unless you speak a foreign language.

I say this because it is true. For upon entering the Department of Labor here on Staten Island (what used to be called 'The Unemployment Office'. In Reichsfuhrer Bloomdouche's New Yorkistan, we're supposed to call them 'Employment Centers' keeping with the now decade-long Bloomberg tradition of calling something exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to be for political purposes) one cannot help but think that English must have been replaced as the Chief Lingua Franca at some point, and whoever did it just forgot to tell us.

You will find all sorts of literature there in the Employment Center -- about your rights as a worker, about state wage and overtime laws, how to apply for welfare -- but few, if any, of these pamphlets are written in English. There's Spanish, Creole, Polish, Ukrainian, Arabic, Cantonese, but no English.

The same goes for the Bloomberg Administration's most efficacious, cost-effective, and low-tech solution to the problem of finding a job in tough economic times: the Job Board. Or, as I like to call it, a bulletin board full of minimum-wage grunt tasks that all end with the sentence 'Se Habla Espanol".

If you're a Native Born, English-speaking job seeker with actual skills, you're shit out of luck. The Employment Center apparently doesn't exist to get YOU a job -- for all the times I've been in there in the last five years, I can't recall anyone ever actually doing anything to help me find an employer. Instead, it's always been 'fill in this paperwork, and wait for us to call you. That call, incidentally, never comes -- and frankly, I wonder just what these people are doing on any given day (other than encouraging illegal immigrants to apply for welfare benefits while also hooking them up with jobs).

There was once a time when the Job Market made sense. People needed other people with actual skills, and so they did something that nowadays seems quaint and anachronistic: they employed a Personnel Agency to go out and find qualified candidates for whatever job they had available, and to perform a very valuable service in weeding out the marginally-qualified before arranging interviews. These Agencies put you in touch with prospective employers, there was often a series of interviews, and if you made the right impression upon the hiring manager, you very often got the job.

No more.

Today's Personnel Agency is  little more than a whorehouse for temporary workers. You get pimped out on short-term projects,and wind up having to split your earnings with the agency, who incidentally, also gets a fee for supplying your services. Temp work always sucked, but it never sucked this badly. You might also try to find some (again, temporary) work with what's euphemistically called a 'Consulting Agency', but again, this is sort of like Indentured Servitude: whatever contract you negotiate under the auspices of the 'Consultant Group', you're going to lose about half of it before you even see it.

That's if you can manage to elbow the Indians and Chinese out of the way first, so that you can even get a sniff at a contract. They're willing to work at such ridiculously-low rates that you wonder how it is that they manage to survive, until you remember that they come from countries where famine is a fact of everyday life. These are people who could stretch a pound of rice and a dozen cockroaches, for a family of six, out for half a decade, if they really had to, and skipping meals eighteen days in a row is no big deal.

Anyways,the Personnel Agency and 'Consultantcy' groups have had their primary function of connecting employer with potential-employee largely superceded by that most impersonal of contraptions, the computer.

See, nowadays, you may not even get to see another human being when applying for a job, and depending on how the computer is programmed to do it's job, you  may never even get an interview even when you're infinitely qualified. Your resume goes into a the dark, murky depths of cyberspace and winds up in some hiring manager's PC, and the next thing you know, his 'puter is deciding for him whether or not he should invest any time or effort on you.

I wonder: How many people would have been hired if they got as much as ten minutes of face time with a Manager,but they never got that opportunity because the computer rejected and shitcanned their resume before the Manager was even aware it had been received?

Well, don't fret that personal-factor bullshit none, because technology has an answer for that, too, in the form of Facebook. It has now become common to see a space on an online application where one can put in their Facebook and Twitter nonsense, particularly a link to a Facebook video of you trying to sell yourself to potential employers (why bother with videos when you can you just as easily invite people in to TALK to them? What's so 'interactive' about Facebook or Twitter, in this regard, and really: would you hire someone based upon their ability to use internet shorthand and avoid the 140-character limit?).

It isn't enough to have qualifications and experience, anymore, now you must master the intricacies of Social Networking and Personal Online Marketing just to find a job? What kind of bullshit is this, other than a way of keeping people -- that is,the older folks, who might be making more money -- OUT OF the job market?

That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts of the Modern Job Search. It gets far worse.

Another useful tool in days past was to 'know somebody' who could whisper a word in someone else's ear, or perhaps get you a shot at a position, but those days are long gone. Despite all this bullshit about a 'connected' world and Social Networking, even if you DID 'know someone' the chances of them being able to connect you with a job opportunity are rather slim for two reasons:

1. There ain't no jobs, and the job your contact has they might only be managing to keep by hanging on by their fingernails. They ain't rockin' boats, they ain't stepping forward to put themselves out, and they certainly ain't bringing potential competition into the office.

2. You DO realize that most of the jobs you (and by that I mean 'I') can do with all your qualifications and experience can be done in India, China, Russia, Pakistan, South Africa, Ukraine, and Indonesia for a fraction of the price you'll ask for, right? Why should anyone pay you $150,000k a year, plus bennies, when they can get some third-party Asian coolie to do the same job for $15k (often less), and they don't have to give him medical, a pension, or vacation days?

Then there's the 'BA or equivalent' routine.

I don't know when it became necessary for EVERY job to require a bachelor's degree, but I can pretty much say that it is perhaps the most ridiculous requirement imaginable. I don't have a degree, myself, and quite frankly, I didn't NEED one; I learned my trade by doing, not by sitting in a classroom, learning to parrot a professor who has no actual EXPERIENCE, while piling up unpayable debt.

As a former hiring manager myself, I saw so many college graduates that I began to wonder if they weren't making them on an assembly line somewhere. Most of them, incidentally, couldn't write, count, or find their own asses with both hands. So, imagine what a shock it must be when you pick up an ad for a Computer Operator's job (a job that is, frankly, about as close to factory work as you'll find in the IT industry) and it requires a BA or 5 years of experience.

No problem: I have 20+ years of experience, right? Should be a shoe-in. Except there's no degree for a job that doesn't really require one. And if that excuse doesn't confuse you, try this other one:

Oh, right...I'm too old. Apparently 44 is the new 81 when it comes to employing people, especially if it's in the financial industry and they have to abide by some of the more onerous...and expensive ...state laws. Like the Pension Law that states that if you underwrite any State business, then you MUST contribute a lump-sum payment into your employee's pension fund, based upon their age. A 40-year-old working for a financial firm that underwrites New York State debt, for example, costs that financial company $10,000 a year in pension benefits before he even walks through the door for his first day of work.

Fail to make that pension payment, and you'll never underwrite another bond for New York State.

Of course, no one ever tells you you didn't get the job because you have no degree or are considered too old, you simply don't get called back. Ditto when a background check reveals you've been treated for a mental illness, despite the fact that your medical records are supposed to be private. I'm beginning to think it's probably worth eventually getting caught by claiming a disability on an application, just to have some additional legal protections,or get myself higher up on 'TheList'.

I guess I always could go back to school to learn a set of new skills, but applying for financial aid (State or Federal) is a bit tricky, you see. I'm not Black or Female enough, according to the one consultant I've spoken to on this subject (yes, he actually said those words!). Are you sure you don't have any Muslim, or perhaps Pacific Islander, in your background? Too bad; that would have made you golden.

Same thing for Government Work: not black or female enough, and besides, I have this nasty habit of scoring '100' on every civil service exam I've ever taken, which means I get called LAST for any job, assuming I even get called AT ALL.

I can't stock shelves at the local supermarket: I'm over-qualified, they say. I can't program mainframe systems, or run massive mainframe complexes; I'm under-qualified -- no degree -- despite the fact that I did exactly these things for over 20 years. I'm not bi-tri-or-quadri-lingual, which I'm told puts me at a distinct disadvantage in the 'Global Marketplace', but then again, the 'Global Marketplace' is right here in the United States, sucking up welfare benefits, undercutting wages, and filling the 'Employment Office' with pamphlets written in Sanskrit, Cuneiform and Hieroglyphics.

What to do, what to do?

I guess I'll have to do one of those 'reinventing myself' routines you used to see on Oprah before she got tired of hiding her raging 50-pound-a-day bonbon habit from public view. I mean, I could start a business of my own, but certainly not in this country, that's for sure. The taxes and ObamaCare mandates alone would kill you. But even going overseas to start a business could be tricky. After all, you need to find a business concept that will attract local interest.

That means any plans I had for teaching basic hygiene in El Salvador are probably doomed to fail before I even begin. Do you know how many e coli-on-spinach cases we'd avoid if Salvadorans just washed regularly before they picked it?

Ditto for my other great idea, which was to introduce soap to Pakistan. I figured I could corner the soap market,and be the biggest importer of the stuff by simply putting a few dozen bars of Ivory or Irish Spring in a suitcase -- this would represent about a 5,000,000% increase in Pakistani soap imports -- and selling them on a street corner in Karachi. Pakistanis will pay anything, you know, just avoid each other's stench.

Seriously, though, I have to find something to do, and soon. It's starting to look pretty bleak, now and I'm running out of time, what with a sick mother and bills to pay, and all that. So, if there's anyone out there that needs a relatively-smart guy with a work ethic, willing to pay a decent wage, drop us a line at the Lunatic's Asylum and make us an offer.

I'll pretty much consider anything that doesn't involve a foreign object being inserted -- or forcibly removed -- from my rectum.

Oh, And Here's One More Reason Not To Visit Africa...

As if endemic Civil War, Exotic Diseases, Unwashed Scrotums, Biblical starvation, Communism, Islamic Hit Squads, Squalor and those annoying Vuvuzelas weren't enough, there's this:

The Great Frozen Chicken Horror.

And these are the people the United States spent Stimulus Funds on to teach basic hygiene?

Why IT Managers are the Dumbest People On Earth...

Okay, so just why was it that I had to go into Manhattan yesterday? Well, there was the prospect of some work, is why!

There is a certain software company, which shall remain nameless, which produces an entire line of (very expensive) products which it promises that it's customers will be able to make the optimum use of information to make themselves more profitable. If you've ever worked in the IT industry, this is a standard sales ploy: our software will enable your sales force to do X, your employees to do Y, and your management to do Z, all of which will increase "productivity" and sales, cut down on miscommunication and human error, and save you scads of cash.

Which will then be given to people who do no useful work, and already make scads of cash. But that's besides the point...

The truth is that very often these claims are hard to justify. Yes, there are instances where automation can save you money, but more often than not you spend more than you save between implementation costs, maintenance, upgrades, and the disruption to the normal "routine" that each new technological gee-gaw introduces to your work flow. Programmers must devote hours to implementation and customization. Workflow Experts must decide how these tools can best be used and introduced. People need to be trained on how to use the thing. There's often new equipment to buy to make use of it. You have to hire consultants to put the thing into operation and integrate it with your existing infrastructure, or spend a lot of man-hours taking your staff from their regular duties to work with the new crap.

Technology evolves every few years, and today's bargain or productivity tool is tomorrow's White Elephant. As an IT manager, you have to be aware of this, and you need to realize that when you make a purchasing decision, that you make it for the long term. Nowadays, the trend is to buy the latest-and-greatest...and then replace it six or 12 months later when something latest-er-and-greatest-er comes along. IT budgets balloon, cash gets tight, and then you have to fire a lot of people just to keep your job.

And a year later, you make the same mistakes and the cycle continues. Because once most IT managers reach a certain level in the corporate pecking order they become more politician-than-line-worker, you eventually wind up with a multiplicity of tools of dubious value (the quickest way up the ladder is to convince your superiors that you've got the latest money-saving idea, rather than the most efficient or intelligent idea). You can't get rid of these White Elephants because you're locked into multi-year contracts, and you simply can't go back to your bosses and ask for yet-another $2 million for a new-and-improved version of what you've just fucked up.

Eventually, you wind up having to write memos exhorting the troops to use a piece of software that they a) hate using, b) often find useless and c) can't really take full advantage of, just to justify the original expense...and you desperately hope no one above you notices (don't worry, they usually don't, because they're even further removed from reality than you are).

The next step in saving your job is to implement a regime of more rigorous Information Management technologies, which is a fancy term for "can someone make sense of this shitpile for me"? If it's your shitpile and you can't make heads or tails from it, you have a problem. What makes you think I can fix it for you in a short period of time? The solution involves tying together various platforms, a multitude of different data types, and is the electronic version of trying to herd cats, into a simpler, more efficient system that promises to deliver information to those who need it, as they need it, in a way that doesn't require a PhD in Attic Greek to understand what you're looking at, and of course, cheaply.

Except that consultants ain't cheap, and neither is starting from scratch.

IT managers get into this hole because they have been raised in a climate where"Information is Power", and because it is believed (wrongly) that an employee who has access to information that otherwise has no bearing on how they do their job is a more efficient, and therefore more valuable, employee. This is wrong because the same IT managers almost always make the same secondary mistake:

Having spent millions on new technology and the means to diffuse it (iPads, Blackberries, cell phones, desktops, servers, e-mail, and so forth), they do not make any effort on training employees on how to actually use and evaluate this information properly. After all, Training People is an Expense, you see. Eventually, the typical IT worker reaches a curious state; he's supposed to be an expert in the technology you're using, but he hasn't necessarily been trained on it, and he now has information being blasted at him from all quarters, most of which he doesn't need, and he's overloaded. He's not expected to actually think (thinking leads people to make mistakes), but he is expected to always have the answers to every douchebag who calls the help line, or every visiting VIP who asks him a question about what he does and how he does it.

This is your first line of defense against problems which interfere with your, supposedly, most valuable asset: information.

And so, you find yourself on the lookout for the next best technological answer to a relatively simple manpower problem. You're not making effective use of an employee's brainpower, in fact, you're discounting the possibility of them having any brainpower at all, and become reliant on technology rather than people, and you're invested up to the neck in it. People have an advantage over technology in that they are able to think in the abstract, and are capable of showing initiative when properly motivated. If more IT managers realized this, there wouldn't be a multi-hundred-billion dollar "Information Management Software" industry, fewer IT workers would die of heart attacks before their 45th birthday, and American business would not be beholden to machines that most cannot comprehend.

And I wouldn't have to take an interview to work for an Information Management Software Company that hardly makes use of it's own products because it knows they're unequal to the Herculean task of delivering what they promise to deliver: efficiency, flexibility and cost-savings at an affordable price. You think I want to work here? Guess again!

Who wants to design NEW software to do what the last batch promised to do, but doesn't? Why didn't they just keep those programmers and designers and tell them to fix the piece of shit when they discovered it was a total kludge? Oh, right, that would have entailed expense: keeping employees with institutional knowledge, not to mention recreating something that already cost you more than you expected.

Total waste of time, this interview, except for all the ladies that I saw on the way in (see last post). You can only reinvent the wheel so many times before it's no longer a wheel. Besides, most of the kludge comes from all the bells-and-whistles (they're typically so-called "Flexible management features", which is a metaphor for "bullshit" ) you've added to your software, which usually originated by a request from ONE customer to do something differently -- usually because his bosses prefer multi-color pie-charts to monochromatic bar graphs. .

It seems to me that if you really wanted to make money in information management these days, you'd do better to recommend that managers actually make an honest evaluation of their mistakes, and then pour resources into bringing staff up to speed on what they have available to them, and them how to properly use it instead of constantly having to buy something else. I'm going to talk to some folks I know, because there's obviously a dollar or two to made here without having to write code.

CVS Corporate Policy: Discard Unsold Toys -- But Poison Them First.

We're continuously assured that our major corporations are run by "the best and brightest" minds available. And then you read something like this:

CVS Corporate Policy: Discard Unsold Toys, But Poison them With Bleach, First.

And now you know why many of our corporations are in such hideous shape; they are run by unthinking, unfeeling retards who apparently don't think things through very well. The CVS spokesman talks out of both sides of his mouth, and rectum, simultaneously. Get this:

"He (The employee cited in the article) was following policy by insuring the items were not removed from the Dumpster," says CVS Pharmacy’s corporate spokesman Mike DeAngelis.
DeAngelis says people have been known to take toys out of the Dumpster, hurt themselves on the toys, then go back and sue CVS for damages.

In corporate lingo, that’s called "creating a liability" — taking products out of a Dumpster which may or may not be safe.

"If it’s been thrown away, we don’t want anyone to get hurt," DeAngelis says. "We have to protect the liability of the store."

But somehow giving a guy several gallons of bleach, to be used in a potentially-careless manner, with which to possibly injure or sicken himself -- or a passer-by -- is somehow limiting liability?

I'm certain that the Toys for Tots campaign, which the United States Marine Corps runs every year to bring Christmas joy to needy children, would have loved to have gotten an overflowing dumpster full of unused toys. The NYPD and NYFD also have similar programs. Veterans groups, church organizations, local day care centers and pre-schools, those who deal with mentally-and-physically handicapped children, would have taken those toys in a heartbeat, and they would have done some good with them. Instead, all that plastic, now tainted by bleach, will sit in a landfill somewhere for the next 10,000 years and probably poison our ground water.

This is one of those situations where a Tree Hugger might actually be useful. These are not the actions of a responsible corporation, or store owner, and they show a depth of stupidity that it is difficult to understand. Polluting refuse and unsold merchandise with bleach is a Corporate Policy? Why not Rat Poison? Why not just rig the dumpster to explode if it's opened by unauthorized personnel?

Somewhere in America, there's a kid for whom an abandoned Care Bear would have been a treasure beyond all price (Haven't these morons seen Toy Story?). All your typical MBA sees is an unsold product which is somehow cheaper to destroy and toss away than to try to sell at a lower price, or even donate.

Just think about the waste: that merchandise cost money, and if it couldn't be sold for a profit, then it could easily have been given to charity for a tax write-off, unless the Obamatards have made that illegal or not worth the paperwork. This is a shame beyond all meaning of the word.

And these are the people who run your corporations, write the laws through lobbyists and purchased "representatives", and claim to be pillars of the community?

This story breaks your heart...and then it makes you physically sick, and that nausea isn't just from the bleach fumes.

I'm writing a letter to CVS to express my outrage and dismay. I invite the rest of you to do likewise.

From now on, the letters "CVS" will no longer stand for quality merchandise and excellent customer service. They will stand for "Congenitally Venal Scumbags". This is, in it's own sick and twisted way, a form of child abuse, in my opinion.

I will not buy as much as a stick of chewing gum or a fucking aspirin in a CVS store ever again.