Monster.com still charges companies $400.00 for a basic, one-city job posting that stays up for 60 days.

As a Webmaster, it makes me cringe. The incremental cost of an additional job posting to their database is about half a cent. If they aren’t clearing at least $375, they’re grossly mismanaging their business.

In this economy, I’m disgusted that I’m still forced to use their stupid website. Sadly, the “more experienced” (by which I mean “old”) people looking for jobs are too stupid to check local job sites or Craigslist, all of which are free. No, they only look at Monster.

Monster has the corner on the market for experienced professionals and that’s why they can continue to bend over businesses.

Come on, old people, look at Craigslist job postings. Please. Pretty please.

Maybe that’s par for the course in corporate America, but it’s new where I work.

Full moon maybe?

Apparently it went well, but that doesn’t mean it’s a sure thing.

Found out FOR SURE that her old employer disputed the unemployment. Keep in mind that when she lost her job the statement made by her employer was “this just isn’t working out.”

I’m not sure in what reality that constitutes terminating for cause, but not in any world I’ve ever heard of.

And if you are going to tell the unemployment office a story that you didn’t tell the employee, it might be a good idea to have some documentation of some sort to support your cause. Because he doesn’t have any.

Anyhow, next step is to wait and see what the state says. If they still deny the claim, then it’s lawyer time

Woo.

I think office politics were the real reason she lost her job, but I really think it’s for the best.

Jenna needs to work in an office with a lot of people… she seems pretty happy today, so that’s good!

10. The smell of ink and the sound of the presses and bindery equipment
9. Going to lunch with friends every day
8. The crazy girls who propositioned me (and flashed me) regularly
7. The woman who told me “I was here before you were born, and I’ll be here after you’re dead” when I became her supervisor
6. Being able to see screen angles with the naked eye
5. The three minute commute
4. Night shift
3. The manager who hated me because I was male
2. Doing quality statistics
1. The easily-manipulated rumor mill

Yes, it was a fun place to work. There’s no wondering why people hardly ever leave there permanently. Some people quit and then go back after a year or two. I’m one of the rare exceptions that has left for good.

You might think that some of those items look like bad things, but I assure you, they stink of familiarity. I get nostalgic even about the nutty people who hated me. I really enjoyed night shift my first few years there. Those were my favorite times. Here’s a picture of the rag-tag night crew:

That’s outdoors.

Here at the office, it’s in the mid 80’s and humid. Per usual, the maintenance crew has decided that air conditioning is not necessary in our building. There isn’t so much as a light breeze, so the windows really aren’t helping. It’s making me hot and angry. I’m positive I could get more done somewhere else.

This building has been a joke. Six leasing companies and five management companies in just the past 3 years. The bank recently foreclosed, so now the building is owned by a bank and being managed by someone (theoretically) who reports to the bank. The bank is losing money hand over fist, so frankly they don’t care if we’re uncomfortable. They wouldn’t be that much worse off if we left, so they barely do anything around here.

70% of the building has been vacant for at least 2 years, and there is just one other tenant left besides our company. Both of us are considering leaving.

I am fine with being cold. I’m fine with doing my own dusting. I’m fine with a marginally clean bathroom. I’m NOT fine with heat.

I’d like to punch the owners in the throat.

At work, failing to set realistic expectations can mean that people assume you can do any task in any amount of time they need. “I need you to build a new fully-integrated customer database. We’ll launch it tomorrow.” Things like that happen in the workplace all the time. Sometimes it’s caused by having a boss that is clueless about the difficulty of what he or she is asking. But more often than not, it’s because you always do what he or she asks and you always get it done by the deadline, regardless how arbitrary or extreme.

If the same employee had regularly missed deadlines, pushed back, and told the boss things were impossible, perhaps the expectations wouldn’t be so high. Maybe they could even have a dialogue about what was realistic…. a sort of give and take. There’s only so much to be said for being a good soldier.

I can achieve almost any deadline given one important rule – I get to do it 100% my way. You can’t make any deadline if you’re relying on input from others. The law of meetings applies (to calculate the IQ of a group, start with 100 and subtract 5 points for each person).

The same is true in relationships. In my relationships, I always made the mistake of setting the bar for myself too high right off the bat. I would lavish girlfriends with fancy gifts and far too much attention. The result was always the same. The moment I slowed down the pace of my giving or attention, they would be angry and ultimately dump me. I used to think it was because they were just selfish, superficial beeotches (which they were), but it’s more accurate to say that I set a certain level of expectation and when I slowed down, it appeared to them that I no longer cared.

I can fully understand why many men are cheap and jerky to the women they date. When they do something nice for their girlfriend, she is ecstatic and shocked. It’s all about setting the tone right from the start. You can’t ever LOWER expectations successfully. You can only raise them. And once they go up, they stay up.

The key to a happy life is for everyone to think you’re a barely competent, cheap bastard.

For many of you, congratulations – you’ve succeeded!

Unfortunately for him, Shields went on the record saying that the victim hadn’t done anything to her and she didn’t know what Sutherland’s problem was.

Real life isn’t always like 24, apparently.

It got me thinking about how feminists react to things. It used to be (before my time) that when you opened the door for a lady, she would thank you and walk in. Now, most of us guys have encountered women who either scowl at us or say “I can do it myself!”

I’ve been victim to more than a few rude feminists in my day. They think I’m looking down on them if I open the door. Never mind that I’ll also hold the door for a man if he’s walking right behind me. I was under the impression that was just common courtesy.

Women fought for the right to join the workforce at all levels. I respect that they wanted equal treatment, but it simply ignores the biological reality of gender. Women do in fact bear children, at least many women do. It’s unpleasant to work and be pregnant and to work when you have a newborn. Men don’t bear children. That’s the fundamental reason why there were traditional gender roles. It wasn’t discrimination, it was biology.

If a woman decides to join the workforce, she should be treated the same as men. That goes without saying. However, many women I’ve run across in the workforce have a huge chip on their shoulder. They’re just waiting for any tinge of what they perceive to be sexism so they can be offended. They act like bullies, supposedly to show that they can run with the men. However, most of the men in the workforce are disgusted by bullish women. By their own behavior they get passed over for promotion, but they assume it’s because the system is inherently sexist.

There’s no shame in letting the real aspects of your biological makeup show at work. If women are inherently more emotive, then by all means they should embrace it. The most successful women I’ve met are women who act like women, have empathy like most women have, and don’t look for reasons to be offended. They rise above what little sexism still exists in the modern workplace.

As you might imagine, to “consult” means you like to “con” and “insult” people, and they pay you a lot of money to do so.

Ha.

I jest. Consultants get a bad name for a few reasons, but for the most part it’s because they are expensive and their solutions don’t work most of the time. However, the REASON they don’t work most of the time is that the client only follows the solution part of the way or only with lip service. Funny how things don’t succeed if you aren’t really committed to them, eh?

The other main reason they get a bad name is that many consultants become an embedded part of the client company, much like a parasite. They check in, but they don’t check out.

And frankly, there are a lot of smart business people out there who ALL feel that they’re experts and don’t need any help. They resent that a consulting company has been brought in. Never mind the fact that if they had been succeeding, we wouldn’t have been called. Duh.

Even if your organization is loaded with brilliant MBA’s with 20 years of experience, you still lack one thing that a consultant does have: objectivity.

I don’t care if marketing hates operations and sales hates marketing and HR hates everyone. I don’t care if Joe in operations is always “sabotaging” your efforts. I don’t care that you’ve reorganized your department 50 times in 5 years, or that you’ve hired the best employees away from the competition. I don’t care that you spent 6 months developing your operating strategy for next year. None of that makes a heap of difference to me. I don’t have a dog in the race.

Objectivity is very difficult to attain when you DO have a dog in the race. It’s hard to acknowledge systemic issues that cross functional areas when all you deal with daily is your own area.

80% of consulting is listening to what everyone has to say (without bias) and meshing all of the problems and ideas into a cohesive action plan. I don’t know the first thing about petroleum exploration, but that didn’t prevent our company from turning a petroleum exploration company around. The knowledge is already usually there in an organization that we work with. It just can’t get out because it’s too personal for the people who work there.

We help people get their heads out of the details and back into the big picture. You can’t start fixing a company by fiddling with procedures. It has to start with the big picture and drill down.

So what do I do personally?

That is a GOOD question. It’s a major hodge-podge of things actually. We are a smaller company (yet interestingly our average client is at least 500M in sales), so we all wear a lot of hats. I have a few things I’m responsible for. I manage our independent contractor consultants, who are assigned to various client projects depending on expertise. I run our R&D department which takes our models and concepts and works to verify their effectiveness. I occasionally get to consult on certain topics, usually riding shotgun with a Ph.D. in something or another.

I also have a number of less glamorous responsibilities. I manage our various websites. I manage vendor relationships. I am our IT guy. I do our payroll and HR stuff.

So if you ask me what I do, it will depend on the day.

“Why didn’t you pay invoice number 21561?”

“Um, you never sent us an invoice.”

“Yes we did, now you have to pay late fees.”

“If I’d received an invoice, I’m pretty sure our accountant would have noticed.”

“Sir, can you prove that you didn’t receive the invoice?”

This is where the conversation usually ends, because bill collectors have roughly the same sense of humor as a shark with a headache. It wouldn’t make them laugh if I were to respond by saying “As a matter of fact, I CAN prove that we didn’t receive the invoice, because I am an android and thus flawlessly accurate and programmed not to lie. Now, allow me to download my database to your computer so you can see that we never received it.”

Imagine if our criminal justice system worked this way…

And frankly, I’m asked to do this all the time. It’s like most people aren’t aware of the universal truth that you can’t prove that something doesn’t exist. You can only hope to prove that something DOES exist. That’s why atheists are so annoying. They claim there is not God, but by pure logical laws, they can’t prove it. Yet they always say something like “if God did exist, there would be evidence.”

Duh.

You can’t prove that there isn’t a God. I can point you to lots of evidence of a higher power, but you can’t prove there isn’t a God.

And isn’t it ironic that the very being that invented the rules of logic cannot be rationalized out of existence!?

So my new approach when a bill collector tries to collect on something they never billed for is to say “We sent the check 3 weeks ago. Why didn’t you cash it?” And when they say they never received it, I say “Prove it!” After all, they could just be maliciously refusing to cash the check so they can harass me!

And, by the way, if you ARE a bill collector or an IRS agent, let me just give you a piece of advice. Why don’t you get a legitimate job, you jerk?! Geez.

It can also happen at work. “Why didn’t you finish this project yet?” “Because you didn’t tell me about the project.” “Yes I did.” It comes down to who has the better memory, which sadly is never me. I have a terrible memory. The extent of my ability to remember is in strings of numbers. I can remember fairly long strings of numbers for about 2 minutes. After that, it’s gone.

And before you leave, I want you to provide solid evidence that you DIDN’T read this entry.