Check it out, everybody… I’m taking my opinions on job seekers on the road. I’m announcing Magic Pot of Jobs, a combination of advice for jobseekers, advice for hiring managers, and entertaining stories about what it’s like to work in recruiting. Enjoy!
“So, I see that you’ve done some ‘end user and technical documentation.’ Can you tell me about that?”
“Uh, what?”
“The documentation you did. What was it for?”
“I’m not sure what you mean…”
“I’m reading the sentence directly from your resume. It says you did ‘end user and technical documentation.’ What were you documenting?”
“Oh! Well, see, one day the network was down. So we had to log the calls by hand, on paper.”
*Tiff wishes for a wall to bang her head against*
Conversations I had yesterday:
—–
“Well, the job description says you want a web developer who will also manage your network, and that’s a very rare sort of person. They’re very divergent skill sets.”
“I don’t want a web developer!”
“Your job description specifically says that 50% of the person’s time will be spent on web development, and 15% on database administration.”
“But I don’t want a web developer! I want a programmer!”
“A programmer who writes code for the web IS a web developer.”
“Oh.”
——–
“This HTML Programmer you’re asking me for really sounds more like a Unix Systems Administrator.”
“We don’t need a Unix administrator. We need someone to do HTML and install and configure Solaris.”
“A person who can install and configure Solaris is called a Unix Systems Administrator. An HTML coder who designs websites will weep if you ask him to configure a Unix box.”
“Oh.”
——-
How is it that HR people who are in charge of hiring IT people are allowed to get away with being so completely ignorant of IT? Here’s a hint, people: As a general rule, people who code do so because they hate running the servers and the network. And people who run the servers and network do so because they aren’t coders (and often have no desire to be).
I shouldn’t complain. It’s their ignorance that makes my job necessary. But yesterday I was biting my tongue a couple of times to keep from adding, “…so STOP ARGUING with me! You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about and I DO!”
Just so that my mom doesn’t have to alert the local constabulary, I am home safe from New York, and currently sitting in my office, looking at the pile of stuff my new and oh-so-industrious unit partner assembled for my review during the ONE DAY I was out of the office.
Damn, homegirl has been busy. You should see this annotated pile of resumes and job orders that was so neatly stacked on my chair when I arrived this morning.
Anyway, back to the ol’ grind. Work on Tom’s bathroom is starting this week, so I have to spend the evening preparing mi casa for houseguests- two feline, one human. But at some point, I AM going to break out some of the Perplex City cards… it just might not be before tomorrow…
In the meantime, check out my Flickrstream for more New York photos.
This is just a little bit of the weirdness I experienced yesterday.
It was a perfect day in New York. Sunny and warm, but only moderately humid. Perfect for wandering around the city. And wander we did. We caught Adrian and Michael’s presentation on Perplex City, perhaps the first ARG since the A.I. game to catch my interest at all. But then we decided to leave the presentations for a bit and explore the city. First on the agenda- Central Park.
Dudes, I just don’t get the mystique of New York. I mean, there’s plenty of cool stuff here that I would certainly make the trip to see, and I’m sure I’ll be back at some point. But while I’d go to London just to hang out in London, I can’t get into the idea of coming to New York just to hang out in New York.
Except for Central Park. We do not have parks this cool in DC. Watch my Flickrstream for photos.
Then I filled up both my memory cards. I’ve got a 5 megapixel camera, and I shoot at Vivid, Superfine, and maximum resolution, and yet I had never bothered to get a card bigger than the 64 MB I had bought for my old 2 mpx Nikon. So I had a 64 and a 32, which between them held 24 photos. Not nearly enough.
So we took off for J&R Computer World to get me a 512 MB, because really, that’s just ridiculous. They were having a sale. Bonus! After that, we got hot dogs from a street vendor (of course) and decided to put off our trip to Toy Tokyo- one of the only places in the US that sells the Perplex City puzzle cards. We had run out of time and needed to get back for Jane McGonigal’s presentation on the ARG genre as a whole and why we call it Alternate Reality Gaming.
Jane did manage to warm me up a bit to the term Alternate Reality Gaming, which I had never really liked untile she deconstructed it and demonstrated how appropriate it actually is. But the funny thing, the thing I don’t think she quite realizes is…
The term “Alternate Reality Gaming” won out over the term “Immersive Fiction” simply because someone was an asshole. (If you don’t know the story, count yourself lucky.)
And then it was time for the grand ARGFest-o-Con game! StreetQuest! Basically, it was a game designed to take us all over New York City and eventually reveal the location of where we would all meet for dinner.
And it sucked monkeynuts. Seriouly. It was bad.
Don’t get me wrong. On paper, it looked great. Four teams, each with a rented cell phone. A hint line you could call if you got stuck on a clue or even if you needed help navigating New York. Unlimited subway day-passes. A series of envelopes to open when you receive the signal. Maps to help you get around. Specific times when the puppetmasters would call you to check on you. It had complete cool potential.
But the first clue involved dialing a phone number to get your instructions. The guy who answered the phone just said, “I hear music. Now it’s asking me to set up voicemail.” So we kept walking. And walking. And walking. Finally we got a call asking why we weren’t where we were supposed to be. The answer, of course, is “Because we haven’t been told where to be.”
Turns out, that music the guy who answered our phone heard was Billy Joel’s “For the Longest Time.” Clearly, we were to go to the Rodgers theater, where Movin’ Out is playing. Only the guy answering the phone isn’t American and wasn’t familiar with the music of Billy Joel. Oh yeah, and did I mention these were RENTED CELL PHONES and we were standing on a street corner in NEW YORK CITY when we heard the clue? A little noise interference maybe?
And that was just the beginning. There were a couple of clues that involved texting a code to a number, and then receiving a message back with the hint for the next location. Once, the code just yielded an error message, and we were stuck at Toy Tokyo (which was partially okay, because we finally got our Perplex City cards). But there we were, stranded in the East Village, and oh by the way… that help line we were supposed to call if that happened? Yeah, it wasn’t getting answered.
Talk about PMs breaching the trust of the players. Fortunately, Jay Bushman is a New York native and navigated us around the city.
But dinner at Lombardi’s was good- sangria and pizza. Mmmm….
I was seriously hurting from all the hiking we had to do. My next major purchase is going to be a quality pair of walking shoes, and I don’t care how much they cost, because clearly if a few hours of walking in cheap ass Target shoes is going to hurt the way this did, it’s a small price to pay.
But overall, it was a good day- got to see a lot of New York, ate some good pizza, hung out with the Cloudmakers. Yay. 
Have arrived safe to NYC, and enjoyed dinner and adult beverages with the veritable parade of geeks that walked into the itty bitty restaurant with us. Even though there are lots of people I don’t know, or if I do, still haven’t met, we’re really not hard to pick out. (Nothing but love, I wear my geek status as a badge of honor.)
Haven’t had much of a chance to take good photos yet- I’m staying on Times Square and this whole area is sensory overload, with the flashing neon and the noise and the wow-I-thought-DC-was-crazy. But look for better photos tomorrow night.
Phishing scams are getting more aggressive- I just got an email claiming to be from eBay’s Safeharbor department, threatening to suspend my account if I didn’t click the link and re-update my account information. Oh yeah, and if my account were suspended for that, I’d be forbidden to even open a new account at eBay. Riiiiiight.
So just a reminder- legitimate businesses don’t ask you for your personal information in response to an email. If you suspect the email might be legit, don’t click on the link in the email- go directly to the company’s homepage by typing it into your browser’s address bar yourself. Scammers use a variety of tactics to conceal the actual destination of the link in the email, so don’t use it. The email I got today was actually one big image file that showed the text, and it was linked to the malicious site, with the expectation that I wouldn’t notice because I’d be trying to click on the part of the image that looked like a link to eBay. Don’t fall for this.
(Oh, and since I know some of you are wondering- my spiffy new bag is even cooler than I had hoped. The clear display pocket on the front is the perfect size for a 4×6 photo, there are lots of inner pockets for my gadgets, etc.)
I think this might be the winning bag. I’ve ordered it in pink and black- I’ve even ordered overnight shipping for it so I can have it before Tom and I go to New York on Friday for the weekend.
It’s not all cute and girly like a purse, but I’ve got girly purses for when I need one. This can be my everyday bag…
So, like many geeks, especially girl geeks, I am on what seems to be a never-ending quest for The Perfect Bag. When I’m carrying my laptop, my Timbuk2 messenger bag does really well with managing the assorted chargers and gadgets and whatnot, but I don’t carry my laptop around as much anymore and it’s sort of excessive when I’m not packin’ the axe, as it were.
So I’m trying to adapt what Robert Daeley calls Zen Pockets- the problem is just that, being a girl, I don’t usually have pockets. I’ve gone from the big pink clutch wallet to a little case that holds my wallet, debit card, and a couple of other essential cards with a little zippered pouch for cash. I’ve boiled everything else down to the bare essentials and the more important nice-to-haves.
Ultimately, what I need is a bag that will hold all of the following, while compartmentalizing it enough that I don’t have to root around for anything.
- ID/credit card case
- Zippered change purse
- pen
- lip gloss
- iPod
- cell phone
- PDA
- 6 index cards
- digital camera (a Canon ELPH model)
- 2 tampons
- keys
- prescription medication
- teeny bottle of hand sanitizer
- combination comb/brush
- Metro SmarTrip card
- Business card case
- Spare memory card for digicam
I’ve been trying out a Baggallini Large Wallet Bagg. It has the appropriate configuration of inner compartments, and would have been fine except my camera kind of ruins the whole thing. The camera gets shoved into one side, and it takes up so much space that there’s not a lot of “give” in the bag for other stuff. So if I need to put my keys in it, or if I get a receipt I need to keep for my expense report, there’s no way to put it away quickly because I’m trying to shove it into an already overloaded bag.
So I’ve got to keep looking. Any recommendations?
In which Mary Ann discusses my personal grammar pet peeves.
Those bastards at LA Voice have spilled the beans.
This one is for my mom, and I quote:
Then there’s the mistake I made in my haste to super-secure my data. I assumed that paper transactions must be safer than electronic ones, so I canceled my online bill-pay service. This not only made my husband grouchy, it may have been a waste of time.
“Online bill payments are probably more secure than sending paper bills with a stamp,” said Linda Foley, co-executive director of the Identity Theft Resource Center (www.idtheftcenter.org).
As long as your computer is protected with a firewall and virus software, online banking and bill paying may reduce the risk of data theft by reducing the number of people who handle your transactions. “It’s not computers that steal information, it’s human beings,” Ms. Foley said.
So online bill payment is safer than paper, and you can tell Dad that the New York Times says so. My Dad presciently insisted that my brother and I learn early on how to use computers. Now both his kids are in IT-related jobs and he’s a complete Luddite about online bill payments, ATM cards, etc.
How people found their dream jobs
I am saddened that the iTunes 500 Million contest took place ENTIRELY during the time when I was unable to use my debit card, which is attached to my iTunes account. However, it’s probably best for my finanial health as iTunes is my greatest unbudgeted drain on my bank account.
