Category: Words

New Resume Version

Today I went to a job-search-process seminar, in which I learned many things. For example, the average unemployed person spends five hours a week looking for a new job. The people who are most successful finding a new job they like, however, spend thirty-five hours a week looking for work, and have at least thirty networking-oriented conversations a week. They have a plan to market themselves as a hot product, and they have a ranked chart of where they want to work and who they know at those companies.

The seminar also forced me to look at my resume with new eyes. By the time it ended, I wanted to rush home and fix it immediately. I forced myself to go to the gym and run a couple miles first, but when I got home, the first thing I did was fire up OpenOffice.org and fix the problems I’d only noticed when I printed it out.

The new version has more concrete detail about my accomplishments and publications, but it may be too long. I’m sure I’ll learn later on this week when I get to the one-on-one resume counseling.

Nightstand

On the plane, I read The Areas of My Expertise, which was funny, but not really meant to be read straight through. It’s more of a fictional version of Schott’s Miscellany. Which is to say, it’s a fictional reference book that one would never use as a reference anyway.

Because I got my brother a copy of the Complete Calvin and Hobbes book (see also Calvin and Hobbes: The Last Great Comic Strip), which took up more than half my suitcase with its 22-lb, three-volume majesty, I wasn’t able to bring anything else to read. Instead, last night, I rummaged through the nightstand in my parents’ spare bedroom.

They call it the insomnia room, because it’s where my mom sleeps in when my dad is snoring too loudly, and where my dad stays awake if he can’t sleep and wants to let my mom get some rest. So it’s got a neat little pile of soporific reading right next to the bed: one copy each of Gourmet, Martha Stewart Living, Cell, Science, PC Magazine, Architectural Digest, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, all at least six months old. The Architectural Digest is from some time in the last century.

There are also books on cancer and stress management and literary/economic theory, and a short novel about the sole remaining resident of a decrepit rural town in northern Spain. The nearby bookshelves are stuffed with overflow cookbooks, Spanish poetry, and obscure literary theory in roughly equal volume, plus a few children’s books that I think were bought for the now-grown offspring of various friends, but never actually wrapped and given.

I read the article on vintage swizzle sticks from last July’s Martha Stewart and it put me right to sleep.

I often resent science fiction

I read a lot of horrible science fiction when I was in junior high school, as an escape. I loved the way that it could pull me away from a mundane world I hated so much. As I grew older I began to look down on that fear, want to engage more with the world, move away from fantasy and sci-fi. And of course I developed a little taste as well. So when I deign to read genre fiction, I shiver a little, because it reminds me of how much of a loser I was when I was younger. Then I am also reminded of how much of an insufferable snob I have become.

Anyway, the point is that a lot of genre fiction runs on a combination of badly-sewn-together myth and a detailed imaginary world, but some is genuinely good fiction that happens to take place in an incredibly detailed imaginary world. China Miéville writes this sort of thing. Deep themes, good characterization, brilliant turns of phrase (OK, a little too baroque in places, but still very well made).

I read these books and they suck me away into something else and I come up for air a day or two later and think, where have I been?

Naming your Government Bureau

The Massachusetts unemployment insurance program is administered through a group called DET, which doesn’t seem to stand for anything. Their web page is at detma.org, but their headlines proclaim that they are representing the Division of Career Services/Division of Unemployment Assistance (DCS/DUA). I assume that they are changing their acronym from something along the lines of the Division of Employment Termination.

At least they didn’t call it Mass Unemployment.

Songs: Ohia

Word is that Songs: Ohia frontman Jason Molina’s newer efforts, under the name “Magnolia Electric Company,” just aren’t any good.

But I can’t stop listening to the song Just Be Simple (yes, it’s been in my playlist more or less constantly since September. Megan gets annoyed when I do this, because she doesn’t want to get sick of a song. But I binge.)

The lyrics are all about sticking it out and being strong, knowing that running away from problems doesn’t solve them. Of course, I aspire to feeling that way, but you know I think about getting out and putting a new address on things all the damn time. Usually that address is my grandmother’s farm, where I will become an honest workin’ man.

The song goes on “I ain’t lookin for that easy way out– my whole life’s been about try and try and try to be simple again.” Of course, I’m not trying to be simple. I’m making things incredibly complicated. I’m all about unnecessary complications. Sure, I’d love to cut out some of the things I regard as unnecessary, but that often makes things more complicated rather than less. I just dream sometimes of cutting the excess out, cut and cut and cut until everything is gone and something pure and beautiful is laid bare.

Of course, I know that, in reality, that kind of behavior just leaves you with a bloody mess.

When my grandparents bought that farm back in sixty-some, seventy-some, the guy living on it was basically making his living selling firewood. He lived on what he had: deer, a vegetable plot, firewood, squirrels, rabbits, odd jobs, a beat-to-shit pickup. I doubt he kept his teeth much past forty. Why does subsistence farming sound appealing? No health insurance, no culture, no public transit, bad food, long hours, shopping at Goodwill for work-wear. Yet it is a fantasy for a significant number of office drones and working stiffs, including me.

Grass is greener, I guess.

Personal Essay: The Layoff Story

I haven’t been posting much recently because I have had a secret that is finally out today, and I haven’t been thinking about much else lately. But today I am laid off– in Provo they say “riffed out” (from RIF: Reduction In Force) and out here in Boston I like to say “shitcanned,” but however you call it, I’m finally free to post about the impending layoff rumors which came true today. Here’s the story. (It’s not a bad one: I was about ready to leave, and I wish my employers the best of luck. Actually, as a continuing stockholder, I think that cutting costs and improving focus is the right move, and I hope that Wall Street agrees.)

You may have heard some version of this tale before. It’s not a story of business or software, but of secrets and suspicions. See, the king of a small kingdom once crossed a goddess or a nymph, they way royalty sometimes does, and she cursed him with hideous donkey’s ears. To hide them, he had a special hat made. The only people who knew about those feakish ears and the reason that tall hats were suddenly in fashion were the king and the hatmaker. So the king said to the hatmaker, if anyone finds out about these ears, your life is forfeit.

Now, a secret like that fills you up until it’s the only thing that wants to come out of your mouth. It’s like having horrible gas at a dinner party. You have to find somewhere else to get rid of it, but then everyone wonders why you’re standing off to one side of the party on your own, or why you’re hogging the bathroom so much– are you looking down on the rest of the party? Are you lonely and having a bad time? Are you taking drugs and not sharing? Are you sick and bringing infection on us all?

That’s what it’s like knowing who’s going to get laid off before they do. Managers know in advance, days or weeks in advance, that layoffs are coming: and they have to pick who goes and who stays. Within the company, officially, nothing is happening at all. Nothing to see. The same way, I hear, the Pope isn’t really all that ill until he’s completely dead. A layer-off can’t give a heads-up to anyone. It’s against the rules, it’s poor form, it’s risky: a proper layoff comes all at once, a surprise, a clean break. Knowing in advance gives people time to plan malice or sabotage, and at best makes them mopey and unproductive for their last few days or weeks.

But someone has to know the list in advance. And knowing that list means walking around with a secret too big to fit under even the tallest hat.

A secret that big fills you up so much that even if you don’t tell anyone, you start to act different. Not like a poker player with a good hand trying not to smile– more like a big gun in a thigh holster. You keep your hand near your leg, checking for its weight, ready to reach for it at any second. You walk differently, because the holster pinches the hairs on your thigh and gradually plucks it smooth. After awhile you may not notice that your walk has changed, but someone who knows how to watch people walk will know. They won’t just know you’re packing, they’ll be able to tell which leg it’s on, how long you’ve worn it, how heavy it is, how quickly you think you’ll need to pull it out and kill someone.

So if you have to fire someone next week, it’s best to just try to avoid them, so you don’t risk tipping your hand early. If they pass you in the hall and ask about the rumors in a general way, you can say, “well, yeah, there’s some cost cutting, it’s going to be rough, but the company needs to focus on its core intitiatives.” Even that is difficult. You won’t want to look them in the eye. You like them, you don’t want to lay them of. It’s not like it’s your idea. You’re just the messenger; the layoff was imposed from far above. So, if they ask for a meeting, you just put them off as long as you can. Like, maybe the day that you have to meet them to hand them their walking papers and give the mandatory exit interview.

But your best efforts to act normal are pretty unusual behavior. Take the hatmaker. He was usually a chatty guy, the townfolk’s source of fashion-related news from the court. They hear the king has started wearing a tall hat. Why tall? What makes it stay up? Will the ladies be wearing tall hats as well, or is it more of a men’s thing? And of course every time the hatmaker opened his mouth the secret tried to jump out. He couldn’t think of plausible explanations at all. He stammered. He said he was busy. He avoided all his usual gossip.

So the less you want to let on, the more obvious it becomes that you’re hiding something. If you suddenly stop returning emails, schedule all meetings for next week, don’t make eye contact, have sweaty palms, blink too much– it’s obvious something’s up. An astute observer knows what’s up pretty quickly. An astute and unscrupulous observer starts a betting pool.

When the hatmaker couldn’t stand it any more, he went down to the river, dug a hole, and whispered the secret into it. Then he covered it up and stamped it down. The mud is silent, he thought. The mud will keep my secret.

But the mud told the reeds and as everyone knows the reeds whisper in the wind, and soon the whole town knew.

When the whispering got back to the hatmaker, he could taste acid in the back of his throat along with the usual felt and feathers of a day’s work. He knew the king would have him and his special tall hat sewn into a bag together with some rocks, and thrown into the river to drown like unwanted kittens.

Or perhaps another courtier knew, and had spoken? Just like gas at a dinner party, perhaps he could pretend the stench was the dog’s fault, or the valet’s. If he ran, then everyone would know it was him, and horsemen from the king could catch him before he got to the next town, and they’d torture him for fleeing before they finally executed him. So instead of running, he waited, and went about his day as normally as he could.

On the other hand, he didn’t bother to order new hat-feathers for next week. He knew his odds: slim to none. He knew his widow would need to spend the feather money on bread for the children. And the feather merchant saw death in the hatmaker’s eyes. He was no fool either. He knew what was going on. Soon the town knew not only that the king had deformed ears, but that he was going to kill the hatmaker for spilling the secret. New hat orders dried up immediately.

And all the while, the reeds whispered and whispered. The king heard soon enough, and the soldiers came for the hatmaker, and they put him in a sack with the king’s now-useless hat, some rocks, and a few unwanted kittens, and threw the lot in the river.

Like the hatmaker, I’ve been whispering to a the online equivalent of a hole in the ground and acting like I have a secret over here. And all this while, I’ve seen the townsfolk and reeds whispering: LinkedIn invitations have been flying around, the public news sites have more information than the internal website, and everyone has been backing up their data to CD and taking it home. So I’ve known for several days now that I’m on the list of people being laid off.

Of course, I’m not being executed. I practically volunteered: it’s been a good run, I’m ready to move on. I’ve learned a lot, and now it’s time to learn something else somewhere else.

I’m being given a friendly goodbye and I hope to see my co-workers again in the future, for dinner and drinks or around a conference table at another job. I don’t know where I’m headed, but it could be practically anywhere. I could visit my brother in Bolivia. I could move to my grandmother’s farm in Ivy, VA, and raise pet goats, write freelance, sell vegetables at the farmer’s market. I could get the bird flu or drink myself to death, or go to Korea and clone myself and teach the clone to like kimchee. I could devote myself full-time to volunteer work or to stalking celebrities (OK, not that). I could move to California and grow oily dreadlocks and live out of a van.

The world is my shellfish. At least, it is for 18 months, at which point the COBRA insurance plan runs out and I get sick and die.

With commuting comes more reading

Now that it’s cooling off and I’m taking the train and bus more, I’m reading more. I’ve just started on The Electric Michelangelo, which begins with a portrait of a downmarket northern-England seaside town, where the protagonist spends his childhood. According to the back of the book, he’s going to grow up to be a tattoo artist in Coney Island. Reviews are good, and Bookdwarf liked it. So far, I like it as well, although the prose is a little overwrought in places. Still, it’s nice to read something and know that the writer has paid a lot of attention to how the words sound and feel together, and tried to make it beautiful rather than just easy to digest.

It’s interesting when people die

I found out by watching the TV at the gym that Lisa Marie Presley has done a cover version of Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry.” It’s practically written about her, and she does a good enough job with it, with the style evoking 80s hair bands and the movie clips evoking 90s media frenzies. On the other hand, the heavy breathing goes way past “sexy” and “creepy stalker on the phone” to “has she got asthma?”

That was one of my favorite songs when I was about ten, but I thought it was actually about laundry.

Will there be a place to plug in my laptop?

Spook, the new book on the afterlife by Mary Roach is due out this month. Roach is most known for her earlier book Stiff, a witty layman’s approach to what happens to our bodies when we die: burial rites, brain banks, medical cadavers, interviews with forensic entomologists, the whole deal. The book even made a short appearance on Six Feet Under.

Spook continues the funny, informative approach in her desire to find out what the afterlife is like, starting with whether there’s a place to plug in her laptop. Along the way she covers ghosts, soul-weighing, and ectoplasm, and makes short detours into quantum mechanics, information theory, and one man’s search for the moment that a soul enters a human embryo.

Both books have the same winning balance of humor and information, and I recommend them strongly.