The sting in my nostrils as I step out the back door
Into the pre-dawn cold
The smell of car exhaust mixing
With the frozen winter air
The stretching shifting halos
Around the streetlights seen through squinting half-awake eyes
The snow stomped from my boots before I step
Through the front door
I have perhaps an unhealthy contempt for technology recruiters. I know they’re just doing their job, but it just so happens that their job is only slightly less annoying to me than telemarketers, or those people working mall kiosks who want to shove lotion samples in your face and yell at you for not accepting it.
Part of my distaste for recruiters comes from my own persnicketiness regarding tech jobs themselves. I love technology, but a lot of the ways it gets put to use are tedious and boring or even worse, objectionable to my values. (My primary values being avoiding things that are tedious and boring.) And there seems to be a strong correlation between tech jobs needing recruiters to find people to fill them, and those jobs being the kind of tedious, boring, objectionable work I wouldn’t want to take anyway.
I know I was lucky to have mostly worked at places I found interesting (or at least acceptable) during my decade or so of employment, and I’ve been even luckier to create a niche as a small business owner where my clients and collaborators are interesting, creative, and doing work I value in the world.
In short, I have no place in my life for recruiters or the jobs they recruit for, and never really have, save for a brief period in late 2007 when the job I was in at the time was turning sour and I was desperately casting around for alternatives. That one experience I had dealing with a recruiting company was so negative that I vowed never to work with one again. And as it happens, I’ve never even had to consider it, because I found a new job without their help, stayed there for a few months, and then successfully went out on my own less than a year later.
But occasionally I still hear from the recruiters. Usually (thankfully) by email. And I usually only give them enough of my time to reply “Please remove me from your database.”
Today I got just such a recruiter email:
To: Me
From: Recruiter X
Subject: update [sic]Scott,
It has been a little while since we connected.
Just wanted to get a quick update on your status.
Thanks,
Recruiter X
I definitely did not recognize the sender’s name (and not just because it was “Recruiter X”), nor the name of his company. I was pretty sure it had been a very long while since we had “connected” — like, never. My reply:
To: Recruiter X
From: Me
Subject: RE: updatePlease remove me from your database. Thank you.
I figured that would be the end of it. Surprisingly not.
To: Me
From: Recruiter X
Subject: RE: updateScott,
Can do. I am guessing that you don’t remember getting together a few years ago.
Continued good luck with your business.
Sincerely,
Recruiter X
Why no, I don’t remember getting together with you a few years ago, or ever, Recruiter X. And I just couldn’t leave it alone:
To: Recruiter X
From: Me
Subject: RE: updateNo, I don’t. Perhaps you could refresh my memory on the context of our meeting.
I honestly did not expect a reply at all to this message. What context could he possibly provide, since I know we have never met before? But I was wrong.
To: Me
From: Recruiter X
Subject: RE: updateIt was at a time that you were looking for additional work. I believe it was as far back as 09 or 10, so I understand if you don’t remember. The intent was as an introductory meeting and to do some general networking. You shared your resume with me at that time.
I obviously am not looking to spam you. I was just looking to reconnect.
Sincerely,
Recruiter X
Oh, yes! That time I was looking for additional work! Way back in 2009 or 2010! Now I… no, wait. I still don’t remember. Maybe that’s because I haven’t looked for work with a recruiting company since 2007. In fact I haven’t even produced, much less distributed, a résumé since early 2008. And I had never heard of Recruiter X’s company. And, no offense, but I took a look at Recruiter X’s company’s website and… well… let’s say it did not strike me as the website of a company that would be good at placing people in jobs in web development.
Obviously…
I started drafting a snarky reply (yes, even snarkier than this post), but I elected not to send it. I think I had, and have, already proven my point. Which was that I might complain about recruiters wasting my time, but I am more than willing to waste that time myself in order to complain.
On the extremely remote chance that “Recruiter X” happens to read this post… don’t take it personally. Just delete my information from your database. And from the databases of all of the other companies your company shares information with in exchange for money. Because someone gave you my information, but it sure wasn’t me. I don’t blame you personally for how annoying I find the business of recruiting to be. But since my information is a commodity to you, I also don’t have a lot of sympathy for your work.
I’m a longtime Mac user. A “power user,” you might say. Not so much a power UNIX user, though I do a fair bit of Linux-based command line tomfoolery as part of my job.
But things get ugly when the two come together. At the command line I am a bit too inclined to treat my Mac like a Linux server. It may have UNIX at its core, but it’s not Linux. And Apple has put some effort into de-UNIX-ing it as well. Things you expect to work don’t work the way you expect them to. (Yes, I just wrote that sentence. See what this is doing to my brain???)
For reasons I don’t care to get into, I decided today that I needed to modify the sudoers file on the studio’s Mac mini file server. And in my own inimitable and slightly stupid way, I handled this task as I typically do anything involving changing buried system files, not by struggling through using a command line text editor, but by copying the file to my desktop (where it is magically released from the prison of UNIX file permissions in which Apple has… uh… imprisoned hidden UNIX system files). I edited the file and put it back in the /etc folder where it belongs.
Only problem: in the process, the file’s ownership and permissions got changed. No problem, I thought. I’ll just sudo that sucker. Only problem is, when the permissions on the sudoers file aren’t what the system expects them to be, it doesn’t let anybody sudo anything.
Well… crap.
But then I remembered… Mac GUI solutions to the rescue! I opened up Disk Utility and ran “Repair Disk Permissions.” Problem solved! Apple has saved me from myself.
Now I can go back to my delusion that I am a power user.
Being a runner in Minnesota can be difficult, because it forces you to make one of three choices:
Since #3 is not a viable option, you’re left with either bundling up with many layers and tiptoeing hesitantly along icy sidewalks or park paths with blustery winds buffeting your face, or paying a monthly fee for the privilege of driving to a building and running indoors on a treadmill or (if you’re lucky) a track, a tedious but climate-controlled solution.
Being an uncharacteristically wimpy Minnesotan, I’ve gone with the gym membership. I’m very fortunate, I suppose, to live close to the Midtown YWCA in Minneapolis, where I have access to first-rate facilities including a 1/6 mile indoor track. I loathe running on a treadmill. The track can be tedious, but at least I’m actually moving. And if I pick the right soundtrack, I can even visualize running around Lake Nokomis instead. (I’ve run Nokomis to the sounds of my own The Long Run enough times that I know precisely where I am in relation to the lake as each of the 11 sections of the 40-minute piece comes on.)
But as much as I can trick myself into enjoying (or at least tolerating) indoor running in the winter, there’s one aspect of Y membership that I will never like or be able to reconcile with my desire to be outside and alone when I run: the locker room.
I was not a jock in school. In fact, I was pretty much exactly whatever the opposite of a jock is. So what little time I did spend in a locker room was an exercise in taunting and humiliation (real or imagined, and probably more imagined than I believed at the time). I’m no longer afraid of the locker room. I just don’t like it.
I don’t like how crowded it is. I don’t like having to find a space on a bench to put my stuff while I change, or coming back to the locker room after my run to see someone else has chosen bench space directly in front of my locker.
I don’t like listening to other people whistling in the showers. What is so great about this experience to make them want to whistle their tuneless little non-melodies?
I don’t like people who are too comfortable being naked in the locker room, and I also don’t like people who are too uncomfortable with it. Be naked in the shower, the sauna, and at your locker, but nowhere else. Don’t be afraid to take off your swim trunks in the shower. Conversely, don’t stand at the sink naked while you shave, or at the counter by the hair dryers, reading a newspaper. (It kind of just seems logical to me to cover up certain parts when you’re wielding a razor blade, electronics, or paper. Especially paper.)
I don’t like listening to other people’s conversations, even when I am deliberately eavesdropping. I don’t want to be eavesdropping. I especially don’t like listening to teenagers swear loudly. And get off my lawn.
I don’t like how hot it is in the locker room, and how by the time I’m done drying off after my shower, I’ve started sweating again before I can even put on my shirt.
Given my dislike of winter in general, and especially my dislike of the compromises it requires (like spending so much time on the corollary disliking of myriad characteristics of spending time in the Y locker room), I’ve been asked by certain individuals in my life why I want to live in Minnesota at all.
They just don’t understand.
I’m not sure if it’s the harsh conditions of life in the Upper Midwest, much like the harsh conditions in the Scandinavian countries where many of our ancestors came from, or whether we’re just resentful of how easily our existence is ignored by the rest of the country, but part of the joy of being Minnesotan is to be able to complain about being Minnesotan. For us, to love something is to feel comfortable complaining about it.
Of course, that would suggest that perhaps I really love the locker room. But love and hate are not opposites. The opposite of love is indifference. And whether I love the locker room, or hate it, the one thing I clearly am not is indifferent.
But whatever the reason for my strong feelings, there is one that is stronger than all. Spring can’t get here soon enough.
So, for reasons I’d rather not get into, I had to break down and install Flash Player in Safari today. (OK, I’ll get into it briefly… due to a rather obscure bug, Chrome — my preferred browser — has been crashing repeatedly on me whenever I try to upload a file. Long-term solutions aside, I had an immediate need for a way to use a Flash-based file uploader, so I had to install Flash in Safari.)
On the final page of the Flash Player download process on Adobe’s website, they offer a series of helpful screenshots to guide the most novice of Mac users through the process of locating and running the installer. Only… no, wait. Those can’t be real Mac OS X screenshots. The fonts are all wrong! So is the anti-aliasing, if you want to get really geeky about it. They’re mostly Arial, with the trademark overly-hinted anti-aliasing of Windows. Strangely though, it looks like the text label under the disk icon in the first screenshot is in Helvetica.
The real telltale sign for me though was the white mouse pointer arrow. Mac OS X has a black arrow. (The Mac has always had a black arrow, and Windows has always had a white one… presumably one of Microsoft’s infringement-suit-skirting superficial changes to the GUI in the early days of the Mac/Windows rivalry.)
I have come to expect subpar user experiences from Adobe, a company whose products I once loved so dearly. But this really takes the cake. I can’t even quite comprehend how screenshots like these were produced. It’s impossible to get results like this on a real Mac. Do they have some weird proprietary in-house Mac emulator that runs on Windows? (Actually, that might explain a lot.) Did they actually meticulously create these “screenshots” in (the Windows version of) Photoshop? Or do they have a Windows application specifically designed to generate fake Mac screenshots for all of their documentation? I’m at a loss to explain it, but there’s no way it wasn’t significantly more work than simply, you know, taking screenshots on a real Mac.
See for yourself… (Note: The image is slightly scaled down here to fit the page. Click it to view at full size.)
