gripe – The Sound of One Hand Typing

I’ve been using the job boards a lot in my current job search. Or trying to, anyway. What this means is that my resume gets into a lot of hands.

Some of those hands actually try to be helpful. I got a call today from a recruiter (one of those people we used to call “headhunters”) who had an exciting opportunity. So exciting, in fact, that I could barely understand the message he left me. The only word that I was able to figure out was the name of the company that I used to work for. Finally, the guy sent me an email explaining what he wanted. When I read where the client was located, I knew who the client was, because I had been there, leading a training session. (They were possibly the rudest people I have ever worked with. They were late coming to class, late coming back from breaks and lunch, wouldn’t do the exercises, sat and did their emails and took phone calls while I was talking, and wanted class to be over at 3:30 every afternoon. The last thing I wanted to do is work with them for the next twelve months.)

But, here’s the thing that really gets me:

You get an email from a board with a number of job openings, and find one that sounds interesting. You click on the link and are brought to a screen that shows you part of the job listing… then, if you want to see the rest of it, you have to pay them. You have to subscribe to their board to apply for the job.

Now, they aren’t asking for a whole lot of money. It works out to what you’d pay to buy the Sunday papers (which evidently no one does anymore when they’re looking for work) every week. But it’s the principle involved. It’s like they’re saying, “if you want the job, you have to give us money.” I learned years ago that you never, never, never pay someone to find you a job. A legitimate recruiter or job board gets their fee from the company with whom they placed the candidate.

Needless to say, I’ll find other job boards to do business with.

Twice a year, the wise folks in Washington require that we disrupt our circadian rhythms by setting the clocks forward by one hour in the spring, and setting them back by the same hour in the fall. It kind of makes sense, since by doing so the sun isn’t rising at 5 AM during the summer, and the clocks are reset so the kids aren’t going to school in the dark during the winter. I’m not complaining about that, although the sun just started rising at 7 AM here in the South, which is now 8 AM Eastern Daylight Time, so the kids end up going to school in the dark anyway. But I don’t have kids, so it doesn’t matter to me.

Back when I was much younger than I am now, Daylight Saving Time (note: not Daylight Savings Time) started on the last Sunday of April and ended on the last Sunday in October. That made sense: we had six months of Standard Time and six months of Daylight time, everyone was happy and no one got hurt. Sometime in the mid-1970’s, in order to save energy, we observed the “spring forward” part of DST, but didn’t set the clocks back for a couple of years. That was fine, too; there weren’t the couple of days after the clocks were changed where everyone wandered around lost, asking each other, “What time is it? It feels like it should be earlier/later.”

Now, with DST starting in March and ending in November, we have eight months of Daylight Saving Time and four months of Standard Time. To put it bluntly, why don’t we just go ahead, set the clocks forward one hour, and be done with it? We did that during World War II and it didn’t create a problem, and people weren’t spending several days trying to reset their internal clocks. As I mentioned earlier, we did it in the ’70’s and the world didn’t come to an end. The people in Arizona and Hawai’i never change their clocks, and it’s not anywhere near as bad as if they never changed their underwear…Well, I think you get my point.

No doubt by Wednesday or so my internal clock will match the clock that everyone else runs their lives by, and it will no longer matter. Until November 4, anyway.

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I wanted to put in a word for 750Words.com, a webite that I’ve been using for three weeks now, and will probably use from now on. No doubt, you’ve read Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, and have heard of “morning pages”. Her rules for morning pages are three longhand pages written when you first get up in the morning, the idea being to kickstart your creativity in the morning.That’s all well and good, but I lost my ability to write longhand five years ago, and I have things that I need to do before morning pages, so I was under the impression that they were useless to me.

Nevertheless, when I ran across the site, I just had to try it. And I realized that, as nice as it would be to write three longhand pages when I first get up, typing them (750 words is three typewritten pages) after I’ve done what I need to do and while I’m having my coffee works just as well. As they say, rules are meant to be broken.