jobs now offline

The grand American experiment in shifting to the Internet the system for finding, evaluating, and hiring employees seems to have failed. According to an ABC news report, 80% of all available jobs in America are to be had only for that special person-in-the-know, not merely to the first schlub with an Internet connection. This author is not the least bit surprised to hear that companies have stopped hiring off the Web; each job at which I have worked in the last decade I got through a personal contact, a temporary-employment agency, a physical visit, or a similarly old-fashioned method, and only a few of the hundreds of resumes and job-specific cover letters I have ever emailed, posted, or uploaded garnered even a brief response.

Thousands of templates exist on dozens of sites that job-seekers can use to craft for themselves slick-looking resumes, and the World-Wide-Web abounds with page upon page of detailed instructions on how to puff up or expand one's job-history, on how to use bullet-points to the greatest effect, on what the placement of those bullet-points says about the applicant's character, on the varying importance of a snail-mailed thank-you note, and on just the right thing to say in the subject line in order to catch a downtrodden recruiter's eye; I can only imagine the difficulty of doing the job of a human-resources officer sifting through mountains of documents that all look the same, that all sound the same, that all employ the same tricks. The Online resume, it seems, has faded into oblivion almost as quickly as it hurtled to the forefront of our commonly-shared dream of finally doing something satisfying or worthwhile with our lives. (Whether or not we are misguided fools for seeking fulfillment and reward outside of ourselves – in stilted and stifling job-environments – rather than within the crowded recesses of our own souls, is not in question here, although it probably should be.)

Some of us still have a bit of spunk left in our gullets, however, such as the young man who posted a fake hiring-bulletin on craigslist.com in order to spy on his competition for personal-assistant jobs, receiving over four hundred responses before the end of the first day. (He now has the names and addresses of hundreds of different people, data he can sell – to advertisers, political campaigns, or Kenyan scammers – for good money.) One idea is to get all of the people looking for jobs to come together at a physical location where they can network and figure out which businesses to start with each other, or get paid to assemble widgets, thingamajigs, or whatnots – for a few hours a day while getting paid the federal minimum wage. (With just a sliver of the hundreds of billions of dollars that the United States of America spends waging war on foreign peoples, we could employ every single job-seeking man, woman, and teenager in this country for a whole decade, in the spirit of the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps.) Another idea is to pay these unemployed masses to stand out in the streets to watch the watchers, to keep an eye on corruption-prone and law-breaking police officers. Our ultimate purpose as a nation, however, is to create methods by which our citizens can discover their true passions and abilities, so that they might Pursue their Happiness independent of outside pressure, outside influence, and outside coercion rather than sitting around all day staring at television screens and computer monitors and eating junk food; but, with our state and federal governments filled with persons who have sold their souls to corporate scumbags from agribusiness (Monsanto) and to banks awash with debt-payments (BofA, TD Ameritrade, etc.), we, the American people, will keep on suffering, all the good jobs having been shifted to South-East Asia. But, hey, someone has to restock these t-shirts, and man the deep-fryers. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on balls on cars

Living in rural south-central Pennsylvania, I see many different things. A number of these things are strange; others, unusual; and some, even, are downright sad. Among the most sad of the things I see are pairs of plastic (or metal) testicles hanging from the undercarriages of cars. When I see such a Ride With Balls, my first reaction is to assume that the testicles of the person driving the vehicle are so small, inadequate, and insignificant that he had little choice but to go out and attach fake balls to his vehicle in the invariably unsuccessful attempt to compensate for his glaring male deficiency. More often than not, such fake testicles are attached to the rear struts of modified, raised pickup-trucks, vehicles sure to be driven by men with massive inferiority complexes, insignificantly-sized balls, and length- or girth-challenged penises. Occasionally, however, I see fake balls attached to the bottoms of beat-up sedans driven by scruffy, thuggish-looking persons with poorly executed prison tattoos who, since they seem to be always slumped into their seats in the same awkward fashion, apparently suffer commonly from a certain type of spinal injury.

One reason for hanging artificial testicles from the back of one's car could be to signify to other persons that the car – possessing as it does of massive, brass-coated fake bull's balls – is so powerful, so souped up, and so very fast off the mark that to even dream of challenging it to a race would be to beg for swift defeat and assured disappointment. However, since serious racecar drivers work diligently to shave as much unnecessary weight off their vehicles as possible, this argument does not favor the person who feels the need to hang a four pound, cast-iron scrotum from his car. Perhaps the artificial-sack-danglers act in this fashion out of a deep, unconscious yearning for the Olden Days, back when conveyances ate straw, shit manure, and actually had balls that they used to inseminate their species' females, but, given that most of males I see overcompensating for their shriveled, tiny nuts in this way are under the age of thirty, they cannot possibly have been alive during the time of horse and buggy. A final reason for a person to hang with a bent coat-hanger from his automobile's bumper a lump of plastic shaped like a set of well-veined testicles could be that he is a funny-man, a laugh-riot, the kind of guy who comes into a room and has everyone in stitches with the first phrase out of his mouth. As I have spoken briefly with but a few persons who owned a Ride With Balls, I cannot speak to the extent of their comedic craft, to the well-honed delivery of their witty, sardonic comments, or to their overall side-splitting hilarity, but I doubt that anyone who would pay good money to have his truck jacked up so that it sticks up in the air and wastes precious fuel because of its horrible aerodynamics, I doubt that any such person would have much of a sense of humor, let alone humility, self-loathing, or tact.

Please, fine citizens of America, good readers of these posts, please try not to mock too badly persons who dangle fake nuts from their cars, for they appear to be simple-minded, foolish individuals whose own testicles are so awesomely small that they need to hang a Real Pair from, of all things, their cars. Perhaps we should all just mock them later on, quietly, and in private, together.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit