How not to get a tech job

Johnson’s First Law of Effective Supervision: Hire people who don’t need to be supervised.

We are filling two open tech positions in our district. Advice to applicants based on real events of the past few days:

1. Don't have your mother call and ask for an extension on the application deadline. This may have worked with your English teacher but it doesn't work for anyone who may be your potential supervisor.
2. Don't tell me you can't figure out the online application process. This is a tech position for which you are applying. 
   

Just a couple little hints...

Any other tell-tale signs that a job application should be circular-filed? 

David Brooks on The Bad Memory Century

This is one of the funniest (and most truthful) columns I've read in a long time:

 April 11, 2008 New York Time Op-Ed Columnist, David Brooks on The Great Forgetting. Excerpt:

... Some vaguely familiar person will come up to you in the supermarket. “Stan, it’s so nice to see you!” The smug memory dropper can smell your nominal aphasia and is going to keep first-naming you until you are crushed into submission.

Your response here is critical. You want to open up with an effusive burst of insincere emotional warmth: “Hey!” You’re practically exploding with feigned ecstasy. “Wonderful to see you too! How is everything?” All the while, you are frantically whirring through your memory banks trying to anchor this person in some time and context.

A decent human being would sense your distress and give you some lagniappe of information — a mention of the church picnic you both attended, the parents’ association at school, the fact that the two of you were formerly married. But the Proustian bully will give you nothing. “I’m good. And you?” It’s like trying to get an arms control concession out of Leonid Brezhnev.

Your only strategy is evasive vagueness, conversational rope-a-dope until you can figure out who this person is. You start talking in the tone of over-generalized blandness that suggests you have recently emerged from a coma.

Sensing your pain, your enemy pours it on mercilessly. “And how is Mary, and little Steven and Rob?” People who needlessly display their knowledge of your kids’ names are the lowest scum of the earth.

You’re in agony now, praying for an episode of spontaneous combustion. But still she drives the blade in deeper, “That was some party the other night wasn’t it?”

You lose vision. What party? Did you see this person at a party? By now, articulation is impossible. You are a puddle of gurgling noises and awkward silences. After the longest of these pauses, she goes for the coup de grâce: “You have no idea who I am, do you?”

You can’t tell the truth. That would be an admission of social defeat. The only possible response is: “Of course, I know who you are. You’re the hooker who hangs around on 14th Street most Saturday nights.”

Been there... Have you?

Creative spam headers

I am posting this against my better judgment, but here goes anyway. Rated PG 13, I suppose.

I have to say I've been getting a huge chuckle out of checking the trap on my spam filter lately. The subject headings are getting more and more creative. Who writes these things?  Most, of course, are for male "enhancement" products, Viagra or porn. Those marketers sure know how I like to spend MY money.

Just from today. (With my comments.)

• Huge cucumber is your riches (Time to start gardening?)
• Tired of being second best in bed? (Out of three, four?)
• Give yourself a massive headstart (On what?)
• Beat the odds, bed HER (Oh, they know my usual odds too!)
• Huge love weapon is never too much (Love weapon an oxymoron?)  
• Scarlett Johansson spills boobs (At least she didn't spill the beer.)
• Now You Can Enhance Your Sex Life at the Lowest Prices (I hope somebody forwards this to Eliot Spitzer.)
• Massive even when flaccid (Bragging rights down at the Y, you betcha!)
• Give her the present she deserves (What if she deserves someone who doesn't read this kind of spam?)
• Life is unpredictable. Be prepared. (The Boy Scout Motto, if I remember. Those little pervs.)
• Fierce and furious in bed (And fast!)
• Enhance your wicked reputation (I'm just tickled to know I have one.)
• Feel yourself more manly (But not in public, please.)
• Huge tool to please your lassie (A Shillelagh? No that's Irish.)
  
• Bang your way through all barriers (With your shilelagh, of course.)
• Be the man of women's dreams (And she'll wake up screaming.)
• No weight - no problems (Another one I don't get.)
• Immeasurable wand of pleasure (Wasn't it Harry Potter and the Immeasurable Wand of Pleasure?)
• Give her the time of her life (Proves Hobbs observation about life - nasty, brutish and short.)
• She saw the fire in my eye (Which is why she threw her drink in my face - to put it out.)
• Gain permanent gains now (Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.)
• Rock her socks off. (More likely rock her to sleep.)
• Your tool is set to burst out from the toolbox. (I knew we'd gone too far with these cordless devices.)

Do you have a favorite spam subject header? Add it below - with or without commentary. Do women get the same spam as guys do?