The Nurture of Lying

I just got a job. Yay me. However, that’s not what this post is about. See, I kind of tricked you. I don’t feel bad about it because it’s for a good cause.

In our society, tricking people usually is done for something good such as getting a job or selling something.

Thinking of selling was what got me to writing this post. I was thinking of how to get a hook into my synopsis for my novel, and I was thinking of making it something the publisher really wanted. So I was going to read a bunch of synopses of their other books and tailor mine to look similar, highlighting the areas that I think that they would be interested in.

I’m not going to claim that my book is different than it is, but I was going to flavor it a bit. Is this dishonest? I’m not sure, but usually if there’s a gray area, if you have to ask, it’s probably not right.

The worst thing of all is that if I do mislead them, it won’t get me published. I might get them to read my manuscript, but I don’t intend to change it for a publishing house. The novel is what it is. If they want it, they want it. If they don’t, a clever synopsis isn’t going to change that.

Why do fudge my synopsis then?

I think part of it is selfishness, my urge to succeed outweighing all other things. In our society this drive isn’t even thought of as selfishness rather it’s a kind of healthy drive that a good consumer has. Our society also has a lot of depressed people. As a former member of the later group, I tend to try not to make myself depressed again which means acting as morally as I can. Yes, I believe that morality makes you happy which is why I’m so obsessed with this question: why do I have such an urge to deceive?

I think that part of the blame goes to our the career counseling industry where they teach us to “emphasize the skills the employer is looking for.” I agree that you have to give these people what they are looking for. There’s no harm in letting them know what you can do.

However, this isn’t as cut and dry as it sounds. There’s always an urge to fudge a little.

“I don’t know this protocol, but I watched someone else do it in the lab for a year.”

“I never did this procedure on my job, but I did attend a training for it.”

“Whatever I don’t know, I can learn. I’ll pretend I did this job before.”

“If that teacher didn’t screw me out of one point, I would have graduated from Harvard so I’ll just put it on my resume anyway.”

Some of the above things are seen as clearly wrong and others are seen as OK, even logical to put on a resume. On one hand, you can lose your job for lying on the other hand, you won’t get a job if the employer doesn’t see what they want. And you are hardly every a PERFECT match for any job. Nobody ever is.

What’s an applicant to do?

I really don’t know. I’m not a career counselor. I can tell what I did to get my job. I put the truth on the application.

When I was in the interview, I had to answer this question a bunch of times, “You had a bunch of lab jobs.”

I said, “Yes, I worked in the lab for many years, but I wanted to work closer to people. I wanted to administer the medication instead of just making on in a lab.”

This was exactly the feeling I had before applying to nursing school, and the employment review panel accepted that. My new job is going to pay very well for my lifestyle. It will allow me to do some research on the side and some other cool gigs like helping the poor in Mexico. My supervisor is a compassionate and effective person.

But it took a long time for me to get the job. When they called me for an interview, not only had I given up on this position, but I had actually given up on getting a job altogether.

If it wasn’t for my wife supporting my novel writing habit, I’d probably have gone insane at the very least, I would have been homeless.

Still, I think it’s wrong the way they teach us all to lie. I think it sucks that they give us tough decisions: lie or starve. The bigger lie is that with the right skills and experience, a job is easy to find or that persistence is the answer. I don’t think that this is true. I only got a job after I had completely given up on getting one. This is often the case with me. No amount of punching a wall with your fist will break a brick wall. Similarly, sometimes things are just impossible. But we are told to keep punching that wall. Keep lying.

The honest thing to say would be that if you aren’t rich or well connected, the system IS balanced against you. It IS unfair. Accusing those who don’t have jobs of, “not trying hard enough.” Is as deceitful as it is cruel.

There were days when an engineering major NO DEGREE would be offered a job right off the street. These days are over forever. It makes no sense to laud these people as “hard workers” and to chastise our generation as “lazy” when these are the circumstances. Yes, many of the people hired off the street were brilliant and hard working. But you can say the same about many who now unemployed.

I didn’t want to write this article before because I was afraid of being unfairly accused of being envious of those who were successful. Hell, I respect those who are have success. I had success, too.

Now I realize that all my successes were luck. This is what people need to know when they are looking for a job. You will see your colleagues who are dumber and lazier than you get ahead. Over and over again.

You need to retain your honesty. Don’t suck up too much to an employer. Don’t pretend you are a corporation or try to make a phony brand. Just be yourself. You. You aren’t born a brand. You are born a human being. We work because we need something useful to be done, as human beings, and we need to be fed because this is a human need. We don’t need to promote a brand.

This is just a more elaborate version of the same bullshit we’ve been fed our whole lives.

Another piece of bullshit is that jobs are fulfilling. They can be, but they aren’t designed to be fulfilling. They are designed to maximize revenues for the owners. That’s it. If you find fulfillment in it, great. I hope you do. I urge you to work hard and to try to enjoy the job. But don’t fool yourself.

Companies don’t care about allowing one to have a fulfilling career. They want to make money, and if they can make a buck (or a penny) doing it, they’ll cut you loose.

Best of luck getting a job. Work hard. Apply to many places. But don’t lie. Don’t be someone else. Don’t drink the kool aid or drink the bullshit.

New Pitch Letter

I’m sick of hiding all my various skills and creating a bewildering array of resumes. I am good at many things. Is this a crime? Am I any more ADD than the people I see happily employed where ever I go?

I work on this stuff in my spare time because I’m _capable_. Yet this is seen like some kind of sin. I have stayed at a job for half a decade. I’d be at my current jobs right now if I didn’t cross half the country because for once in my jobs, I was actually happy.

I want to be happy again. I feel that if I am honest about what I want and what I can do, this will happen. If they know who I am this should be good right? Probably not. But that’s the magic of cold calling. Never saying you are sorry.

Pitch letter is below. Note, if you diss this letter, your comment will be deleted UNLESS you tell me precisely what to change and why this will help me get a job. If you do this, then you get a (virtual) cookie and/or hug, your choice. Thank-you for reading this.

BEGIN FANTASTIC PITCH

I am a highly capable worker who can improve productivity in nearly any area, saving money and increasing profits. I learn new fields while I am in a given position because it’s what I like to do. I prefer to stay in a given career for life. However, I will still continue to take classes and to learn because I feel that life long learning is important in a good employee. I believe that the best researchers are able to draw in relevant information from many fields and to synthesize it to create new hypotheses.

I am looking for a corporation to call home for life as I am a loyal employee. I’d be excited to stay in one area for life or to expanding with the company’s needs.

Here are the fields that I have mastered:

1.Chemistry BS
2.Biomedical research. 10 years experience
3.Computer programming. It it’s not COBOL, I know that language. I have software samples that can be downloaded. I have programmed a research instrument from scratch.
4.IT. OS installation. I have maintained research equipment, servers, and I have built web servers from scratch. I am fluent in all major networking protocols. I have given support on the desktop.
5.Writing. It’s my passion. I write daily. I have written manuals, and I have given presentations. I study grammar for fun.
6.Nursing. I have an active RN license. I would like a job that is more creative than the traditional nursing path. I have experience in critical care taking care of two patients. I have done phlebotomy, physical exams, vital signs, and everything else a critical care nurse needs to do.
7.Medial terminology. I have taken all the basic medical sciences. Again, I’d prefer a field that allows me to be more creative than medicine.
8.Administrative assistant. I have worked in an office, and I have excelled.

I have excellent references to attest that the above is true.

I am not looking to use all my skills. I am not looking to make a lot of money. I’d like to work with people who are passionate at their jobs as I am. I strive to be the best at everything that I do, and I am looking for a position that will allow me to focus on one of my strengths and to help create new products that are highly profitable. Despite my various interests, I don’t get bored easily as I practice mindfulness, and I am happy doing whatever is best for the position I have chosen.

END FANTASTIC PITCH

Price of Happiness

Back when I was in medical school, I was miserable for two years. Suddenly in a flash I realized that most people in the world were in fact not doctors and if they were miserable and inferior to the docs out there, they were doing a great job of hiding it.

I felt that there was a point where money was not so important and there was this thing called “happiness” that one must also pay attention to.

Now, years later, in front of me, I have the choice between a miserable job and no job at all. What do I choose? For now, I am going to try to get a job as a nurse. Hopefully. I might not even get a job in this field despite my perfect record, high grades, and license.

I was told that being out of work for over a year made one harder to hire. This fills me with a lot of anxiety as for this is the only game out there. Every other field I applied to NEVER EVEN GOT BACK TO ME save for a few positions in non-profit.

If I want a job, I’m going to have to go into something a bit more specialized. This is nursing for now. My question is that how much suffering does there have to be on a job?

When someone complains about a job being hard, people are skeptical. “It’s not that bad,” they say. And it’s not. It’s just my happiness. Small price to pay for a few bucks.

Things I See as Praiseworthy in Millenials

I am tired of reading about people complaining about the Millenial Generation.

Whenever, I actually meet these lovely people, they are so much different than their slanderous press.

True, they do have PDA’s grafted to their hands. But if I could take a computer more powerful than my C64 with me at all times, I would have. If I could connect with everyone in my class with the touch of a button, I would have. Who wants to be left out?

Are their text messages the new Shakespeare? I don’t know. Probably not in most cases. But was I any brighter when I was their age? No. A lot dumber and a lot of other bad things, too.

Here are the two things I would text if I were their age:

1. “She’s hot, right?”
2. “Eldrich the Dark Mage hits you with a psychic whip for 10 points of mental distress. Saving throw to avoid insanity.”

The Millenials I met had career counselors. What? I’m 35, and I’ve never spoken to a career counselor let alone had one go to my place of internship IN HIGH SCHOOL! My first job in high school was when I was a senior and it was McDonald’s.

These children are working in a lab. They will learn, long before wasting four years on a stupid major, that research sucks and go into something more practical like banking where even if you screw up, you win.

But one might argue that such initiative often comes from the parents not the children. You might say that children, who have been taken care of their whole life, don’t think any more about careers than an occasional game of doctor.

This leads to my second point that the Millenials have better parents. When it comes to getting a job, I _want_ my hand held. When my boss yells at me, I _want_ my parents to tell me that they will make it all better then actually do it. I _want_ to believe that I am the best and that the world revolves around me.

Look at the people in the world who grew up in this kind of delusion. They are now the business leaders of America. If they have some stupid theories about the next generation, they don’t need to sign up for a crappy, free blog service (no offense WordPress). They can give a lecture tour and people will pay them, hoping that their words of wisdom will somehow help make them rich, too.

If a part of a job sucks, they’ll complain till they get reassigned, refuse to do it as below their intelligence, or get a higher paying job that’s more fun. What’s wrong with that?

Oh, but one might argue that all this pampering makes for a self-centered, whiny, group of people who need to constantly tell themselves that their generation made a difference while the others were a bunch of apathetic automatons who live and die by corporate advertising.

Well, no. ProzacTM was not made for Millenials.I don’t believe they were even born when the chemists were twisting molecules into the shape of happy pills. ProzacTM had a huge market before the next generation. Why? I don’t know maybe because life sucks all around?

Don’t let the older generation to tell you how “soft” you are for taking a pill to make you feel better. Who’s the market for ViagraTM? Huh? Let’s get this straight, the notion of pills to make one feel better is an American thing not a generational weakness.

Why? Because these pills work.

I can’t think of another reason why people hate Millenials. If someone can send me something then I’ll write “Things I See as Praiseworthy in Millenials” part II.

Overall, they are as kind, sweet, and selfish, and mean, and all the other things ever other group of humans is. Thing is that they have some edges in careers, and I want in.

The Job Center Rules

My brilliant wife, through networking aka attending a party, found out about a job center that has been a great boon to me all ready. It is called the Metro Region Career Center, and there are 1700 of then in the United States.

The people were incredibly helpful especially with regards to the classes. The first class, which was resumes, like the group interview I had a few weeks ago, merely served as a self-esteem booster. I knew nearly everything that was being said, and the people seemed not as bright as I am.

The next class, which I had today, was about Navigating the Job Market. The teacher was great. He motivated us to find a job, but also he did the best thing that one could do which was point us to a place where we could get information regarding what to do in a career.

At this point, I’m going through careers I all ready know are fun like Administrative Assistant. I’m going to pull some skills out of the site which I all ready have. Then I am going to make sure they are prominent in my resume. The teacher told me something that I had all ready suspected. HR staff uses a point system when judging resumes based on embedded keywords.

This means that under the UV gave of an HR agent, a resume is not a coherent piece of text, but rather the keywords light up in bold and are tallied. The other resume niceties that one spent hours on become invisible. That is unless it’s a spelling mistake. In that case, your resume goes in a hopper that reads REJECT.

Regular readers know that I have a great deal of anger toward the HR industry because I am a brilliant person who has gotten into the best schools, beating out thousands of applicants, only to wind up in debt, nearly homeless, and struggling to get any sort of job. Although I have woken up from the bad dream called the Delusions of Higher Education, I have decided to embrace my anger for all things HR and to study the enemy in the hopes that I can use their methods against them and infiltrate the citadel of solvency.

The thing that has given me the most hope was a stint at a University Housing office which turned out to be the lap of luxury, laughter, and happiness. Now I hope to repeat this wonderful experience using my new found skills.

Career Survey: HR

The funniest thing about this career is that it used to be called Personnel, now it is Human Resources. Why the name change?

Here’s an article that sheds some light on the reason.

It appears that the reason for the name change was that Personnel Office workers didn’t feel like they were respected enough so they changed their name. To me, this is plain bizarre. First of all, it shows that they are concerned with appearances and status more than doing a good job. Second of all, they chose the profession. How it was perceived was known before they went into it. So why all the fuss now?

So if I dump on this profession, why am I so obsessed with it? Plus, why would I even consider going into a field so removed from my own education, experience, and interests?

Simple answer: money. Why money? Well, all the land is owned, and many natural plants one can survive on are either dead or impossible to get at so I need to make money to eat. Plus camping outside all the time really sucks. It’s scary and boring.

HR workers are the gatekeeper to pretty much any job that pays a decent wage. Like it or hate it, the amount of influence I have over HR staff will make or break whether I have a decent job or not. Plus, as a man, I am expected to provide for my family. I have never seen this attitude seen as sexist in any way nor is it seen to place an unfair burden on men. It is just “the way things are.” I’m nobody so I have no intention of changing people’s minds on this opinion.

The problem is that since I graduated in school in 1995, I have had a hard time getting the high paying jobs I was promised for spending seven years of non-stop study. This makes me feel really bad. In many ways, this is all my own fault as I did not learn that there was a game to be played and people to be manipulated. On the other hand, can I be blamed for taking people at face value? Should have I suspected that there was something deeper behind employment? Again, I don’t create the prevailing viewpoints and opinions, I just suffer under them.

I have always disliked games that didn’t have explicit rules as I have a hard time even understanding that there’s a game being played. This is why I hate both dating and HR. There are people with power who are judging my ability to read their minds. If I fail then they with hold their resources from me, and I look like a loser.

Thus my love for the field of HR was born. I figured if I could work as an HR worker, I’d know their secrets, and I’d never have trouble getting a job again.

Pros:

1. Learn how the HR Citadel really works. Get better jobs and fully use my benefits from my job.

2. The work is really easy. They take many breaks–they are never there when I need them. They are in at 9, the earliest, and definitely out by 5 PM. I have never seen an HR office open before or after normal hours. HR workers work in an office. They do no heavy labor. The heaviest thing that they have to lift if a file folder.

3. Feeling of power you get by judging others by whatever standard you want. Watching people grovel to get a job.

4. Pay is very high.

5. Know the gossip in the office such as who is harassing whom and when layoffs are going to occur.

Cons:

1. Hard to get a job in HR with no education and experience.

2. Job consists of mastering boring forms and regulations.

3. HR culture is not mine. It is a legalistic butt covering culture of paranoia. HR workers feel under appreciated and under attack from litigious employees.

4. Does not value humor nor creativity. Potentially stifling and soul crushing work environment.

Summary:

Overall, HR is a cake job. The worst part about it is the boredom. Being an anxious and imaginative person, this will probably not be a problem, and I can see myself working in HR for the rest of my life. The only tough part is to get my first job. This is why I am not actively seeking this type of job, but I will consider offers. Also, I will try to work myself into this role by volunteering at another job.

Career Survey: Computer Programming

Since this is supposed to be a career blog rather just a whiny
memior/auto-biographical rant, I’ll talk about careers a little.

But I’ll do it in an auto-biographical way.

I’m going to continue my (seemingly hopeless) search for the perfect
career by speculating what the actual job would be like, and what I
need to do to get there.

One job I think I might like is computer programming. The reason I
think I might like it is that I do it as a hobby. I find it to be
really relaxing, actually.

Pros

1. It’s fun. Like I said, I love it.

2. I’m pretty good at it. At least I think I am. If I’m not good, I
don’t mind practicing. I could pretty much spend the rest of my life
programming.

3. It pays more than I ever expect to get in my life. Advancement is
seemingly endless–see the programmers who got on the ground floor at
MS. They are all very wealthy.

Cons

1. It’s so fun the boss can take my project away to punish me. That
hurts. This actually happened.

2. It’s so fun I forget to write the features that I’m asked to write
because I’m obsessed with some obscure optimization or a cool hack
that nobody will care about.

3. It’s so fun it makes me into a zombie that can’t focus on anything
else. This creates an “unbalanced” life.

4. It is very tiring and after a day of programming, I can’t write fiction.

5. I don’t know how to get a job in this field. I don’t have
education, and I may have to go back to school. After ten years in
college including 3 years at the gradaute level, I’m deeply in debt,
and I am sick of school. This might not be a job I can get with a
normal education.

6. The domination of MS. Love ‘em or hate ‘em. I hate ‘em mostly because their platform sucks, but also because you can’t criticize them without being accused of being jealous. OK, I want a lot of money for doing such a crappy job, too. Who doesn’t. But I’d rather be well paid to do a _good_ job. Thankfully, Linux has taken over to a point that there are full time jobs that will allow one the luxury of never touching a MS machine. So this point is now moot.

Overall. I should have majored in computers. If I did, I’d be out of
debt by now. I would not have had to live in such awful ghettos. I
could have avoided working years of disgusting jobs.

The main reason I didn’t go into computers is that I didn’t want to be
a geeky person who could not relate to other people. I wound up
becoming this person anyway, but in a far less lucrative way. It seems
as if there is money to be made anywhere near me, I’ll be in the worst
position to exploit that.

I’m actively applying for computer jobs right now, and I am
voluntering on gnome-games to hone my skills and make a name for
myself. Lack of computer hurts this endeavor, but I can borrow my
wife’s machine for a few hours if I get up early enough.

The Marketplace doesn’t care about your passion

There is this belief that each one of us is gifted with this one field where we are the happiest. If only we can find our passion, we can follow it into a job of our dreams. Many find this liberating, but I actually find this belief to be annoying and stressful.

I am 35, and I still don’t know what I want to do with my life. I don’t think I ever will. I feel that actually, the people you work with and your boss determine your entire work situation.

I didn’t know that when I first got out of school. I had a Chemistry BS and some Medical education. I thought that my dream job would be making new discoveries to change the world. At least I could do this for eight hours a day until it was time to go home and write the Great American Novel.

However, I had nasty bosses for years. Each time I moved on, it turned out that they really valued my work, but they thought that being nasty was the only thing to _motivate_ me. The opposite is actually the case. I’d move mountains for a nice boss, but with a nasty one, I’ll merely do the job while looking for a way out. I had the a nice boss for the first time in my life last year at a temp job as an administrative assistant. This made me realize that I’m actually a great employee and the only problem with my “career” is that I always had crappy bosses.

This leads me to just look for a nice boss no matter what the field. I keep reading about following one’s passion, but I don’t have one in the traditional sense. I want to write novels. But I have to feed myself first. Does this make me some kind of fraud like an illegitimate worker? When they ask me why I want this job, I feel like I’m lying. I can’t say that, “I’m just working here until my writing career takes off.” This fills me with stress.

At least at my last job, my boss was refreshing. He told me, “Of course your time sheet is important. Why else would you come here?” Yes! Why do so many employers create this charade that no matter how shitty your job is, this has to be the thing you wanted to do all your life. I hate it because it makes me feel like a phony. I made the mistake of telling one research boss the truth, and they canned me shortly after that.

Even though I was always made to feel that I had to pretend I had my dream job, I feel that most people are _not_ following their passion. They seem to be happier than the ones who actually were following their passion, the scientists I worked under. The scientists seemed to be bent out of shape at the smallest thing, while the passionless people seemed to be more relaxed sometimes they even seemed happy. At my last job everyone admitted that they’d rather be on the beach, but they weren’t so upset all the time.

Note, I’m NOT saying take a job you hate. I’m just relating what I have observed. People don’t realize that is that jobs are not created to give people fulfillment nor are they made to give people interesting things to do with their time. Jobs are created because people need stuff to get done. People need to eat so there are farmers and cooks, for example.

Still, I think that people should spend a lot of time thinking about what they want to do in life. I regret not thinking my own career out a lot more than I did. I was so caught up in actually becoming a surgeon, I never realized that surgery was a terrible profession for me. I don’t like to stand on my feet knowing that if I mess up, I could kill this person. Even if I don’t mess up this person could still die. Plus, I don’t like the idea of not being able to go to the bathroom when I have to go.

They should get into an interesting field with people are similar to them. Their job should challenge them as much as they wish to be challenged. But you have to look at the big picture, too. Often the most interesting subjects in school don’t lead to the most interesting jobs.

I loved Chemistry in college, but I realized that working in a lab would probably suck because I would spend most of the time dealing with smelly chemicals, which I hate, and very little time in the imaginary world of atoms which I love. Ten years later as a lab technician, I was right, it sucks. I’m clumsy so I often mess up my experiments because I make one tiny mistake or another. I prefer a job where all my mistakes can be fixed with the backspace key.

Therefore, I actually love the day to do of a routine administrative assistant which sounds dull on paper, but it can be a great time when co-workers have a good sense of humor and the work is light enough to allow daily blogging. So I suggest those still reading to not only think of their passion, whatever that is, but how they’d like to spend time day to day. Because that’s what a job is. Day to day. Most of the really cool stuff you do in school will never come up in the real world. Out of all the complex equations I learned in Chemistry classes, I only use one equation. It was taught in high school Chemistry.

Another example: Medicine might seem like an awesome subject on paper. Doctors look so cool in their while strutting around hospitals. When you think of the day to day, it kind of sucks. You wind up seeing a lot of people who are dying. People who have given up hope on life. People who want to abuse you because their stay at the hospital sucked. You wind up dealing with blood, pus, feces, and urine. Part of your day, you have to stick your finger up people’s assholes. Yuck!

Once you realize what kind of day you want, you should pick a major that will lead to this kind of job. I never saw anyone suggest this. If you want to go home at five PM then look into office jobs, but don’t become a lawyer.

Finally, if you find that your dream job is not all your dreamed, that’s OK. The dirty secret is that dream jobs are never perfect. There is always something missing; and there are always things you have to do that you don’t like. For example, for all the glamor, models have to look like their having a good time even when they’re not. If that sounds easy then try it. It’s much tougher and more stressful than something that sounds boring like office filing.

The best way to deal with life is to be happy where you are rather than chasing this elusive “passion.” If your job sucks and you hate your life, you should probably get a new job. But, if your job is tolerable and you can hang out with the people you work with and you get paid enough to live on, you are as much of a success as anyone who is “living their dream.”

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