The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

A few quick tales about my workplace, since I know you all enjoy stupid customer stories (some events dramatized for comic effect):

Client: “I want a senior ColdFusion Developer, but I only want to pay $40/hour. What? I can’t hear you… STOP LAUGHING!!!”

—

Me: “Okay, sounds great… what I’ll need you to do is send your resume in to our recruiter, and his email address is-”

Potential Temp: “Well, can I talk to him?”

Me: “He’s on the phone, but send him your resume and he’ll follow up right away.”

PT: “But why would I send him my resume without talking to him first?”

Me: because I just told you to. “Because that’s our process for new applications.”

PT: “But I don’t want to just send my resume out.”

Then I guess you don’t want a job that badly, do you?

—

PT: “I’m calling about the data entry posting I saw on the Internet.”

Me: “Um, that posting wasn’t made by our office. Do you-”

PT: “But I saw it! On the Internet! It said you had a data entry job!”

Me: because if you see it on the Internet, it has to be true. “Sir, our office doesn’t place for data entry positions, but I can give you the number-”

PT: “But this number was given to my by a FRIEND!”

Me: “I understand that sir, but if you are looking for a data entry job, I can’t help you. As I said, our office does not have data entry jobs. Our office down the street does that, and I can give you the correct number.”

PT: “Is it still the same company?”

What part of “our office” don’t you understand?

—

Some advice when looking for a job:

- The answer to “What kind of work do you do?” is NOT “Anything, really…”

- “You got any jobs?” is not an effective question when you are looking for work in a professional environment.

- A secret: if someone who can get you a job asks you to follow a particular application process, do not argue with them or tell them all the reasons you don’t want to do it. If you can’t follow directions, you aren’t going to get a job.

—

One more:

“Performed systems administration by maintaining a customer database” is not a bullet point that’s going to get you a job as a systems administrator. It just makes you look like you’re trying to make something out of nothing.

Scissor Sisters are the musical guest on SNL tonight. Ana Matronic’s dress is a crime against humanity.

Honey, just because there’s nothing wrong with not being a size 2 doesn’t mean you have to wear clothes that add 100 pounds to your figure.

Colin Farrell is hosting Saturday Night Live rerun tonight. Being hot does not make up for the fact that he’s reading cue cards through this whole skit.

Dude. You’re paid zillions of dollars to make movies of questionable quality. Learn your damn lines.

I know. I’m a blog slacker.

Work continues to go well. I miss Blondie and the Sri German, but I’m making good headway at the new job- trying to fill job orders, dealing with nightmare customers who give you vague descriptions of what they want and expect you to read their minds, wondering who teaches tech people how to write resumes (apparently no one), etc.

Actually, the most amusing anecdote from work recently is that one of the male agents was recently forced to call in sick- he called Lisa to help him figure out what was wrong. I was sitting on the room and heard, “Well, does it hurt more on one side of your head? …Does it feel like someone is standing inside your head and trying to drive a nail through your eye from the inside? …And there’s a light that seems to come from your ear and go into your eye? …Yeah, you’ve got a migraine. Welcome to mine and Tiff’s world.”

She advised him to go get some Excedrin. It helped, and apparently he called later and said, “I’m really sorry for all the times I rolled my eyes at you and Tiff and said, ‘You’ve just got a headache?’”

Heh.

I’ve got more posts brewing, but I wanted to quick-post the link to Perverted, God-Hating Frenchies vs. Inbred, Sex-Obsessed Yokels, in which the fundamental misunderstandings between liberals and conservatives are explored. Required reading for all of you.

Via The Tepster.

It was a magical season, but now it’s over.

Tom has temporarily soothed the pain by bringing me cookie dough ice cream.

Don’t anyone else talk to me.

To apologize for the recent lack of posts, a mammoth collection of fun links:

A journalist makes the Switch. (user: warmndecember pw: 333444) Also, another comparison of the mini Mac to a low-end Dell.

iPod Jewelry, so that your iPod Shuffle will look like a necklace rather than a pack of gum on a string.

Unintended consequences of bad copyright law.

Colorized photos of classic TV starts, all colorized in Photoshop.

Guinness’ first snow!.

Note to self: Networking tips for introverts.

Info on Technorati tags, to read up on when I have time.

Cool vintage tin signs.

The house of Shag.

And, just in time for Valentin’e Day shopping, say “I love you” with soap.

Since apparently an inch or two of snow sends drivers in this town into a complete frenzy of panic and idiocy, allow me to pass on some tips for driving in the snow:

1. Four wheel drive doesn’t mean four-wheel STOP. You can’t, as Amy says, drive 75 in the snow just because you have an SUV.
2. Expect to slide a bit, and understand that the way to come out of a skid is by turning your wheel gently away from the skid.
3. Don’t go any faster than the skid you can recover from- if you’re going 15, you won’t skid any faster than 15 mph, unless you happen to be sliding downhill. So as you’re deciding how fast you can go, ask yourself how much time you’d need to recover from a skid before hitting something, and accelerate accordingly.
4. If you’re having trouble with sliding in the snow, put your car into a lower gear. For those of you driving an automatic, this is what those numbers under the “D” on your gearshift is for. You will get better results, I promise.
5. Accept that it’s going to be slow going, and adopt an attitude of “better late than smeared all over the road.”

Amy posted today about the globalization of America, as reflected in her fridge.

I had a similar thought today. I needed a new chair for my office, so a coworker and I made an afternoon Ikea run, stopping for lunch along the way.

We drove my German car, assembled in Mexico, to a Vietnamese restaurant where we ate lunch while listening to a Latino singer, on our way to a Swedish furniture store, to buy a chair that was made in China. We put the chair in my office- did I mention that our company is Dutch?

It made me smile. I enjoy being part of this aggregation of cultures and economies. The nice thing about being an American, I guess, is that we don’t feel any tug of a culture to maintain the purity of- our culture is mostly a collection of stuff we decided to keep from the various immigrant groups who have come to be part of it.

Julian McMahon is apparently besieged by women asking him to evaluate their breasts, due to his role on Nip/Tuck.

That’s pretty dumb, but I can certainly understand being inspired to ask Julian McMahon what he thinks of your boobs. Rowr.