Report from Chicagoland

We trekked to the Chicago area to attend a family (my second cousin-in-law) wedding and to visit long-time friends in the college town of Urbana. Lemme tell you, if there’s gloom in nation, a pall on America’s spirit, I didn’t find it here. Folks are going about their business. They’re making lives, working hard, and are hopeful for their kids and grandkids. They’re glad for a light snow cover to make December feel like Christmas.

To be sure, we didn’t initiate any conversations aobut politics with anyone outside of the decidedly liberal crowd at the taping of Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!. We let people about work and families and the usual fare for people who’d just met.  The most serious social problem that I heard discussed came from one woman who told of neighborhood kids playing baseball in her driveway and denting her garage door.

A room with a view

The rehearsal dinner was in a restaurant in the back of a bowling alley. Several people at the lanes were wearing Bowling for Jesus shirts “because He died your pins.”

It’s true that Marshall Field’s has been hollowed out and replaced by Macy’s, that Dunkin’ Donuts is bringing its alleged coffee to every street corner and gas station. There were few choices for breakfast near our hotel that’s at the back of a large shopping mall that’s in the middle of the carpet of suburbs. So we had our breakfast at IKEA and were very pleased. We ate lunch at the restaurant next to the Bass Pro Shop.

The people we spoke with were unfailingly polite as you’d expect. Their work was often in flux. The people getting married are in their mid-30s, late by the standards of previous generations, but common now. Housing prices are low, but credit is extremely tight, so attractive homes stay on the market for a long time. There weren’t  a lot of little kids around, letting the four-year-old ring-bearer enjoy his day without competition.

We talked long enough to get beyond the introductory niceties. People didn’t, of course, get to deep stories, but they did talk of their futures, what they liked and disliked about their jobs, what they did on weekends, and what they imagined for retirement. None of it was on hold until the 2012 election. None of it was about 99% or 1%. None of it was about class war or the war on Christmas or or who believed what. They talked about what they were doing and what they were gonna do.

If you read or watch or listen to the news, you might think that the fabric of the nation is irrecoverably split. The news spends too much time listening to itself.  Chicago may be divided, but it’s between Cubs fans and White Sox fans, those who care or don’t care that Theo Epstein might bring a World Series championship to Wrigley Field.

The job’s yours, unless you need it.

A couple of months ago, an email came through with information about a contract technical writing job with Staples. The message, sent by a recruiter, included this delicious sentence:

Only seeking candidates who have been recently (within the last 3 months) been working as a technical writer.

This is a contract position, mind you, not even a permanent job. They didn’t want anyone who was a) new to the profession or, more likely, b) out of work for a long time.
I muttered a bad word and forgot about the email until I saw this article in the New York Times: The Help-Wanted Sign Comes With a Frustrating Asterisk
It appears that this is a common trend. Employers, flush with stimulus funds and renewed tax cuts,  are choosing to treat people who have been out of work for a long time as damaged. (This also applies to people who have gone through training in preparation for a career change.)
It may not be quite as bad as it seems. A search through Monster, SimplyHired, Craigslist, and a few other job sites only showed this example from Monster:

The Times article notes that New Jersey has passed a law that prohibits discrimination against the unemployed.
And so, tonight’s moment of Zen: would you ever get the chance to turn down a job offer from a place that wouldn’t hire you because you were out of work? 

Dept. of Self-Promotion

I am now a blogger on The CMO Site, an executive social network that provides research and analysis for chief marketing officers and other marketing executives with a focus on technology and social media. I’m grateful to be working with long-time friend, Keith Dawson, who is senior editor at the site.
My first post, Massachusetts Healthcare Marketers Struggle With Consumer Apathy, went live this morning.

On the job search front

Job prospects seem to be improving. Every day, there’s at least one lead to pursue. Last year, weeks could go by in silence.
I had a call from a recruiter regarding a very interesting job last week. I declined to pursue it because of the commute. The company _really_ wanted someone on-site all of the time and I’m not willing to spend 20% of my waking hours in my car.
Yesterday, though, I had a good conversation with another consultant who may have some assignments that might be a good fit. We’ll talk more in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, the online sites offer, I’d said, one or two leads a day, which is a very good sign for job-seekers and for the overall economy.
We are seeing that pay rates are slow to recover. Few, mercifully, have reached this level:

via Technical Writer job in Boxborough, MA – Kelly IT Resources

Uphill in the snow both ways

At this writing, we have four inches of snow (.032 cubic hectares for our metric readers). The forecast suggests that we’ll double that and then some before the day is over. We  have a couple of plans for the afternoon and will make a decision late morning. I don’t mind a day at home. I have school work and work work aplenty.
Late-season winter blasts are nothing new. I’m not sure that I’d even call this a late-season event. Last year we had a hard freeze in mid-May. The crocuses were peeking out in the warmer parts of our yard a couple of days ago. They’re not silly. They grow based on the ground temperature, which is getting progressively warmer even as the air above does its own weird thing.
The April Fool’s Day storm of 1997 was as big a storm as you’ll get, two feet of white cement. That’s another thing about later-season storms – the snow contains much more water. A mid-January storm can have a fluff factor of 15:1 – 15 inches of snow for each inch of melted liquid. Storms during April and May can have ratios down to 8:1.
I was working at a small startup in Westford. (We were building a $100K 100GB fileserver.) Our CEO and CFO were scheduled to start their big roadshow that would prepare investors for our initial public offering later in the year. Important meetings were scheduled for New York that day and later in Miami.
The execs went to the airport while the rest of the crew was back at the office. (Working from home wasn’t much of an option. The company shared a single 56K modem line at its corporate Internet connection. Microsoft’s PPTP was just rolling out and not well understood.) We got hourly updates about their attempts to get on one flight and then another throughout the day. At day’s end, they were still at Logan and the money guys were still in New York. At six o’clock, we dug out our cars and drove home. I’d be back 12 hours later for another day.
The roadshow was rescheduled and we had our IPO in the summer. IIRC, the strike price was $5.00. It briefly peaked at $5.25 and never saw those levels again.
If you’re a New Englander, you can’t get very far by trying to blame your troubles on the weather. The  April Fool’s Day storm had almost no effect on the company’s fate. We earned our bad luck from our own hard work. 

More on work and clothes

If I stand on a chair, I can see the end of the semester. Between now and then is plenty of  school work, a paper, a presentation, exams, ‘n such, but it’ll all get done. I need a much bigger chair, though, to see beyond that, a chair even bigger than Gardner’s big chair.

via Zippy The Pinhead: “Well-Endowed”
A time is coming when I’ll need to buy some interviewing clothes. I’m mindful of Thoreau’s caution about new clothes (which is more about changing ourselves rather than about our clothes.) My current jacket is, I kid you not, an $8.00 special that I picked up at the Sears outlet store last fall. I remember fondly that, when Barney Frank ran for re-election as state rep in 1974, he had a poster that proclaimed “Neatness Isn’t Everything.”
Today’s Boston Globe has a style supplement, How to update a classic blazer, with some guidance for the man in need of help. The featured article of clothing is a blazer, around which we’re to build several wardrobes. Their recommendation is for a Reporter “Quick Jacket” that runs a cool $595.
Buy a really good jacket and it’ll all make sense. Pfft. The jacket is just the down-payment. I’ll need a $275 shirt, $495 shoes, and, well, it’s clear that we headed in the wrong direction.
My new degree suggests that I should be looking for a job as a paralegal. Might then some blogs that cover paralegal careers be helpful. Let’s see.

Practical Paralegalism often has some good tips. Last Monday’s post was titled Paralegal Career Dressing. Almost. The subtitle is Flower Brooches from JKW Jewellery. There’s a picture of Carrie Bradshaw. I opened the wrong door.
A link in an earlier post showed some examples of what a male paralegal might wear to lunch. The prices have moved from Newbury Street to your basic shopping mall. That’s probably the best that we can do.
It’ll also depend on the type of work I seek as a BBC correspondent discovered when reporting on the minimalist dress code of the Amazon’s Awa people.
Did I mention that I finally had to retire my red paisley suspenders (braces to you folks across the pond)? I bought them at Spag’s for five bucks a dozen years ago.
I don’t mind looking good. I just don’t want to be afraid of my clothes. I don’t do well when I am spending more time thinking about how I look rather than how I’m thinking.

More on work

My Linkedin connections have ratcheted up their activity level since the start of the new year. At last count, my associates collectively posted more than 750 status updates. Most of the activity is the result of people making new connections.
When one person shows a lot of new connections, it’s often an indicator that the person has or is about to lose a job. When there’s a squall like this, from people at different companies, something else is going on. I suspect, but can’t confirm yet, that this is a good sign. People who have jobs are looking for better jobs or at least are thinking about it. They’re wondering who among their connections is doing what.
People aren’t finding the kinds of steady jobs of old. Those jobs and the expectations for same ended probably 20 years ago. Tom Peters predicted it in the 80s and has ridden the wave of New Work for a pretty good career. He used to say that your career was your Rolodex (back when folks knew what one was), that you always needed to be thinking about how you’d be assembling a job based on your personal connections. Companies, too, would be developing virtual, ad hoc teams that would come together for quick projects and dissemble with no hard feelings.

Of course, lots of people have made a living with all kinds for a long time. Recently, a guy has received a lot of attention for admitting that he wrote college papers for pay. (These folks have an, um, interesting name for their company in this line of business.) Some 40 years ago, I did the same. I didn’t write many and probably made only a few hundred bucks. I did  guarantee a B. My big advantage was that I could type, making it easier for the customer who didn’t have to recopy the text into his (it was all guys) handwriting. It might be the only typewritten paper that the student ever handed in, but in a big school, no one noticed.
Funny thing. I was bombing out of my own courses even as I wrote B papers in sociology, English, and history. Karma generally finds you, eh?

More on sleep, Chile, work, and compassion

It’s a line of context, but Dylan is good for that:

Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?
Visions Of Johanna 

As I’ve mentioned often before, I have a type of insomnia that my mother had. I sleep for a while and then am awake for several hours during the night. Generally, I get back to sleep in the early morning and, with a nap in the early afternoon, do ok.
Two nights ago, I dreamed that I slept a full night. I woke enthusiastically and was then disappointed to learn that it was one in the morning. This past night, I dreamed that I couldn’t sleep. I woke at the same time, quietly restarted the fire in the stove (quietly so that I wouldn’t wake the dog who no longer sleeps on his bed near the stove) and listened to the BBC coverage of Chilean mine rescue.
As I’ve very often said, whatever it is that I do, I work hard, but what I do isn’t hard work. The major challenge I’ve had in my work is that I turned my desk 90^° so the afternoon sun isn’t shining in my eyes. I didn’t have to wait 10 weeks for someone to drill through 700m of stone to rescue me.
Nevertheless, I’ve found that comparisons rarely help me change how I feel about my situation. In the early 1980s, I went to a doctor with symptoms that I now know were the early signs of depression. “What have you got to be depressed about?” the doctor said. “Look at all those people who are losing their jobs in Detroit.” Now I had three things to feel bad about – my initial symptoms, the people in Detroit, and the fact that I didn’t feel bad enough about the people in Detroit.
Researchers have shown that different parts of the brain are activated when we show compassion or not in the presence of another’s pain. In the sweet language of scientists, we learn that

The researchers concluded that empathy-associated activation of the anterior insula motivated costly helping, whereas a signal in the nucleus accumbens, a brain area related to reward processing, reduced the propensity to help.

via Competing motivational brain responses predict costly helping

I think that this means that the part of my brain that seeks rewards is less compassionate. This suggests that if I’m told that I should be nice to others because it’s good for me, I’m less likely to be motivated to do so. Instead, if I perceive someone is part of my group, I’m already predisposed to be willing to relieve their pain.
That’s a lot to ponder. And, as the guy says, “I may not be much, but I’m all that I think about.”

More on work and jobs

The flurry of new connections on LinkedIn indicated that there was churn in the workforce. Then,  we received word from former co-workers that there was a recent round of layoffs at our former company. More people are now looking for work. Some are finding jobs, temporary, mostly.
It was just about a year ago that Sandra got word that her work would be going away. She had a choice: accept a severance package or follow the work to India. She chose the former and is now retired. (We may not be done with work for pay, but careers as we knew them are pretty much done.)
We now get to watch the world of work from a different vantage. Here are some items of note:

• Remember the opportunity to follow the work to India? It turns out that some people are seeing this as a viable option. You can live cheaply and find plenty of opportunities for career development and advancement. via No work in the US? Move to India – Boing Boing.
• I don’t know many people who use a pencil these days. (I carry a mechanical pencil and use it rarely.) Apparently, there are a few folks left and, among them, are those who take their pencils really seriously. Cartoonist David Rees Launches ‘Artisanal Pencil Sharpening Service’. You can get your pencils sharpened manually.
  Quote of the day:
  “Just because something makes you smile or laugh … doesn’t mean it’s a joke.”  via Artisanal Pencil Sharpening.
• Don’t know what kind of work you should be doing? Your brain can tell you. Brain scans may help guide career choice.
• Some people like the excitement, challenge, and risk of working for a small startup company. If you do, here’s a cautionary tale about bailing out too soon. The third co-founder of Apple Computer, Ron Wayne, designed the original logo and wrote the first manual. He decided that the Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) were too unfocused and unrealistic and so he sold back his 10% stake in the company for $800. It would now be worth north of $22 billion.
• If you’re young, smart, and female, you can make some decent money selling your eggs. Good SAT Scores Lead To Higher Egg Donor Prices.

More on work

“Do you work for Intel?” he asked me. The young man works at a large grocery store, helping the folks who are using the self-service check-out stations.
I glanced down at my shirt pocket. “This? No, I got this shirt at Morgan Memorial.” I paused. “I do work with computers, though.”
“I do, too,” he said, eagerly, waving his hand in a broad arc to indicate the check-out stations. “These are all computers.” He said most of the problems he’d encountered were related to power, but the diagnostics in the registers were pretty good.
We talked a bit about the user interface, the need for the barcode scanner to be clean, and the conveyor belt free of dirt. “These things are running Windows XP,” he said, pointing to the cabinet below the register. “They have a keyboard. I can get onto the Internet.”
“Cool,” I said, watching the honeydew melons spin and tumble down the belt and into the tomatoes.
It’s good when work is more than something you get through in order to get money, when work gets you to think about more than just what you’re doing, and when you’re a person who wants to talk with other people about things of interest.