Tag: nonsense

Just wondering

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Has anyone else, while perusing job listings, seen a listing for a job with what is obviously a tech company, taken one look at the tech company’s name, and decided that regardless of the job, the tech company was going to be out of business in a few years and so there was no good reason to apply? I just got kicked a listing for a company called Optimizely. Optimizely. And … nah. That’s got pets.com written all over it. As soon as the venture capital runs out these folks are gonna be gone. I mean … this is from their website:

Does that not absolutely scream “we are burning through our seed money as fast as we can move it offshore”? These folks are gonna have their pink slips before I can finish the application. I love this picture, too:

I’ll give them this: for a tech company, there do seem to be a fair number of women around, at least in the pictures. But you don’t get to have someone holding up an “embrace inclusion” poster when you only managed to find one black person to stand in the picture, and given how awful the Photoshopping is across the board on this image one wonders if he was actually in the room with everybody else. A couple of those people initially scan Asian or maybe Hispanic but that is still a group of white people with some pepper sprinkled on it, not anything that looks like “inclusion.”

Note also that in all of those posters there’s not a hint of what this company actually does, which I suspect boils down to nothing at all anyway. I bet half the employees at this place couldn’t nutshell what their jobs actually are for.

Anyway, I’m still job hunting. Just not with these guys.

40321 things down, 8042942 left to go

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I didn’t do anything substantive yesterday, which was 100% a deliberate choice, but that meant that I left everything I had to do today for today, and then got three inches of snow dumped on my driveway that demanded dealing with on top of it, meaning that today I have run errands, graded, tried out our new snowblower (A+ would blow again,) planned for next week, made some tentative plans as to how I’m going to teach Fatima to read, edited some videos, written this blog post, and done some reading. I’ve also … uh … supervised as my wife and son crawled into the crawlspace underneath the house, because we have a couple of leaks that are going to have to be dealt with, which I’m super excited about.

We watched Eternals yesterday. That’s the review. That one sentence. I’m not saying don’t watch it, but don’t go out of your way to expend any effort on watching it either.

I still have a ton of stuff to do tonight, or maybe I don’t and it’s just that the few things I have left to do feel like a lot, I’m not sure. Either way it’s probably time to cross “dinner” off of the list (right after “write blog post”) because it’s possible that I’m overestimating what else I have to do today because I’m hungry. Did I ever eat lunch? I think I skipped lunch. That probably wasn’t smart.

Anyway, see you tomorrow. There may be kvetching about technology purchases! Or maybe not. We’ll see.

On things that don’t matter

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I’ve blogged, like, ninety days in a row or something like that, and I had a streak of much longer than that going before a long day where I literally forgot broke the streak, and I simultaneously 1) don’t care about the streak, 2) have nothing to say (this digestive thing will not go away; all I’ve eaten today is a banana, a little bit of turkey and a sandwich) and 3) am posting anyway because apparently I do care? Except I don’t.

Anyway, it’s not 8:30 yet and I legit might be in bed in a few minutes, how are you?

How about no?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, idiocy2 Comments

Sure, WordPress, I’ll drop $36K a year minimum on analytics for my hundred hits a day and the no money this blog is making me. These advertising dollars were well spent!

(I pay $90 a year for the blog. Why the hell do they think this is relevant to me?)

I’ve got nothing today, really, but I’m about to go live over at YouTube for a little while so pop on over, say hi, and subscribe. 🙂

I swear this story is true

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

Or: how not to speak around middle school students.

I was walking down to the office to drop off some paperwork when I saw one of the new teachers in the building having a conversation with one of her students in the hallway. Because this is relevant to the story, I will reveal that she is a relatively new teacher– second or third-year, I think– and is of an appropriate age for that, so early/mid twenties or so. Seeing her reminded me that I’ve been meaning to email her about a mutual student we have for a couple of days and I keep forgetting to do it, so I thought I’d take a moment and just talk to her in person.

By the time I got to her room, she and the student were back inside, so I just stood in the doorway until she noticed me and asked a question, using these precise words, which would prove to be her undoing: “Could I borrow you for a sec?”

You might possibly already see where this is going. To her credit, she realized mid-sentence that she was in the midst of making a terrible mistake and just … powered through it like a damn champion, not breaking stride or stammering and joining me in the hallway, where we exchanged a glance that said we will never speak of this again, other than when I run to the rest of the math team and tell them, then tell the entire internet tonight, and somehow only a small number of her seventh-grade (thank God she didn’t have any of my 8th graders in the room) class seems to have noticed.

Because the exact words that she inadvertently chose to respond to my question, in perhaps the single most awkward exchange I have ever had with a young woman in my life, were “For you, Mr. Siler, I have all the secs you need.”

Say it out loud, if you need to.

I have a silly job.

Some realizations

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments
  • First, that it is 7:30 PM, and I probably ought to blog today;
  • Second, that I am officially closer to retirement than I am to college, even assuming I wait to 65 to retire;
  • Third, that my student loans are due to be paid off four years prior to said 65th birthday, which should be a crime;
  • Fourth, that even if the notion of living another 20 years much less teaching for that long is difficult to wrap my head around, I probably ought to take this retirement thing seriously since I have, y’know, a wife and child in the mix now.

In case you can’t tell, I met with a retirement … dude, of some sort, at work on Friday, and several mortality-confronty sorts of things were discussed, and then this weekend I managed to keep my shit together long enough to dig through the folder that I throw anything even vaguely investment-related into and find not one but two different investment-related accounts that appear to no longer be receiving active contributions; I did some strategic scanning and sent them off to The Dude with a note attached that basically said I don’t know any of the money words, please help and we will see if anything happens. I have never really believed in retirement, to be honest; not in the sense that I don’t want to eventually quit working– I want to quit working now— but in the sense that I suspect any money I “invest” in my “future” will be stolen or siphoned off somehow before I’m able to actually benefit from any of it.

Today also included mowing, putting all my laundered clothes away like a big boy, finishing a book, starting another one, getting my grading done, writing a number of important emails, and a couple of videos recorded for The YouTubes. All in all, not bad for a Sunday.

Oops

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I don’t actually think that having posted 269 days in a row on this site without interruption is much in the way of achievements, but I must admit that having that streak interrupted because I wrote an “I am too tired to post” post and then forgot to hit publish and didn’t notice until the next day is kind of annoying.

Ah well. We begin again, I suppose.

Oh my god I hate you SO MUCH

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

My day began with an email from my boss, and that email began with the words “I don’t know how many of you remember …” and then the name of a man who I, in fact, did not remember. The email went on to say that this man’s partner had passed away, and then gave information about the viewing or the funeral or whatever.

You don’t work with me, right? Probably not. So use your reading skills and your thinkin’ brain, based solely on the small amount of information I have given you, and answer two questions for me:

  1. Does this person still work at my school?
  2. Was this person included in the email sent to the staff?

If your answers were no and no, respectively, congratulations! You possess at least a modicum of reading comprehension and common Goddamned sense.

So why the fuck did I spend all day deleting emails from the reply-all brigade expressing their condolences to Mr. So-and-So, who doesn’t work at our school any longer and has not in at least three years and furthermore could not possibly read any of the emails that you were sending to the eighty people on our staff??

And to make it worse, some of the people sending the emails joined the staff after I did, meaning they were sending their personal condolences to someone who not only was not going to see the message but they didn’t know.

How did I make it through the day without losing my shit? Am I going to get a reward for this? Please say yes. Because sooner or later I’m going to strike back, and the building will never be the same again afterwards.

Jumping off a bridge, back later.