Application to play Sysiphus

Editors Note: Trying a new thing. All instances of swear words have been replaced with other words. The author is woefully unaware of our trick. Let us know if you it.

I don't know how many of you are on the hunt for a job. I'll say I am, but the truth is I am half-heartedly engaged in the process. It's not that I don't want to work, it's just that I don't really want a job.  If I, or anyone, is required to perform such a job, perhaps there should be some recompense in less hours?  I mean, robots can do our work anyway. 

Recently I got the chance to speak to my friend Linda, who is about my fathers age, about work. Labor. Her generation, and therefore my fathers, prided themselves on work. A good job, in a factory, marked your status in the community.

Even Norman Rockwell would find this quaint. A modern jaded hipster would find this the worst, hopeless conceit of a poor imagination. Not because we are afraid of work, but because the stable jobs are all low-wage unlivable jobs or high-stress paperwork jobs. Go on, read about the twenty hours staring at excel.

The truth is, the economy is sideways. The black-and-white Calvinistic, Austrian model of economics hasn't just been turned on it's ear, it's been kidnapped, gagged, and forced to inform people by the use of hoots, grunts, and interpretive dance.

Face it, the rules that applied back then simply don't anymore. Not in any meaningful way. Our parents, leaders, and corporate elite  haven't informed us that the rules have changed. Partially from ignorance.   But also, out of malice.

Job applications have certainly not changed for the better. They are, in all honestly, a hopeless  bureaucracy,designed to inhibit, deter and prevent you from getting a job.

In my father's day, you could walk in, ask for a job, and get one, or told to get lost. And, if so rebuffed,  you'd head down one door.  "Hitting the pavement" was the euphemism for what you actually did.   Now you apply on  for Internet websites, press submit. Answer 400 questions about your personality. And though there are no right answers, clearly I answer them wrong because I never get a call back. i just send my application into the either.

And call on an application? They don't really do that anymore. They will call you.

Sure they will. 

The worst so far, Qdoba. Do you really need to ask 300 questions. I go to Qdoba frequently, and the biggest question I have is: Can you find someone who can actually roll a borking burrito? fire the people who make those long personality tests, use that money to bus your burrito rollers to La Bamba for a day.

McDonald's was only slightly less aggravating. They ask a series of questions and you choose the question that most reflects your views. These are the same questions.  For example

"I am a hard worker" vs "I like to watch butterflies fly into my bosses nose." 

"OK" I clicked the former - though my boss has nose hairs you could land Apache gunships on.

"I am a lazy good-for-nothing slacker"  vs  "I eat baby dolphins because I hate life."

So now what?  Do I contradict myself or do I make Jack-the-ripper look like a children's educator?
Sure, it's a bit of hyperbole, but it still aggravates me. What does any of this have to do with pressing burgers and dropping fries in hot oil? 

I'll tell you what, I ain't no slacker. Baby dolphins be damned. 



Sparkfire kindly posted this  graphic. I know it's bogus  when it talks about farmers. "No Job Hunt. No Career improvement."


Nonsense. Farmer is one of the most important jobs. The plight of the farmer was not one of improvement, it was about the poor economic and political policies. Yes, being a feudal serf might have sucked. But barring disaster, a skilled farmer lived quite a good life in the US.

And besides, in this hyper-corporate project-based, intern-serfdom world. Maybe a stable job with consistent pay is just the thing we need. 

I tell you Zach Weiner is positively prophetic. I suspect he has a lot of Millennial friends less-than-employed. 

We are reaching the existential crisis of the Job Market.  On one hand, we have a a bunch of slack-jawed sociopaths babbling about "returns on investments", "10 percent improvement in process efficacy" and "item action productivity", on the other, we have an overabundance labor jobs (replaced by automation) and service jobs "not meant to be a living wage." On the third, yes, third hand, we have an ever-swelling, leviathan-like government bureaucracy that exists to leech off the low- and moderately-waged and make serfs of those at the bottom. And the fourth hand we have people who, by virtue of illness, disability, or plain orn'riness, refuse to have anything to do with this nonsense.

Yes, the current job market is basically a 4-armed tentacled monster. In my nightmares it has Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama's face, melded like a sick love child.

And it's not like the basic rules have changed. So why the horse and pony show? 

The massive tentacled beast destroying or economic possibilities does have some vestigial arms - farmers (often automated), medical technicians (rapidly becoming educated button mashers), the arts. Things that were, or are, still valued for producing. But the system doesn't like those arms. Bankers making money on bailouts hate to hear that maybe the guy that grows pumpkins is doing more for the country. At least the farmer isn't giving money to people who hate the US. 

At least you can become a plumber or tradesman, with years of schooling and byzantine apprenticeships.

The markets are being made to keep people out.

But that's another blog post (or two, if I talk about neo-cottage revolutions). I'm losing my point today. Forgive me.

If you are, or were, looking for a job in an old way, you are right-borked. Unless you know somebody. And I am not even kidding. 

That McDonald's job? I have applied at McDonald's before. That specific McDonald's, for a soul-sucking mcjob that I can work around my desire to not actually do that job. Something that lets me pretend that I will be an artist some day.

They have ignored my application, but a caseworker of mine works with  and knows the manager there. And he says he will hook me up.

Networking required for a "not a livable wage" job. This is madness. Absolute madness. Regulation and litigation have made companies terrified of just giving a job.

If I weren't already a little on the batshit side, this would be enough to make me so. 

If you can't talk to people and hob knob, you might as well enjoy mopping floors. It's not like starting a business is much an option. Even in the blog post above, he needed way more money than he new. if you are in poverty, how are you going to manage that?

Remember when we were told to get a good job and not to be an artist? Remember that? I sure as hell do.

That was before Patreon and Kickstarter made fools of all of us, except the damn fools that followed their dreams. It's a new world, and prescient as I might have been, I was sure dumb on that account.  

The Comcast Effect.

I seem, very much, to be in a tizzy over the economy - specifically how we work, why we work, and what we work on. I think the whole system, created by industrialization, has turned like some modern-day ouroboros, onto itself. The mechanization and industrialization has ran away with regulations (and de-regulations) all in the wrong places. It's left the free market, good work, and the lower-class gasping in the dust.

As for the middle class, our current legislative body, from fed to state, and often local, stabbed it in 2002, it just took this long for it to bleed out. The middle class barely had tiem to gasp "Et tu?"

The ever-increasing hatred of Comcast is a bandwagon that has perhaps circle. Recordings and interviews  making the rounds, showing us the madness of the Comcast system. And regardless of claims to the otherwise, Comcast knows about and encourages it.
In fact, I feel like translating the Comcast apology:

We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and Ms. Belmont and are contacting them to personally apologize.

 Translation: We are so busted. This is just like when mom caught me stealing as a child. I had to go, apologize, and promise to pay back the shopkeeper. So now we have to apologize even though the candy we stole was delicious. Lame 

 The way in which our representative communicated with them is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives.

Translation: We do not precisely train our CSRs like this. In fact, it's not until they get on the call center floor where we discreetly discuss metrics. We reinforce these metrics at their 30- and 60-day reviewt

We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. 

Translation:   So, we know what's up and we will handle it in-house by completely ignoring it and.or firing the employee. 

While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect.

 Translation: This happens all the time, but we will add an extra ten minutes in training to discuss how much we care about our customers so we can update the published date on our training materisl. We'll make it look like an overhaul by paying people way more money than they ought to rewrite the language of our training materials.

(As a mercenary who doesn't have apersonal beef with Comcast, I'd like to say to them: I am up to the rewrite job, and my fees are reasonable. It's will be $10,000 a month. You can bundle that with my $5000  a month  consulting and my $3000 cartooning. Now separately you'd pay 18 grand for all that, but with introductory bundling, I can get you two for $9000 or all 3 for only $6000 for 6 months!  What a deal!)*

 Sometime in the past we gave up on the simple idea of good products and services. There used to be this process. You made a product or a service, then shared it and exchanged it for money. if the product and/or service was good, and you were reasonable, you would get returns and some profit. Industrialization was, supposedly, simply an extension. of this.

But something went sideways. We stopped looking at return customers and happy customers as signs of good work and started engineering opinions. We sent out surveys. And the surveys said things like 'the call was too long" or "they didn't fix the problem and I had to call again."  And we valued signing up new customers, at any cost. We added flow lists and databases and metrics because we thought the science and data backed it up. And it did, to a point. 

But we stopped offering service, and offering to do the jobs, and starting managing the customer. Not his expectations, but them. We forgot that all the data in the world isn't giving the customer what they want or need. 

The fact is, while it's true that no sane or honest business owner goes into the game to lose money, the profit - the bottom line, comes from relationships, and connections.

Rather than asking "What can we do to help the customer?' We ask: "Can we make the customer happy in 6 minutes." Then we ask "Can we finish the call in 6 minutes to help the next person, and can we make them wait in a queue."

I have discussed this before here.

Comcast is not alone. I worked for a small Telecom, TDS. I was a pretty solid employee,but I had a problem. I wanted customers to be helped. I want to solve their problem and make sure they didn't need to talk to me again.
Did some of the customers need multiple things? Yes. That, at first, didn't bother me. Did some customers ask me for things outside my scope of support? certainly - I explained that I could help, or couldn't. If I could help, I said other agents might not be able to help.

I had excellent customer service. But in the world of metrics and numbers, this was unacceptable. And the simple answer is because our managers were so divorced from the customer and the process that they couldn't even understand good customer service, and why their metrics were detrimental to the people on the floor. Customer Service Representatives breaking out in a sweat when the difficult call takes very long. raises lost to skewed averages and you miss a metric.  

All companies do this. Marco's Pizza did this. Measuring the time to make pizza, the time in the oven, the time on cut and time out the door. All of these do, in fact affect customer service. But, in the end, the only thing that really matters is the quality of the pizza and the good customer experience.  At Marco's Pizza, the management is not distant from the customer. If a customer is happy, metrics are loosened. If a customer is unhappy, no amount of metrics repair it.

Metrics tell very little about the customer experience. It is a game of testing boundaries - how much can we get away with in our search for profit and speed and still have a positive experience.

It seems insane. In order to give a "positive experience" I had to not do all the things that made an experience positive.

Now the same telecom sent all their tech jobs to uneducated Jamaicans, costing the US jobs and giving a worse customer experience.

Madness and bad customer experience in a search for profit. No company went out of business by building positive relationships.

Something has happened. Industrialization and profit-hunting have become metric chasing. Desperate attempts to show your job is relevant by explaining why your imaginary measurements are good measurements. That the science of profit, time management, and efficacy replaced the ability to craft a good customer experience.


*Comcast must sign a 12 month contract. After 6 months the introductory rate become $19,999 a month. Early termination fees apply.

The Paradox of Wages (Walmart and Middle Class)

Hello, Friends!

I promised that I would write more polemics in the vernacular to which I am accustomed . Currently my job at The Mineshaft has me on an incredibly tight schedule. So expect at least one post a week.

Last week  I posted a maudlin mopey post. Don't read it, kiddos. I reeled on painkillers and bad training. My hands slapped, my ego bruised, and my morale spinning in the can from training. Made more in tips than my bitch of a trainer. That may be why she was so pissy.

I read this post the other day about raising the minimum wage. The argument from both sides can be summed up thus (Paraphrase):

Pro-wage-hike: More disposable income means more money to spend and more money through the sluices!
Anti-wage-hike: Suck my fat capitalist dick.

OK, that's not actually how the conversation goes. The wage hike supporters (towards which I lean) basically lean on one argument with two premises. More money in the hands of the average spender means more money over all, and it won't cost that much to raise wages.

This is common sense - a man (or woman) can only enjoy so many yachts, have so many parties, and so many "escorts". Eventually the amount they can spend dries up. Mostly   Jesus. How many zeros?*

This is true of the commoner too. I can only spend so much on blow before I have to slow down, take a pill (a different pill) chillax and let my heart rate get below 200.

But, I need to point out, there are a lot more of us, the commoner, than them, the wealthy. And those parties may benefit a few people. Maybe they have a hundred or a thousand servants, but that money doesn't go through he sluices as nicely as giving everybody working for large corporations a fat check.

I am not completely on board with government mandated wage increases. I am a friendly anarcho-moderate, and while the government has done some good things, a cumbersome juggernaut is she. So I am always cautious with regards to it's movements. But what else can we do? The corporations will be dickbags. Not even good business men, but actual shortsighted cuntnuggets.

I hate when we have to make laws to protect people from Dickbags, but see below.

Anti-wagers contend that this will cause businesses to offer less jobs, and fire people and generally continue to fuck up the economy like giant dickbags.  Truth is that most of the huge corporations could probably handled the loss in income. It's not that much. Sell a yacht or two.

This PDF happily explains what would happen with an increase to $12 an hour. Dick-all, really. Big corporations like Walmart and Target would not feel much of a pinch, nor would the consumer.
If wages increased 6 grand a year, but costs go up 1500 smackers similarly, that means the average consumer makes out to the tune of $4500 dollars a year.

Not too shabby. And according to these leftist folks there will be no affects on business. They also suggest rose-colored glasses, because they seem to forget the rule of business 101*.

BUT, my dear readers, this is all from progressive (pinko-commie) writers. Surely the conservative view can give us the "fair and balanced" style you expect from me.  So I did some research.

They say: Fuck you, worker. Dance for your dimes!
The third article above discusses it.
Some fuckwit named Mark Wilson  says that "fringe benefits" might be curtailed by a raised wage.

To him I ask: "What "fringe benefits?" Like, what benefits would be taken from someone? Insurance? Not fringe. Half-off burgers? Not a big deal for my last job. And most box stores don't give you that much of a discount.

Let's say Walmart gives you 10% off your own purchases. In order for you to make out the same as a wage hike (that hypothetical 4500 bucks) you'd need to spend 45 thousand dollars there in a year (while making, for those bad at math, an average wage of 15-20 grand a year). . At the Mineshaft I'd have to eat there for 1500 meals a year.

No wonder poor people have bad credit and are obese. Look how we have to spend and eat to take advantage of our fringe benefits.

Yeah, OK. keep your 25 dollar gas cards at Christmas, you petty jizzstains, I'll take the raise, thank you very much.

Math, Mr. Wilson. Either you do math or you fucking don't.**
I mean, are you fucking serious?

I can almost  -almost see the argument that Smaller businesses may have to fire employees. Well, most of them pay a little better than minimum, and can be more choosy. I agree that a higher wage will make better employees think about taking the job. God knows that some of my employers could have done better picking anyone else and paying them more.

Regarding the argument that these are "not meant to sustain a living wage." Newsflash, dickweasel, they are.  I never planned to be a cuss-spitting gonzo commentator, but there you fucking go. I never wanted to be on the side of more laws. I am. They are. The middle class isn't moving up. Old folks are staying in their jobs longer. So where's a poor dickhead kid gonna go?

Nowhere. We are going nowhere.

And finally, let's look at the free market. "Let the free market handle wages." Yeah. Let's Fucking Do That. Except that it's cheaper to buy a politician than produce a better product. Can't compete? Have Uncle Sam wag their finger at your opponent.

And don't get me started on cheap entertainment and expensive consumable goods. Christ. That's a great way to keep us down.

It's all shit, my friends. The song and dance of Walmart is just a mummer's show. They are spending more than they pay out to keep wages right where they are.

The rich are in bed with civil servants. Democracy is dead to the almighty dolla'. It's just aristocrats partying on top.

Do your best. And if you are one of those rich fucks at the top, remember, many of you didn't get there by yourself. You worked, sure, but you also had help. Mentors, friends, lucky breaks that made your work worthwhile.  Remember that. Mentor and befriend, and occasionally give in on fiscal policy.

Because as the French Nobility learned, it's awful hard to spend your money when you're dead.


* Dickbaggery.
** Yes, those numbers may be massaged.