Four months ago I started my new job in far-away (60 miles) Urbandale, Iowa. The job was a six month programming assignment with the carrot held out of being hired on full-time if my performance was found worthy. Although I do like carrots I negotiated an hourly rate that was higher than the other contracting jobs that had been shown to me and less than the admittedly windfall-like rate that I got when I contracted directly with a company last year instead of going through a staffing agency like the one I used to get this position.
My thought was that I would work my six months and if the company wanted to hire me we would negotiate things like salary or being able to work from home a day or two a week. I expected the company to wait as long as possible before making me an offer since the closer I came to the end of the six months the less leverage I would have at least in theory since most workers that take on contract to hire positions are not in a position to miss the paycheck or two that a job search would entail. My windfall last year left me in a good enough situation that I could walk away from the job when the contract was up but my employers would have no way of knowing that.
The job was unusual in a number of aspects. I was part of a team of programmers and engineers based on three continents tasked with making a major upgrade to an existing project. In addition to the three groups there was also a research and development group whose software the existing project needed to interact with. Most of the people on the project (including the R&D group) had been with this company for at least 10 years with most of them having 20 or more years at the company.
With so many people spending so many years at the company I thought that I could be told what I needed to do and pointed to where I needed to make changes by the more experienced hands. This was not the way it was. I was told what end results I needed to create but the company language was a kind of shorthand that required years to comprehend exactly what needed to change and what side effects could occur and finding where things needed to be changed another matter entirely. No one seems to have the complete picture of the project. Finding out who knew what was cumbersome and frequently making me seem more like a nuisance than a part of the team.
I liked the people I worked with but I didn’t care much for the work at all. All the programming groups seemed to distrust each other and it appeared that they would occasionally go out of their way to make other groups or group members look bad. It reminded me a lot of a place I worked in New Jersey in the late 1980’s / early 1990’s when I first started programming. Everyone there seemed frustrated most of the time and a lot of the people contracted stress related diseases. I didn’t know how that dynamic evolved and 30 years later I don’t understand this group dynamic any better. I recognized this situation as something I’d encountered before and that kept me from getting too frustrated but it is not an environment I want to spend the rest of my working life in.
After a few weeks I settled in and was getting my feet under me. I didn’t have to ask nearly as many questions but had to redo my work often because of my lack of understanding of the project, other changes breaking my changes, a misunderstanding on the part of the person asking for the work or any combination of all three factors. I had taken my name off the lists that recruiters use to cull applicants but in May I got a call from the recruiter that got me the interview with a company in Marshalltown right before I took my current job. Someone had retired and there was another opening. I said I would apply if I could start in July so I could finish up my current projects. This was acceptable and I started the application process once again.
Since I had recently applied at this company I didn’t have to go through the entire process. I had a phone interview and breakfast meeting in place of an in-person interview and lunch. I found out a week later I had made the cut to the final three applicants and a week after that was asked to submit my information for a background check. I passed the background check and was offered the job which I accepted and will start on Monday. I gave two weeks’ notice at my current assignment and true to the dysfunctional nature of the place arranged to leave on Wednesday with the person who approves my time sheets and when this person went on vacation someone else asked me to stay on until Friday and work late and on the weekend from home. I agreed to stay until Friday and work from home but was not given any work to do at home.
I will be getting less pay at my new job but the savings in time, gas, and car usage commuting five miles instead of 60 miles will make up for some of the shortage and being part of a health care plan instead of buying my own through COBRA or the staffing agency’s non-subsidized plan should take care of the rest. This is the same company I worked for a decade ago after leaving my job of 13 years writing shoe store software the company was sold to a group from out of state. I was a contractor back then and when the recession of 2008 hit the contractors were taking pay cuts and getting laid off in a terrible job market. I liked working in town but the circumstances of a recession (no pay raises) and no benefits (buying my own health care and not getting paid on holidays OR the ten-day Christmas shutdown) dictated I get a ‘permanent’ role with benefits even though it meant traveling a couple of hours a day for another ten years. I wouldn’t have felt good about taking a contracting role again with this company but feel pretty lucky to have landed a full-time job with benefits at the same place. I’m not naive enough to think that having a job close to home will suddenly make my work life a paradise. It is called work for a reason and I have worked here before and know that every place has its share of disagreeable people and practices. There is a lot of unknowns at any job but if my hand wasn't forced almost a decade ago I wouldn't have left a job so close to home. I feel like I am closing a loop and I expect a pleasant experience to be working so close to home again.
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Friday, June 29, 2018
Friday, March 9, 2018
On The Road Again
A little more than two months ago my contract ended at the place I was programming at in Ames. I didn’t have another job lined up and had resolved to be a bit choosy in picking my new job with the end result hopefully to be making closer to the incredibly generous rate I was being paid in Ames and working closer to Marshalltown than the 60 mile commute to Des Moines I had in the past few years.
In order to let the world of recruiters know I was available I updated my resume on dice.com and changed my status on LinkedIn to ‘looking for work’. Almost immediately recruiting companies started making contact with me. Most of the jobs openings were what I considered low-paying ‘contract to hire’ jobs with no benefits with the idea that the promise of being hired after six months to a year will make up for the low rate.
I explained to the recruiters that my salary range was higher than the openings and also explained that that my range was subject to change. That was good enough for most of them. One recruiter submitted me for a direct hire position but would not accept my explanation about not considering a particular contract to hire position. The same recruiter wrote to me two weeks later to ask about the contract to hire position and I replied asking if he heard anything about the direct hire position he had submitted me for. I got a reply asking me if I would talk to his supervisor about the contract to hire position.
I said OK and talked to the supervisor in the afternoon. The supervisor told me that he didn’t understand why I wouldn’t consider the contract to hire position because he had ‘been in this business a long time’ and they were offering the going rate. I couldn’t resist asking how old the supervisor was. He was 32 which meant that I had been programming before he had been born and we probably had vastly different ideas about what ‘a long time was’ (he has been a recruiter for 7 years which may be a long time for being a recruiter but I wouldn’t think so).
The supervisor and I weren’t going to agree but when I asked why I didn’t get any feedback about the direct hire job he said he was going to call his contact at the company in the next week and apologized for the ‘mis-communication’ which was really non-communication since there would have to be a communication in the first place for a ‘mis-communication’ to have taken place. I heard back from the recruiter the next week saying the position had already been filled which tells me that this recruiter had no relationship with the company except to spitball resumes in their direction or else he maybe would have known how the hiring process was getting along. I haven’t heard from the recruiter or the supervisor since which means I haven’t had any time wasted by them which is a positive in my book.
When you deal with the recruiters of the world (or at least in Central Iowa) you get a good feel for who has relationships with the hiring companies and who is just throwing resumes at companies. Most of the recruiters are trying to get candidates for a few jobs at the same companies. When only one recruiter is mentioning a company that is a good sign they have a personal relationship and you will be considered more carefully if they submit you. By the middle of February I had four in person interviews and two phone interviews in the span of two weeks. All the face to face interviews went well enough and three of them were for what I would consider top-shelf companies that had good pay and interesting work. I thought I did well in the interviews where I was asked concrete questions (solving deadlocks, dealing with an unforeseen issue) and less well where I was asked questions where the right answer was some buzzword that I wasn’t familiar with. I felt the buzzword type of questions were trying to see of someone my age was up on newer technologies since they were almost always brought up by younger interviewers.
I decided that I would want to work for three of the four companies I had interviewed with and would accept an offer from any of them given the right compensation. The only problem was that the companies are all 60 miles away in Des Moines. I had a phone interview with a company in Grinnell that was 45 miles away and had the perk of being able to work from home two days a week but they were deliberate in their hiring process and had scheduled a face to face interview for a week after the other interviews.
The next week my face to face interview in Grinnell got postponed for a week but a recruiter called with a job opening in Marshalltown. We talked in Wednesday and scheduled an interview for Friday. The only problem was I got a job offer on Friday morning from a company in Des Moines. I said I wanted to take till Monday to think it over which was accepted. I told the people in Marshalltown about my situation during the interview but they told me that the process would take at least two weeks to determine if an offer would be made or even if a second round of interviews was going to be necessary.
The interview went well enough and I let both the Marshalltown and Grinnell recruiters know that I had to make a decision on Monday. I didn’t hear from anyone so I decided to accept the job I was offered and take myself out of the running for the other jobs. Did I make the right call? I’ll never know. I do know that I was concerned with being the second choice from the other jobs and not having any job after interviewing for a bunch of top-shelf jobs.
There was a third option that I didn’t pursue which was to accept the job and renege on the deal if a better offer had come along. From a cold analytical standpoint this was the correct option to take as long as I didn’t mind giving my word and going back on it. For me this was not an option. I’ve accepted jobs in the past and then gotten counter offers to remain where I was and increased offers from other companies and increased offers from other jobs. I’ve never gone back on my word and never regretted it either. I like being able to go to sleep not thinking about having broken my word. Also almost every job I’ve had has either provided me extra income after leaving or new skills to make me more valuable to the next job and I don’t expect this job to be an exception, The only downside is that I am back to the hour long commute each way which is 40 minutes longer per day than the commute to Ames and an hour longer than the commute to my living room if I could have gotten a work-at-home job.
In order to let the world of recruiters know I was available I updated my resume on dice.com and changed my status on LinkedIn to ‘looking for work’. Almost immediately recruiting companies started making contact with me. Most of the jobs openings were what I considered low-paying ‘contract to hire’ jobs with no benefits with the idea that the promise of being hired after six months to a year will make up for the low rate.
I explained to the recruiters that my salary range was higher than the openings and also explained that that my range was subject to change. That was good enough for most of them. One recruiter submitted me for a direct hire position but would not accept my explanation about not considering a particular contract to hire position. The same recruiter wrote to me two weeks later to ask about the contract to hire position and I replied asking if he heard anything about the direct hire position he had submitted me for. I got a reply asking me if I would talk to his supervisor about the contract to hire position.
I said OK and talked to the supervisor in the afternoon. The supervisor told me that he didn’t understand why I wouldn’t consider the contract to hire position because he had ‘been in this business a long time’ and they were offering the going rate. I couldn’t resist asking how old the supervisor was. He was 32 which meant that I had been programming before he had been born and we probably had vastly different ideas about what ‘a long time was’ (he has been a recruiter for 7 years which may be a long time for being a recruiter but I wouldn’t think so).
The supervisor and I weren’t going to agree but when I asked why I didn’t get any feedback about the direct hire job he said he was going to call his contact at the company in the next week and apologized for the ‘mis-communication’ which was really non-communication since there would have to be a communication in the first place for a ‘mis-communication’ to have taken place. I heard back from the recruiter the next week saying the position had already been filled which tells me that this recruiter had no relationship with the company except to spitball resumes in their direction or else he maybe would have known how the hiring process was getting along. I haven’t heard from the recruiter or the supervisor since which means I haven’t had any time wasted by them which is a positive in my book.
When you deal with the recruiters of the world (or at least in Central Iowa) you get a good feel for who has relationships with the hiring companies and who is just throwing resumes at companies. Most of the recruiters are trying to get candidates for a few jobs at the same companies. When only one recruiter is mentioning a company that is a good sign they have a personal relationship and you will be considered more carefully if they submit you. By the middle of February I had four in person interviews and two phone interviews in the span of two weeks. All the face to face interviews went well enough and three of them were for what I would consider top-shelf companies that had good pay and interesting work. I thought I did well in the interviews where I was asked concrete questions (solving deadlocks, dealing with an unforeseen issue) and less well where I was asked questions where the right answer was some buzzword that I wasn’t familiar with. I felt the buzzword type of questions were trying to see of someone my age was up on newer technologies since they were almost always brought up by younger interviewers.
I decided that I would want to work for three of the four companies I had interviewed with and would accept an offer from any of them given the right compensation. The only problem was that the companies are all 60 miles away in Des Moines. I had a phone interview with a company in Grinnell that was 45 miles away and had the perk of being able to work from home two days a week but they were deliberate in their hiring process and had scheduled a face to face interview for a week after the other interviews.
The next week my face to face interview in Grinnell got postponed for a week but a recruiter called with a job opening in Marshalltown. We talked in Wednesday and scheduled an interview for Friday. The only problem was I got a job offer on Friday morning from a company in Des Moines. I said I wanted to take till Monday to think it over which was accepted. I told the people in Marshalltown about my situation during the interview but they told me that the process would take at least two weeks to determine if an offer would be made or even if a second round of interviews was going to be necessary.
The interview went well enough and I let both the Marshalltown and Grinnell recruiters know that I had to make a decision on Monday. I didn’t hear from anyone so I decided to accept the job I was offered and take myself out of the running for the other jobs. Did I make the right call? I’ll never know. I do know that I was concerned with being the second choice from the other jobs and not having any job after interviewing for a bunch of top-shelf jobs.
There was a third option that I didn’t pursue which was to accept the job and renege on the deal if a better offer had come along. From a cold analytical standpoint this was the correct option to take as long as I didn’t mind giving my word and going back on it. For me this was not an option. I’ve accepted jobs in the past and then gotten counter offers to remain where I was and increased offers from other companies and increased offers from other jobs. I’ve never gone back on my word and never regretted it either. I like being able to go to sleep not thinking about having broken my word. Also almost every job I’ve had has either provided me extra income after leaving or new skills to make me more valuable to the next job and I don’t expect this job to be an exception, The only downside is that I am back to the hour long commute each way which is 40 minutes longer per day than the commute to Ames and an hour longer than the commute to my living room if I could have gotten a work-at-home job.
Unlike Willie Nelson I am not looking forward to being on the road again, perhaps because while Willie will be in places that he's never been, I will be on the same stretch of asphalt over and over and over...
Friday, December 29, 2017
Out on the Streets Again
When I was laid off in February from my previous job as a consultant that was hired out to different companies I was lucky in that I immediately hired myself out to the same company that I was hired out to by my old company and didn’t miss a day of work. The arrangement I had with the company was that I would be contracted out until the end of the year and possibly more. In addition, my old employer found themselves unable to support the software I maintained that interfaced with a government entity and hired me to continue maintaining the software on a part-time basis.
I had never worked for myself full time before and I found that I am not the greatest guy to work for. I took eight days off all year which included three half days off to go to the dentist, two days I had previously committed to playing in the Twin Ports chess tournament, and four days visiting relatives in South Carolina and seeing Ben graduate in Idaho. I did take holidays and weekends off but that was only because the company I was working for was closed because I might have been greedy enough to work eight days a week if I could have. Even when I was ‘off’ I was still working at least a half hour a day checking the program I was supporting as part of my part time duties which included weekends and holidays.
Long before I started contracting with the company it had been purchased by a bigger company based in Minnesota. I have been through having the company I was working for being bought by a bigger company twice before and I kind of knew the script. Slowly but surely the kind of jobs that are found in every company are eliminated in the company that has been bought. Then a lot of people at the company being bought find new jobs and aren’t replaced. This time around wasn’t any different. Naturally there is a push to move the computer systems over to the buying company which in my experience takes a lot longer than anyone expects and that was no different in this case either. I was expecting to be told that my contract would be ending at the end of September when the company officially changed names. That didn’t happen but I was told in November that none of the contractors’ deals were going to be extended at the end of the year.
The way my supervisor told me the news I think he was expecting me to be upset which I wasn’t. We had an arrangement until the end of the year and they lived up to their end of the bargain. I was told that it would be understood if I got a new job and left early. To me that wasn’t an option since I also had made a commitment that I intended to live up to. I have been working pretty hard this year and also made a lot of money and I intend to take a few weeks off to relax. I haven’t had a week off with nothing to do since I moved to Iowa in 1994 and spent 6 weeks looking for a job.
I have a number of projects I’m planning on tackling during my time off. Whether I’ll get to them or not is an entirely different question since I started getting calls from recruiters about jobs before I let my availability be known. One call came from a recruiter who was looking for an EDI programmer. He wrote to me with the job specs and I said I was interested so we set up a phone meeting. The recruiter’s first question was how excited was I about the job opportunity and his second was how much money I wanted since I told him my excitement at the job opportunity was going to be dependent on his much the job paid. The recruiter spent most of his time gauging how negotiable the salary number I gave him was. He first told me that I was at the high end of the clients range and would I be interested if the offer came in for a little less. I said maybe if the benefits were right and then he went a little lower and a little lower until I said that I wouldn’t be interested for that number. Having settled that we ended our conversation but the recruiter called me the next day. He wanted to talk to me right away so I called him back. The recruiter told me that he was worried I would just want to work for his client for a short time until I got a better job. I asked him if he had my resume and we both knew he did. I pointed out that I had worked 13 years at one place and 7 years at another and asked if he thought I had never had chances to move on from either job. This got the recruiter on the defensive and he said of course he knew all that which didn’t explain why he called in the first place. Maybe he was trying to see if I was desperate for a job so he could lower the offer but I’ll probably never know as I haven’t heard from him since.
I had another call from a different recruiter a few days later. This person wanted me to submit me for a job at the State of Iowa. I sent him my resume and he said he submitted it and then wanted me to send the State of Iowa a form saying that his company was my representative. I sent the form in, the recruiter confirmed it, and I haven’t heard from him either.
Both of these ‘opportunities’ were cold-calls from recruiters looking for low-hanging fruit which is how most of the recruiters I’ve ever worked with operate. If they can’t place someone in a day or so they lose interest and don’t follow up. They are generally pointless exercises that I don’t bother with but I went along with it because I figured I needed the experience dealing with these types again. In 1994 the job market was pretty tight and I was jumpy about getting a job but in 2018 there seems to be a lot of demand for programmers so it is just a matter of finding the right place to work and I can even be a bit choosy to start with, choosy meaning looking closer to Marshalltown than the 60 mile drive to Des Moines I’ve done for 19 of the past 23 years.
I had never worked for myself full time before and I found that I am not the greatest guy to work for. I took eight days off all year which included three half days off to go to the dentist, two days I had previously committed to playing in the Twin Ports chess tournament, and four days visiting relatives in South Carolina and seeing Ben graduate in Idaho. I did take holidays and weekends off but that was only because the company I was working for was closed because I might have been greedy enough to work eight days a week if I could have. Even when I was ‘off’ I was still working at least a half hour a day checking the program I was supporting as part of my part time duties which included weekends and holidays.
Long before I started contracting with the company it had been purchased by a bigger company based in Minnesota. I have been through having the company I was working for being bought by a bigger company twice before and I kind of knew the script. Slowly but surely the kind of jobs that are found in every company are eliminated in the company that has been bought. Then a lot of people at the company being bought find new jobs and aren’t replaced. This time around wasn’t any different. Naturally there is a push to move the computer systems over to the buying company which in my experience takes a lot longer than anyone expects and that was no different in this case either. I was expecting to be told that my contract would be ending at the end of September when the company officially changed names. That didn’t happen but I was told in November that none of the contractors’ deals were going to be extended at the end of the year.
The way my supervisor told me the news I think he was expecting me to be upset which I wasn’t. We had an arrangement until the end of the year and they lived up to their end of the bargain. I was told that it would be understood if I got a new job and left early. To me that wasn’t an option since I also had made a commitment that I intended to live up to. I have been working pretty hard this year and also made a lot of money and I intend to take a few weeks off to relax. I haven’t had a week off with nothing to do since I moved to Iowa in 1994 and spent 6 weeks looking for a job.
I have a number of projects I’m planning on tackling during my time off. Whether I’ll get to them or not is an entirely different question since I started getting calls from recruiters about jobs before I let my availability be known. One call came from a recruiter who was looking for an EDI programmer. He wrote to me with the job specs and I said I was interested so we set up a phone meeting. The recruiter’s first question was how excited was I about the job opportunity and his second was how much money I wanted since I told him my excitement at the job opportunity was going to be dependent on his much the job paid. The recruiter spent most of his time gauging how negotiable the salary number I gave him was. He first told me that I was at the high end of the clients range and would I be interested if the offer came in for a little less. I said maybe if the benefits were right and then he went a little lower and a little lower until I said that I wouldn’t be interested for that number. Having settled that we ended our conversation but the recruiter called me the next day. He wanted to talk to me right away so I called him back. The recruiter told me that he was worried I would just want to work for his client for a short time until I got a better job. I asked him if he had my resume and we both knew he did. I pointed out that I had worked 13 years at one place and 7 years at another and asked if he thought I had never had chances to move on from either job. This got the recruiter on the defensive and he said of course he knew all that which didn’t explain why he called in the first place. Maybe he was trying to see if I was desperate for a job so he could lower the offer but I’ll probably never know as I haven’t heard from him since.
I had another call from a different recruiter a few days later. This person wanted me to submit me for a job at the State of Iowa. I sent him my resume and he said he submitted it and then wanted me to send the State of Iowa a form saying that his company was my representative. I sent the form in, the recruiter confirmed it, and I haven’t heard from him either.
Both of these ‘opportunities’ were cold-calls from recruiters looking for low-hanging fruit which is how most of the recruiters I’ve ever worked with operate. If they can’t place someone in a day or so they lose interest and don’t follow up. They are generally pointless exercises that I don’t bother with but I went along with it because I figured I needed the experience dealing with these types again. In 1994 the job market was pretty tight and I was jumpy about getting a job but in 2018 there seems to be a lot of demand for programmers so it is just a matter of finding the right place to work and I can even be a bit choosy to start with, choosy meaning looking closer to Marshalltown than the 60 mile drive to Des Moines I’ve done for 19 of the past 23 years.
I got the title for this post from this song by the inimitable band 'The Selecter' which was a favorite of mine almost 40 years ago when I DJ'd at a college radio station.
I also saw this band at the late Hurrah club in New York City over half a lifetime ago - here is a live version of the same song!
Friday, February 17, 2017
Meet The New Boss
I’ve been working on site at a company in Ames Iowa the last 15 months. Ames is 37 miles from my house which is a lot closer than the 60 mile commute to West Des Moines. Everything has been going good. The company in Ames seems happy with my work, the company I work for makes money from farming me out, and I have a good paying job with health care, a 401k match, and four weeks’ vacation/sick time that grew each year I worked for the company which will be six in March.
Or should I say would have been six in March. Two weeks ago my boss drove to Ames to meet me for a ‘status meeting’ and lunch. Over lunch I found out that the status of our department was that the large company that bought our company years ago decided to close our department. This wasn’t a surprise for me since in the last year there has been an exodus of the senior leadership of the older company and the new company has been very aggressive about consolidating all the companies they have bought in the past few years which are now all located in one building in West Des Moines and have been rebranded into one company name with different divisions. The custom programming department I work for doesn’t seem to fit in the new company which is mostly focused towards selling and maintaining networking and phone systems with little to no custom programming.
I was told I had a number of choices. I could work another 60 days and receive a severance package and be unemployed, I could find another job before the 60 days in which case I wouldn’t be unemployed but the severance package would be problematic since I was leaving the company, or I could ‘transition’ to the staffing company that was bought by the large company that bought our company years ago and be farmed out to the same place in Ames to work.
My situation is no different than most people. I work to pay the bills and also to make sure I have health coverage. I had lunch with a man and a woman from the staffing company three weeks ago on a Friday. They were well dressed, very polite, smiled a lot, and paid for my lunch. We talked about my ‘brand’ and I mentioned that at 56 years old I was probably too old to have a ‘brand’. Then we talked about how since I was already working at the company in Ames it would be a seamless transition with the only difference being that the company I am working for was now going to pay this staffing company instead of my old department. Then the seamless transition started to split at the seams. The staffing company does not give their contractors vacation time or paid holidays and the contractors are assigned to a ‘higher tier’ of health care coverage. The ‘higher tier’ does not mean the contractors get more coverage, rather that the contractors pay much more for the same coverage.
I was told by the staffing people that I could expect enough of an increase in my hourly rate to offset the loss of benefits. It was a very nice meeting at a very nice restaurant and we all said very nice things (even me). I did notice that even though we were at this restaurant for so long that the all the other tables turned twice staffing guy only left a minimal tip.
That afternoon I got an email from staffing guy wondering if I had any questions. I had only one question and that was if there wasn’t a position from the staffing company available when my current assignment ended who would be paying for my health care. I didn’t ask the question because I didn’t know the answer – I asked the question because I wanted to see how long it would take to get the answer.
Since I couldn’t imagine a staffing company not knowing the answer to this very simple question when I got an email the next Monday that the staffing company was researching the answer to my question I started looking around to see what jobs were around. Luckily there are plenty of programming jobs around and I picked two companies I was going to apply to. The company I was stationed at knew that my department was being closed. I told them I didn’t think that I was going to be moving to the staffing company. This company has always been straight with me and told me that they would give me and my company three months’ notice before I wouldn’t be needed there so I wanted to be straight with them and let them know that I may not be able to reciprocate and give them three months notice.
I’ve been through this scene before. I worked for a staffing company that I signed a contract for two years at an agreed upon rate. At the end of the first year the company called me to congratulate me on the fact that I’d been renewed. I asked if this meant a third year only to be told ‘never mind’ because my ‘2-year’ contract was only a one year contract and the printed copy that said two years was only for my benefit. The nebulous nature of the ‘contract’ was confirmed when the staffing company cut my pay in the middle of the second year of the contract. At that time the staffing company told me they would ‘over-communicate’ with me to make sure I was in the loop. I never heard again from the staffing company until the day I told them I would not be available after the second year of my contract ended because I got a new job. Then the staffing company called me and told me that they had been working on my new deal and they were just about to call me and let me know about the huge raise I was going to get. What a coincidence.
Now maybe this staffing company was different than the other staffing company but I’ve had experience with plenty of these companies and so have my friends and for the most part we have come to the conclusion that working for a staffing company means you are eminently disposable. Maybe this staffing division is better than the rest and maybe they aren’t but a company that doesn’t offer their employees any benefits or won’t answer a simple question doesn’t make me think they are any different except maybe worse than the other staffing companies.
In the next week the place where I’m assigned asked me if I would consider contracting directly through them instead of through a staffing company. They checked with their legal department and I made an offer and it was accepted. 10 days after my initial meeting with staffing guy and staffing woman, staffing guy called me to run through the numbers. My pay would be raised by a little more than the amount needed to make up for no paid vacation, no holidays, and the massive increase in the cost of health benefits. It turns out that the staffing company’s health care costs as much as it would cost me to buy it privately. I asked for the answer to my original question and staffing guy told me that if I was not on assignment I was considered unemployed and had to purchase my health care out of my pocket.
Then staffing guy told me that I had to sign the ‘transition paperwork’ within two days. This reminded me of my previous experiences with staffing companies. While there are no quick answers for the contractors’ requests the questions from the staffing company seem more like demands that leave little to no room for reflection. I told staffing guy that since it took him 10 days to answer my question I would like to take 10 days to think about the offer. Staffing guy said OK and I waited a couple of days and tendered my resignation to my old job and let the staffing company know that I wouldn’t be joining them.
Working for myself is a boatload of hassle - there are extra tax forms to fill out, expenses to track, insurances to buy, and I even have to pay my taxes quarterly. I was happy working at my company (6 years is the second longest I’ve been working anywhere) but I didn’t leave them – they left me. As is the case with most working people I’m a red pen line drawn through my name from being unemployed but it seems to me I’ll have a better chance at avoiding the red pen by not having the layer of a staffing company in between me and the company that is ultimately paying the bills. The staffing company is kind of like a matchmaker in that they have access to both the programmers that need jobs and the companies that need people but in this case I was already bringing the company to the table so I didn’t need the staffing company and if circumstances change there are plenty of staffing companies around.
I don’t know how this will work out. It is like buying a car or any other big decision in that I won’t know whether it was a good choice or a bad choice until I get down the road a few years. I do feel good that when suddenly faced with an unpredictable situation I acted swiftly and honestly instead of sticking my head in the sand and hoping for the best like I did 10 years ago when the company I worked at for 13 years was sold and I waited fruitlessly for a promised retention bonus. So even though Monday I’ll be going to work in the same location in Ames that I went to today and will still be doing the same work with the same people it will be very different because I’ll have a new boss which is me. I hope we get along.
Or should I say would have been six in March. Two weeks ago my boss drove to Ames to meet me for a ‘status meeting’ and lunch. Over lunch I found out that the status of our department was that the large company that bought our company years ago decided to close our department. This wasn’t a surprise for me since in the last year there has been an exodus of the senior leadership of the older company and the new company has been very aggressive about consolidating all the companies they have bought in the past few years which are now all located in one building in West Des Moines and have been rebranded into one company name with different divisions. The custom programming department I work for doesn’t seem to fit in the new company which is mostly focused towards selling and maintaining networking and phone systems with little to no custom programming.
I was told I had a number of choices. I could work another 60 days and receive a severance package and be unemployed, I could find another job before the 60 days in which case I wouldn’t be unemployed but the severance package would be problematic since I was leaving the company, or I could ‘transition’ to the staffing company that was bought by the large company that bought our company years ago and be farmed out to the same place in Ames to work.
My situation is no different than most people. I work to pay the bills and also to make sure I have health coverage. I had lunch with a man and a woman from the staffing company three weeks ago on a Friday. They were well dressed, very polite, smiled a lot, and paid for my lunch. We talked about my ‘brand’ and I mentioned that at 56 years old I was probably too old to have a ‘brand’. Then we talked about how since I was already working at the company in Ames it would be a seamless transition with the only difference being that the company I am working for was now going to pay this staffing company instead of my old department. Then the seamless transition started to split at the seams. The staffing company does not give their contractors vacation time or paid holidays and the contractors are assigned to a ‘higher tier’ of health care coverage. The ‘higher tier’ does not mean the contractors get more coverage, rather that the contractors pay much more for the same coverage.
I was told by the staffing people that I could expect enough of an increase in my hourly rate to offset the loss of benefits. It was a very nice meeting at a very nice restaurant and we all said very nice things (even me). I did notice that even though we were at this restaurant for so long that the all the other tables turned twice staffing guy only left a minimal tip.
That afternoon I got an email from staffing guy wondering if I had any questions. I had only one question and that was if there wasn’t a position from the staffing company available when my current assignment ended who would be paying for my health care. I didn’t ask the question because I didn’t know the answer – I asked the question because I wanted to see how long it would take to get the answer.
Since I couldn’t imagine a staffing company not knowing the answer to this very simple question when I got an email the next Monday that the staffing company was researching the answer to my question I started looking around to see what jobs were around. Luckily there are plenty of programming jobs around and I picked two companies I was going to apply to. The company I was stationed at knew that my department was being closed. I told them I didn’t think that I was going to be moving to the staffing company. This company has always been straight with me and told me that they would give me and my company three months’ notice before I wouldn’t be needed there so I wanted to be straight with them and let them know that I may not be able to reciprocate and give them three months notice.
I’ve been through this scene before. I worked for a staffing company that I signed a contract for two years at an agreed upon rate. At the end of the first year the company called me to congratulate me on the fact that I’d been renewed. I asked if this meant a third year only to be told ‘never mind’ because my ‘2-year’ contract was only a one year contract and the printed copy that said two years was only for my benefit. The nebulous nature of the ‘contract’ was confirmed when the staffing company cut my pay in the middle of the second year of the contract. At that time the staffing company told me they would ‘over-communicate’ with me to make sure I was in the loop. I never heard again from the staffing company until the day I told them I would not be available after the second year of my contract ended because I got a new job. Then the staffing company called me and told me that they had been working on my new deal and they were just about to call me and let me know about the huge raise I was going to get. What a coincidence.
Now maybe this staffing company was different than the other staffing company but I’ve had experience with plenty of these companies and so have my friends and for the most part we have come to the conclusion that working for a staffing company means you are eminently disposable. Maybe this staffing division is better than the rest and maybe they aren’t but a company that doesn’t offer their employees any benefits or won’t answer a simple question doesn’t make me think they are any different except maybe worse than the other staffing companies.
In the next week the place where I’m assigned asked me if I would consider contracting directly through them instead of through a staffing company. They checked with their legal department and I made an offer and it was accepted. 10 days after my initial meeting with staffing guy and staffing woman, staffing guy called me to run through the numbers. My pay would be raised by a little more than the amount needed to make up for no paid vacation, no holidays, and the massive increase in the cost of health benefits. It turns out that the staffing company’s health care costs as much as it would cost me to buy it privately. I asked for the answer to my original question and staffing guy told me that if I was not on assignment I was considered unemployed and had to purchase my health care out of my pocket.
Then staffing guy told me that I had to sign the ‘transition paperwork’ within two days. This reminded me of my previous experiences with staffing companies. While there are no quick answers for the contractors’ requests the questions from the staffing company seem more like demands that leave little to no room for reflection. I told staffing guy that since it took him 10 days to answer my question I would like to take 10 days to think about the offer. Staffing guy said OK and I waited a couple of days and tendered my resignation to my old job and let the staffing company know that I wouldn’t be joining them.
Working for myself is a boatload of hassle - there are extra tax forms to fill out, expenses to track, insurances to buy, and I even have to pay my taxes quarterly. I was happy working at my company (6 years is the second longest I’ve been working anywhere) but I didn’t leave them – they left me. As is the case with most working people I’m a red pen line drawn through my name from being unemployed but it seems to me I’ll have a better chance at avoiding the red pen by not having the layer of a staffing company in between me and the company that is ultimately paying the bills. The staffing company is kind of like a matchmaker in that they have access to both the programmers that need jobs and the companies that need people but in this case I was already bringing the company to the table so I didn’t need the staffing company and if circumstances change there are plenty of staffing companies around.
I don’t know how this will work out. It is like buying a car or any other big decision in that I won’t know whether it was a good choice or a bad choice until I get down the road a few years. I do feel good that when suddenly faced with an unpredictable situation I acted swiftly and honestly instead of sticking my head in the sand and hoping for the best like I did 10 years ago when the company I worked at for 13 years was sold and I waited fruitlessly for a promised retention bonus. So even though Monday I’ll be going to work in the same location in Ames that I went to today and will still be doing the same work with the same people it will be very different because I’ll have a new boss which is me. I hope we get along.
Friday, November 20, 2015
The Interviews
Last week the company I work for hired me out to work for a company in Ames Iowa for the foreseeable future. Being farmed out is nothing new for me – I program for my employer’s clients who pay my employer, who then pays me. Normally I work out of my office but in 2013 I had to occasionally work 90 miles east in North Liberty Iowa and in 2014 I spent six months working in a bank in West Des Moines which was 55 miles southwest but only five miles further than the 50 mile commute to my downtown office. My new workplace is 37 miles west which is less than the 60 mile commute to my employer’s current office and more than the 20 feet I walked from my living room to my computer on the three days a week I’ve been working from home.
Before I could work in Ames I had to go on an interview which must have went well enough since I was accepted for the assignment. During the 13 years I spent writing shoe store software I went on exactly one interview until 2007 when the owner of the company I worked for sold his company to people from Indianapolis who had their own programmers at which point I went on a number of interviews.
I wasn’t very successful at interviewing in 2007 and I think it was because I badly wanted a new job and it showed which made me less than an attractive candidate in the way that the seemingly unattainable girls in high school were the most sought after at least that’s the way I remember it. Wanting a new job too badly made me not exactly myself in interviews. I came off trying to sound too professional and less funny than I am and I probably just seemed like a phony.
Eventually one of my interviews panned out and I got my new job which was a two year contract so after two years I was out interviewing again in 2009. For this go round I was determined to be myself and even though I needed a new job instead of wanting one like two years prior I had a great time interviewing. I was at one place where I was told that the programmers were in charge of making the time estimates. I’d barely ever made estimates, preferring instead to say the project would take until it was finished and worked as hard as I could to get my projects done as soon as possible which almost always pleased my employers in terms of the time the project took and the quality of the completed project. I asked the interviewer how it would go over if I was able to complete a project earlier than scheduled. When the interviewer asked how that could be possible I explained that I had the occasional epiphany (meaning a burst of production or an amazing time saving idea) which enabled me to complete some projects well ahead of schedule. The interviewer sniffed “We do not have epiphanies at this company”. We made some more chit-chat but I knew there wasn’t going to be a job offer and the interviewer knew it wasn’t going to be accepted.
I did much better on my next interview. The interviewer asked me if it was better to have a job done on time or done correctly. I said if the job wasn’t done correctly how could it be done on time? Since that got a laugh I told the story about how I took a job at a company and had to take over half of an overdue project from an overworked programmer who I shared the office with. The next week the overworked programmer was talking to our supervisor in our office at lunch not realizing that I was sitting at my desk reading. The supervisor mentioned that I did a good job on my half of the project and the programmer said that while I 'managed' to complete the project his design was “much more elegant” than mine. I got up from my desk and said that if the program didn’t have to work and didn’t have to be done on time I could be just as elegant. My interviewer roared at my story but I wasn’t offered the job because the company put on a hiring freeze. The happy ending was that a month later a position opened up at the company and I was offered the job without another interview.
I interviewed twice for my current job. The first time I went to the downtown office with my current supervisor and his boss. I tried to be funny and got a second interview to meet one of the programmers over lunch. I didn’t want to drive around so I suggested the snack bar at a nearby Target superstore within walking distance. I got the job and my supervisor told me that he never had an interview at a Target snack bar before. I don’t remember much from the interview except the subject of my age came up and I said that while I was a dinosaur one thing to remember was that dinosaurs have big teeth and are more than capable.
I didn’t have an interview for three years until the company put out notice that they were moving to the west side of West Des Moines. This would make an interminable 52 mile commute an unbearable 62 mile commute through 10 miles of the worst Iowa traffic so I was out .interviewing again. Most interviews are done through recruiters that have a job opening and if you fit in the salary slot they will pitch you to their customer as if you are the programming world’s answer to Elvis and Michael Jackson but if you don’t you will never hear from the recruiter until months or years later when they have another opening they think you will fit into.
I had one interview at a huge insurance company that was in a huge 5 story building even further west in West Des Mones than where my company would be moving to. I parked in the full shopping mall sized parking lot and went in. My first meeting was with the department director and a programmer. They were the most exhausted people I’ve ever seen with huge puffy bags under their bloodshot eyes and the stooped over seated posture of someone who was about to fall asleep which I think they did. Their first question was whether I was willing to work overtime. I said I was on occasion if I was paid for it or given time off as compensation. I was told there was no extra pay or compensation and that everyone regularly worked between 55 and 60 hours because they were all “team players”. I mentioned that if these kind of hours were expected the team needed a new manager which was not met by laughter or even a smile. Then I interviewed with two other programmers and I asked them how many hours they worked. They told me they worked between 50 and 60 hours every week and didn't like it but did it because they were “team players”. After that I met with the finance vice president that was in charge of the programming. She told me that she liked to meet all the interviewees but didn’t have any questions and asked if I had any questions. I asked how long it took her to get out of the parking lot. She said it took no time to get out of the parking lot because everyone else was working late because they were all “team players”. My next question was if there were any finance vice president positions available and there weren’t. I wasn’t offered a job which was just as well since I was certainly not their kind of “team player”.
My next interview was with a medical insurance clearinghouse company that was taking their programming needs in house and severing ties with the company that had developed their programs for the past five years. I interviewed with the president of the small company who was a lawyer armed with a list of 20 questions that I assume came from Linked In or some other website that she read off. Here are some of the questions, the preferred answers in bold, and my answers in italics.
Where do you see yourself five years from now? I see myself advancing in this company because I’ll be helping it grow so much. I’m almost 55 years old and I hope to see myself in the mirror and not the cemetery.
What is your biggest and weakness? My biggest weakness is that I care about my work and company so much I work tirelessly to accomplish my goals and have no personal life because I give my all to my company. I don’t have weaknesses or strengths. I have qualities and it is up to my employer to not make them weaknesses. One of my qualities is that I get my work done fast. It sounds like a strength but if I work for someone that thinks out loud about what they want me to do I will get a lot of useless work done because the person I work for wasn’t wanting me to do anything - they were just thinking out loud. If that guy is making the decisions don’t hire me – hire the person that waits until the last minute to do anything which seems like a weakness but will be a strength at your company.
How do feel about supervising employees? I take pride in mentoring and building relationships. Can I fire them? I can’t supervise someone I can’t fire.
As you might imagine I didn’t get offered that job either and I didn’t mind a bit. It is politically incorrect in this age of team building to talk about wanting to fire people but I’ve been saddled with having someone work for me who would only do the very minimum of what I asked and there was nothing I could do about it because we both knew I couldn't fire them. I think for me to supervise people effectively I need to have a nuclear weapon. If I NEEDED the job my answers would have been a lot different but since I didn't NEED the job it made sense to me to be myself so there would be no illusions about who I was.
I had a short interview for my new assignment. I was asked very few questions of mostly a technical nature that gave me no chance to be my normally funny or insulting self. I was quickly accepted for the assignment which had less to do with my interview and more to do with the fact that as a contractor I can be gone at the snap of a finger. That’s OK with me. I have a lot of confidence in my ability to pick things up and quickly contribute and if I cant we’ll all be better off if I’m somewhere else.
If my basketball picks keep up their current pace I expect to be giving interviews with gambling magazines and web sites. As I wrote on Monday I went 4-0 on last Friday’s picks to boost my record to 9-2 and my mythical winnings to $680. My prediction program went 3-2 on Monday’s pick (that I didn’t bet on). I’m concerned about the bias the program is showing towards road teams but the program is 25-12 including last night’s Warriors-Clippers game in which my program picked the Warriors to give 6.5 points to the Clippers in Los Angeles. So operating on the assumption that 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' I will be placing my mythical bets from my prediction program using the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page and as usual for entertainment purposes only with no real money being wagered. It is early on Friday morning as I write this and my program has determined only one of the 11 games on the schedule is worthy of a prediction with the lines for the Pelicans-Spurs,Thunder-Knicks, and TrailBlazers-Clippers yet to be determined. If me program decides to place a bet on those three games I'll put it in the comments by 7pm tonight and here is my program's one pick for tonight.
Philadelphia 76ers at Charlotte Hornets
The 76ers are once again angling for the worst record in the league and are off to a fine start with 12 straight losses to open the season, including Wednesday's embarrassing 23 point loss to the Pacers at home. Tonight Philly travels to Charlotte to face the Hornets who are on the second game of a seven game home stand. My program likes the Hornets to win by 16 and the spread is 11 points, just at the 5 point predictive cut off line. The 76ers have been marginally less awful on the road but the Hornets have shown the ability to score points in bunches with the additions of Nicolas Batum and Jeremy Lin so I'll go with my program and bet $110 on the Hornets to cover the 11 points and win $100.
Before I could work in Ames I had to go on an interview which must have went well enough since I was accepted for the assignment. During the 13 years I spent writing shoe store software I went on exactly one interview until 2007 when the owner of the company I worked for sold his company to people from Indianapolis who had their own programmers at which point I went on a number of interviews.
I wasn’t very successful at interviewing in 2007 and I think it was because I badly wanted a new job and it showed which made me less than an attractive candidate in the way that the seemingly unattainable girls in high school were the most sought after at least that’s the way I remember it. Wanting a new job too badly made me not exactly myself in interviews. I came off trying to sound too professional and less funny than I am and I probably just seemed like a phony.
Eventually one of my interviews panned out and I got my new job which was a two year contract so after two years I was out interviewing again in 2009. For this go round I was determined to be myself and even though I needed a new job instead of wanting one like two years prior I had a great time interviewing. I was at one place where I was told that the programmers were in charge of making the time estimates. I’d barely ever made estimates, preferring instead to say the project would take until it was finished and worked as hard as I could to get my projects done as soon as possible which almost always pleased my employers in terms of the time the project took and the quality of the completed project. I asked the interviewer how it would go over if I was able to complete a project earlier than scheduled. When the interviewer asked how that could be possible I explained that I had the occasional epiphany (meaning a burst of production or an amazing time saving idea) which enabled me to complete some projects well ahead of schedule. The interviewer sniffed “We do not have epiphanies at this company”. We made some more chit-chat but I knew there wasn’t going to be a job offer and the interviewer knew it wasn’t going to be accepted.
I did much better on my next interview. The interviewer asked me if it was better to have a job done on time or done correctly. I said if the job wasn’t done correctly how could it be done on time? Since that got a laugh I told the story about how I took a job at a company and had to take over half of an overdue project from an overworked programmer who I shared the office with. The next week the overworked programmer was talking to our supervisor in our office at lunch not realizing that I was sitting at my desk reading. The supervisor mentioned that I did a good job on my half of the project and the programmer said that while I 'managed' to complete the project his design was “much more elegant” than mine. I got up from my desk and said that if the program didn’t have to work and didn’t have to be done on time I could be just as elegant. My interviewer roared at my story but I wasn’t offered the job because the company put on a hiring freeze. The happy ending was that a month later a position opened up at the company and I was offered the job without another interview.
I interviewed twice for my current job. The first time I went to the downtown office with my current supervisor and his boss. I tried to be funny and got a second interview to meet one of the programmers over lunch. I didn’t want to drive around so I suggested the snack bar at a nearby Target superstore within walking distance. I got the job and my supervisor told me that he never had an interview at a Target snack bar before. I don’t remember much from the interview except the subject of my age came up and I said that while I was a dinosaur one thing to remember was that dinosaurs have big teeth and are more than capable.
I didn’t have an interview for three years until the company put out notice that they were moving to the west side of West Des Moines. This would make an interminable 52 mile commute an unbearable 62 mile commute through 10 miles of the worst Iowa traffic so I was out .interviewing again. Most interviews are done through recruiters that have a job opening and if you fit in the salary slot they will pitch you to their customer as if you are the programming world’s answer to Elvis and Michael Jackson but if you don’t you will never hear from the recruiter until months or years later when they have another opening they think you will fit into.
I had one interview at a huge insurance company that was in a huge 5 story building even further west in West Des Mones than where my company would be moving to. I parked in the full shopping mall sized parking lot and went in. My first meeting was with the department director and a programmer. They were the most exhausted people I’ve ever seen with huge puffy bags under their bloodshot eyes and the stooped over seated posture of someone who was about to fall asleep which I think they did. Their first question was whether I was willing to work overtime. I said I was on occasion if I was paid for it or given time off as compensation. I was told there was no extra pay or compensation and that everyone regularly worked between 55 and 60 hours because they were all “team players”. I mentioned that if these kind of hours were expected the team needed a new manager which was not met by laughter or even a smile. Then I interviewed with two other programmers and I asked them how many hours they worked. They told me they worked between 50 and 60 hours every week and didn't like it but did it because they were “team players”. After that I met with the finance vice president that was in charge of the programming. She told me that she liked to meet all the interviewees but didn’t have any questions and asked if I had any questions. I asked how long it took her to get out of the parking lot. She said it took no time to get out of the parking lot because everyone else was working late because they were all “team players”. My next question was if there were any finance vice president positions available and there weren’t. I wasn’t offered a job which was just as well since I was certainly not their kind of “team player”.
My next interview was with a medical insurance clearinghouse company that was taking their programming needs in house and severing ties with the company that had developed their programs for the past five years. I interviewed with the president of the small company who was a lawyer armed with a list of 20 questions that I assume came from Linked In or some other website that she read off. Here are some of the questions, the preferred answers in bold, and my answers in italics.
Where do you see yourself five years from now? I see myself advancing in this company because I’ll be helping it grow so much. I’m almost 55 years old and I hope to see myself in the mirror and not the cemetery.
What is your biggest and weakness? My biggest weakness is that I care about my work and company so much I work tirelessly to accomplish my goals and have no personal life because I give my all to my company. I don’t have weaknesses or strengths. I have qualities and it is up to my employer to not make them weaknesses. One of my qualities is that I get my work done fast. It sounds like a strength but if I work for someone that thinks out loud about what they want me to do I will get a lot of useless work done because the person I work for wasn’t wanting me to do anything - they were just thinking out loud. If that guy is making the decisions don’t hire me – hire the person that waits until the last minute to do anything which seems like a weakness but will be a strength at your company.
How do feel about supervising employees? I take pride in mentoring and building relationships. Can I fire them? I can’t supervise someone I can’t fire.
As you might imagine I didn’t get offered that job either and I didn’t mind a bit. It is politically incorrect in this age of team building to talk about wanting to fire people but I’ve been saddled with having someone work for me who would only do the very minimum of what I asked and there was nothing I could do about it because we both knew I couldn't fire them. I think for me to supervise people effectively I need to have a nuclear weapon. If I NEEDED the job my answers would have been a lot different but since I didn't NEED the job it made sense to me to be myself so there would be no illusions about who I was.
I had a short interview for my new assignment. I was asked very few questions of mostly a technical nature that gave me no chance to be my normally funny or insulting self. I was quickly accepted for the assignment which had less to do with my interview and more to do with the fact that as a contractor I can be gone at the snap of a finger. That’s OK with me. I have a lot of confidence in my ability to pick things up and quickly contribute and if I cant we’ll all be better off if I’m somewhere else.
If my basketball picks keep up their current pace I expect to be giving interviews with gambling magazines and web sites. As I wrote on Monday I went 4-0 on last Friday’s picks to boost my record to 9-2 and my mythical winnings to $680. My prediction program went 3-2 on Monday’s pick (that I didn’t bet on). I’m concerned about the bias the program is showing towards road teams but the program is 25-12 including last night’s Warriors-Clippers game in which my program picked the Warriors to give 6.5 points to the Clippers in Los Angeles. So operating on the assumption that 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' I will be placing my mythical bets from my prediction program using the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page and as usual for entertainment purposes only with no real money being wagered. It is early on Friday morning as I write this and my program has determined only one of the 11 games on the schedule is worthy of a prediction with the lines for the Pelicans-Spurs,Thunder-Knicks, and TrailBlazers-Clippers yet to be determined. If me program decides to place a bet on those three games I'll put it in the comments by 7pm tonight and here is my program's one pick for tonight.
Philadelphia 76ers at Charlotte Hornets
The 76ers are once again angling for the worst record in the league and are off to a fine start with 12 straight losses to open the season, including Wednesday's embarrassing 23 point loss to the Pacers at home. Tonight Philly travels to Charlotte to face the Hornets who are on the second game of a seven game home stand. My program likes the Hornets to win by 16 and the spread is 11 points, just at the 5 point predictive cut off line. The 76ers have been marginally less awful on the road but the Hornets have shown the ability to score points in bunches with the additions of Nicolas Batum and Jeremy Lin so I'll go with my program and bet $110 on the Hornets to cover the 11 points and win $100.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
My Week as a Zombie
As I wrote last week, I didn’t get much sleep after the government agency whose interface I’m responsible with went haywire after a firewall upgrade last Saturday and started giving out more misinformation than the Obama and Romney campaigns combined (Did you know that both men have not only raised or are going to raise taxes on the middle class by thousands of dollars but that both candidates are going to cut taxes on the middle class by thousands of dollars?). The government agency hasn’t solved all their problems but after another mini-meltdown on Thursday morning, they have at least stopped losing transmissions and my program has returned to a semblance of normalcy.
I can’t remember the last time I had to work this hard on so little sleep. My mind was racing so fast trying to keep track of all the snafus I couldn’t sleep and as soon as I got into work I had to talk to one customer and give them a status a report and plan our next steps and as soon as I got off the phone I’d have a similar conversation with another customer and on and on and on… It was a hellacious week that I’m not eager to repeat but it wasn’t a problem of my making and I suppose if you don’t have those kinds of experiences at work every so often you either aren’t doing work of much import or you are very lucky or you are very competent.
I was so tired I even resorted to taking a bottle of 5 Hour Energy to stay awake during chess club last Thursday. I’m still not sure how well it worked but I wasn’t too amped up and while I made at least one sloppy move I played well enough the rest of the time to gain a tie for first with Dave the Barefoot Chess Player in the weekly blitz tournament. After leaving the club, I monitored the government interface for a bit and crawled into bed, knowing I’d be out the door at 5:30 the next morning for chess club at St. Francis.
It was our second club meeting of the year and I knew I was off my game when I couldn’t remember the names of all the kids I met for the first time the week before (normally I am super great at that). I was working with the new players who barely knew how the pieces moved while my co-coach Chris and 3 time Iowa champ Tim Mc Entee kept an eye on the experienced players. I was happily surprised that Tim wanted to help with the kids at St. Francis this year. He is a great asset to the kids, likes their enthusiasm, and gets that the kids are at club because they want to play and aren’t especially interested in being taught chess. This doesn’t mean that we don’t teach, just that we have to pick our spots. There are around 35 chess players so far this year which is down a few from last year. I lost some of the seventh graders to an early morning advanced math class and also heard from some of the parents that their children are still sleeping in on Fridays or have some other Friday morning activities. I have hopes that once the kids ease into the school year they’ll start to head back to chess club but a more likely scenario is that having a chess club with no fees was a novelty last year that attracted a lot of kids that wouldn’t normally have even tried chess and they just didn’t enjoy it very much.
As usual, I got more out of helping with the chess club than the kids do and was fully energized for another day of work on Friday. It was the most human I’d felt in a week. With no new crises erupting, I was able to focus on cleaning up some of the problems that the meltdown had caused and was almost all caught up by the afternoon. After my first decent night’s rest in almost a week I was still pretty tired when I got up the next morning to take Daisy and Baxter for a walk to the Jiffy for their beef stick treats. It would have been nice to have been able to hop into bed for an early nap, but I had to leave the house at 6:30 to drive back to Des Moines for my first indoor youth chess tournament in 5 months at St. Francis.
You never know how big or small of a crowd you are ever going to have for a chess tournament. I thought this was going to be a small crowd and it seemed to me that it was, but the numbers say I had 43 different players as opposed to 44 last September. There were 10 less players attending both sessions than last year which means that I had less players staying all day than last year. That made sense since last September was my first tournament split into morning and afternoon session and now that everyone is used to the new format I have less people staying for an entire day or chess.
I picked up Marshalltown club players Chandler and Dalton (who set up the tournament hall in return for free entry) and got a rude awakening 60 miles later when I found the outside entrance to the cafeteria was locked. The church’s event scheduler should have had the doors opened automatically, but luckily the next entrance was open for football practice. Once into the building, I got another rude surprise when I found out the cafeteria doors were also locked! But once again the gym next door was unlocked and I was able to slip through the portable partition that separates the 2 rooms and get into the cafeteria from the inside. We got inside and set up the hall and then I got a good surprise when I found that the school now has a guest internet network. This allowed me to check my emails, enter memberships, and even correct a name for a player who bought a membership from another tournament organizer who misspelled it.
The tournament itself went smoothly enough, although it all went by in a blur for me and I noticed I was a lot more edgy about little things than I normally was. There were 2 beginning players who barely knew how the pieces moved and they needed a lot of attention during their games. In one game, 2 players who went to my summer chess camp squared off and one of the campers pulled off a 4 move checkmate! I had given both these kids a lesson on how to avoid the 4 move checkmate at the camp (apparently not very successfully) and while I was keeping the 2 beginning players in my sights, I pulled the 2 campers aside and reprised the lesson for them.
I was happy to see the return of a few past tournament winners who didn’t play in the summer outdoor tournaments and even got to see my son Matt for the first time in a month. Matt came down with one of his students and decided to play in the afternoon session (Matt is still 19 until December so he was eligible). All the kids were cowering and whimpering at the thought of playing the college expert. I tried to encourage them by saying that if they didn’t make any mistakes there was no reason they should lose to anyone. This is easy to say but hard to do. In 4 years of our Thursday Night blitz tournaments in Marshalltown, Matt has a record of 68 wins, 1 loss, and 2 draws. I drew him last year when he blundered a piece in the opening. I took the piece and offered him a draw which he accepted. We then played out the game and he crushed me while a piece behind. Very humbling, indeed. At Saturday’s tournament, Matt wanted to make a checkmate with 4 knights. In the first game, he was winning handily, had promoted 2 of his pawns to knights, but accidentally stalemated his opponent and gave up a draw to a player rated 1400 points below him! He did manage to checkmate a player with 5 knights in the next game so the day wasn’t a total loss for him and since he had a good humor about his draw, the more observant players learned a valuable lesson in handling setbacks and everyone learned that anything can happen over the chessboard.
Once the tournament ended, I drove home, got all the post tournament stuff done by 9 (posting the pictures and tournament article, updating standings and ratings, etc…) and collapsed into bed. On Sunday I was hoping to be able to sleep late, get some rest, and head to the 50th CyChess tournament in Ames by 1 pm. Daisy and Baxter did not realize that I wanted to sleep late and at 4:30 in the morning they were up and wanting to be walked so Kathy and I took them to the Jiffy for a beef stick treat. After a mile and a half walk, I wasn’t feeling too sleepy so I hung out with the beagles and relaxed by watching Law & Order and Joel Osteen. I nodded off a bit but then it was 9am and I still wasn’t very tired so Kathy and I took Daisy and Baxter for another long walk for beef stick treats. I piddled around until 11 and then I finally crashed and was dead to the world until 1. At that point there was no chance of getting to the chess tournament but I was still beat and was all woozy until around 3. I even crashed again from 7 to 9 in the evening and still slept all night.
I’m bummed out at missing the 50th CyChess tournament but hopefully there’ll be a #51 that won’t get interrupted by work or sleep deprivation. I’ve played on little or no sleep when I was in my twenties. The results were awful then and I wouldn’t expect them to better 30 years later. I would have liked to fit in everything I wanted to do this weekend, but as the classic song by Ella Fitzgerald goes “You can bet as sure as you live. Something's gotta give, something's gotta give, Something's gotta give.”
I can’t remember the last time I had to work this hard on so little sleep. My mind was racing so fast trying to keep track of all the snafus I couldn’t sleep and as soon as I got into work I had to talk to one customer and give them a status a report and plan our next steps and as soon as I got off the phone I’d have a similar conversation with another customer and on and on and on… It was a hellacious week that I’m not eager to repeat but it wasn’t a problem of my making and I suppose if you don’t have those kinds of experiences at work every so often you either aren’t doing work of much import or you are very lucky or you are very competent.
I was so tired I even resorted to taking a bottle of 5 Hour Energy to stay awake during chess club last Thursday. I’m still not sure how well it worked but I wasn’t too amped up and while I made at least one sloppy move I played well enough the rest of the time to gain a tie for first with Dave the Barefoot Chess Player in the weekly blitz tournament. After leaving the club, I monitored the government interface for a bit and crawled into bed, knowing I’d be out the door at 5:30 the next morning for chess club at St. Francis.
It was our second club meeting of the year and I knew I was off my game when I couldn’t remember the names of all the kids I met for the first time the week before (normally I am super great at that). I was working with the new players who barely knew how the pieces moved while my co-coach Chris and 3 time Iowa champ Tim Mc Entee kept an eye on the experienced players. I was happily surprised that Tim wanted to help with the kids at St. Francis this year. He is a great asset to the kids, likes their enthusiasm, and gets that the kids are at club because they want to play and aren’t especially interested in being taught chess. This doesn’t mean that we don’t teach, just that we have to pick our spots. There are around 35 chess players so far this year which is down a few from last year. I lost some of the seventh graders to an early morning advanced math class and also heard from some of the parents that their children are still sleeping in on Fridays or have some other Friday morning activities. I have hopes that once the kids ease into the school year they’ll start to head back to chess club but a more likely scenario is that having a chess club with no fees was a novelty last year that attracted a lot of kids that wouldn’t normally have even tried chess and they just didn’t enjoy it very much.
As usual, I got more out of helping with the chess club than the kids do and was fully energized for another day of work on Friday. It was the most human I’d felt in a week. With no new crises erupting, I was able to focus on cleaning up some of the problems that the meltdown had caused and was almost all caught up by the afternoon. After my first decent night’s rest in almost a week I was still pretty tired when I got up the next morning to take Daisy and Baxter for a walk to the Jiffy for their beef stick treats. It would have been nice to have been able to hop into bed for an early nap, but I had to leave the house at 6:30 to drive back to Des Moines for my first indoor youth chess tournament in 5 months at St. Francis.
You never know how big or small of a crowd you are ever going to have for a chess tournament. I thought this was going to be a small crowd and it seemed to me that it was, but the numbers say I had 43 different players as opposed to 44 last September. There were 10 less players attending both sessions than last year which means that I had less players staying all day than last year. That made sense since last September was my first tournament split into morning and afternoon session and now that everyone is used to the new format I have less people staying for an entire day or chess.
I picked up Marshalltown club players Chandler and Dalton (who set up the tournament hall in return for free entry) and got a rude awakening 60 miles later when I found the outside entrance to the cafeteria was locked. The church’s event scheduler should have had the doors opened automatically, but luckily the next entrance was open for football practice. Once into the building, I got another rude surprise when I found out the cafeteria doors were also locked! But once again the gym next door was unlocked and I was able to slip through the portable partition that separates the 2 rooms and get into the cafeteria from the inside. We got inside and set up the hall and then I got a good surprise when I found that the school now has a guest internet network. This allowed me to check my emails, enter memberships, and even correct a name for a player who bought a membership from another tournament organizer who misspelled it.
The tournament itself went smoothly enough, although it all went by in a blur for me and I noticed I was a lot more edgy about little things than I normally was. There were 2 beginning players who barely knew how the pieces moved and they needed a lot of attention during their games. In one game, 2 players who went to my summer chess camp squared off and one of the campers pulled off a 4 move checkmate! I had given both these kids a lesson on how to avoid the 4 move checkmate at the camp (apparently not very successfully) and while I was keeping the 2 beginning players in my sights, I pulled the 2 campers aside and reprised the lesson for them.
I was happy to see the return of a few past tournament winners who didn’t play in the summer outdoor tournaments and even got to see my son Matt for the first time in a month. Matt came down with one of his students and decided to play in the afternoon session (Matt is still 19 until December so he was eligible). All the kids were cowering and whimpering at the thought of playing the college expert. I tried to encourage them by saying that if they didn’t make any mistakes there was no reason they should lose to anyone. This is easy to say but hard to do. In 4 years of our Thursday Night blitz tournaments in Marshalltown, Matt has a record of 68 wins, 1 loss, and 2 draws. I drew him last year when he blundered a piece in the opening. I took the piece and offered him a draw which he accepted. We then played out the game and he crushed me while a piece behind. Very humbling, indeed. At Saturday’s tournament, Matt wanted to make a checkmate with 4 knights. In the first game, he was winning handily, had promoted 2 of his pawns to knights, but accidentally stalemated his opponent and gave up a draw to a player rated 1400 points below him! He did manage to checkmate a player with 5 knights in the next game so the day wasn’t a total loss for him and since he had a good humor about his draw, the more observant players learned a valuable lesson in handling setbacks and everyone learned that anything can happen over the chessboard.
Once the tournament ended, I drove home, got all the post tournament stuff done by 9 (posting the pictures and tournament article, updating standings and ratings, etc…) and collapsed into bed. On Sunday I was hoping to be able to sleep late, get some rest, and head to the 50th CyChess tournament in Ames by 1 pm. Daisy and Baxter did not realize that I wanted to sleep late and at 4:30 in the morning they were up and wanting to be walked so Kathy and I took them to the Jiffy for a beef stick treat. After a mile and a half walk, I wasn’t feeling too sleepy so I hung out with the beagles and relaxed by watching Law & Order and Joel Osteen. I nodded off a bit but then it was 9am and I still wasn’t very tired so Kathy and I took Daisy and Baxter for another long walk for beef stick treats. I piddled around until 11 and then I finally crashed and was dead to the world until 1. At that point there was no chance of getting to the chess tournament but I was still beat and was all woozy until around 3. I even crashed again from 7 to 9 in the evening and still slept all night.
I’m bummed out at missing the 50th CyChess tournament but hopefully there’ll be a #51 that won’t get interrupted by work or sleep deprivation. I’ve played on little or no sleep when I was in my twenties. The results were awful then and I wouldn’t expect them to better 30 years later. I would have liked to fit in everything I wanted to do this weekend, but as the classic song by Ella Fitzgerald goes “You can bet as sure as you live. Something's gotta give, something's gotta give, Something's gotta give.”
Sunday, December 18, 2011
With a little luck and a lot of help
Left: I'm never too tired to pose for a picture with my fellow St. Francis chess coach Chris Hermes. Up front are Chris' nephew Ryan(l) and son Matt(r). Right: Many of professional chess teacher Jose Gatica's students were playing in the tournament, but he was willing to go over the games with anyone.
After stressing over the changeover all week Thursday finally came. I shut down our systems and went home where I would implement our changes when and if I got the signal from the government. The restart was scheduled to take place at 6am Friday and I was hoping it would be late so I could implement our changes after I got back from chess class. I went to chess club where there were an odd number of players for the tournament so I sat out and played 2 games against Joe Meyer after the tournament. I was sloppy and lost 2 games to Joe. Thinking about the changeover would be a convenient excuse, but facts are facts and the fact is Joe is better than me at the moment.
I got home from the club, got the tournament rated, and saw that the government had finished their changeover in record time so I could get started. I put in my changes, testing each component. It was 12:30 by the time everything was done and I crawled into bed at 1, only to wake up at 4:30 and start all over again. I logged into my work computer, saw I had one process that was crashing, fixed it, walked Daisy and Baxter, and was on the road at 5:45 to teach chess at St. Francis 60 miles away. I haven’t missed a club meeting in the year and a half I’ve been teaching there, but I would have begged off this week except that my co-coach Chris had an appointment and couldn’t make it.
Getting 3 hours sleep was no problem when I was 20 or 30, and not such a big deal when I was 40, but at 51 it is hard not to get sloppy and irritable on such little sleep. I got my exercise setting up the 30 boards and the crowd of 50 kids talking and playing chess kept me wide awake for the 45 minute club meeting, matching kids for games and teaching the younger kids how to win simple endings. After class, Kurt the maintenance guy helped me put away all the boards and tables and I got to work at 9. There were a couple of problems caused by the government not implementing a process correctly, but they had already fixed it by the time I alerted them. Everything went so well that I went home at 12 to get some sleep before a long tournament day on Saturday. I got home at 1 as planned but nothing else went the way I wanted. Every time I started to nod off, I got a phone call. There were 4 from work, 1 from St. Francis letting me know my next 2 tournament dates, and even a friend of Kathy’s calling to tell me to go outside. I was already awake so I went outside and her friend told me he could see me. He was flying a plane overhead! Pretty cool, but not what I was thinking at the moment. I finally gave up on getting a nap and went to sleep at the normal time.
I got a reasonable night’s sleep and after a walk with Kathy, Daisy, and Baxter for some beef stick treats, was off to West Des Moines at 6:45 for this month's youth chess tournament with Matt and Chandler the high school kid who helps me set up in return for free entry and a ride. Matt had decided to head down to watch the tournament and meet with Tim McEntee (life master) , Jose Gatica (the candidate master we did the chess camp with last year), and many of the kids who attended the chess camp in July. This month’s tournament was held in a large meeting room instead of the cafeteria so we had to move all the round tables in the room to one side and drag out the long square tables and chairs before we could even get the boards set up. We were running a little behind when Dan Troxell stopped by. Dan had a student playing and was going to play in the parents and friends section. With Dan’s help, we got all caught up and had everything in place when the tournament players started arriving.The morning tournament went very smoothly with a nice crowd of 43 players. A lot of players arrived late because they went to the cafeteria on the other side of the facility. Everyone thought the Santa trophies and medals were very cool, if a little odd. I had a lot of time to talk to the players and parents. This is the 3rd month I’ve had the morning-afternoon tournament concept and the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. There must have been something special about this tournament because I had a large number of players stick around for the afternoon session after they had only committed to the morning tournament.
I had another 37 players for the afternoon session, but then things started to go a little squirrelly. During the lunch break a parent who runs a school chess club told me he had big plans for a week-long summer chess camp and a big tournament in March and wanted me to tell ‘my people’. He wasn’t real happy when I told him that I don’t have any ‘people’ and I wasn’t going to be promoting any other tournaments but the ones I was personally involved with. Then when the afternoon tournament started I had the following 4 incidents happen within 5 minutes: 1) One player made a mistake to lose the game and started crying and SLAPPED HIS FACE!! HARD!! 2) Another player made a mistake to lose his queen and shouted ‘D**N’ very loudly…100 feet from a church 3) A player resigned and fired his pen 20 feet into a wall 4) A player got a nosebleed after horsing around. It looked like a disastrous afternoon, but we got the nosebleed stopped, I got the upset players to calm down, and the tournament returned to a fun time for the kids. I think that the Santa trophies were SO cool, the kids went mental when they lost their first game (making it all but impossible to finish in the top 5 and get the trophy).The tournament finished without incident. While Matt was going over games with the players, Tim and Jose were giving impromptu chess lessons to the parents, and I was keeping an eye on the games and answering questions the parents had about tie-breaks, pairings, and a host of other questions about organizing and running tournaments.
Once the tournament was over, it was time to put away the sets and boards, 8 tables, and 64 chairs and then rearrange the round tables the way they were in the beginning. It would have taken forever, but with Matt, Tim, Jose, and Michael (the parent of one of Matt’s students) helping, everything was put away in 15 minutes and we were done by 4.
I’d need some time to think about it, but it seemed like one of the most successful tournaments I’d ever held. Except for the bout of 'afternoon madness', everyone had a great time and I even made enough money on this tournament ($82) that I’ll be able to offer trophies to the unrated players for next month’s tournament. Jose had to go, but Tim, Matt, Chandler, and I went to the Perkins for a celebratory dinner. I tried to order the ‘Perkins Famous Chicken Noodle Soup’ but they didn’t have any so I had to settle for a grilled cheese sandwich and ‘Tomato Vegetable Soup’. I couldn’t find any vegetables and while the bowl was very wide, it turned out to only be a spoon full deep. I’m not complaining though. I hadn’t gotten to hang out with Tim in a long time and I was the ONLY person in our group to have any silverware.I started getting tired on the drive home, but I was smart enough to get a coffee for the trip. By the time I got home, I’d caught my second wind and had the tournament rated, pictures posted, my report written, and my website updated all by midnight, even though there was one last mini crisis with the government changeover that I had to deal with.
I did last month’s tournament all by myself and had 63 players between the 2 sections (80 this month), but I had so many balls in the air this time I was happy for all the help I could get. I was lucky to have made it through the changeover at work unscathed but I only call that a little lucky because I was as prepared for it as I possibly could be. But to have had as much help setting up and tearing down the playing site was incredible. It's nice to think you can do everything by yourself, but only a fool wouldn't be grateful for all the help I got yesterday.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Payday
I didn’t get paid last week but I will this week. My company is not in trouble, I just get paid every other week. This is my second job in a row where I get paid every other week and it is by far my favorite way to get paid.
I got paid by the week in all my jobs until 1990. On all except one job, my boss or supervisor would give us our check if we were working on payday. If you weren’t working that day, you’d either wait till you were working or just come in and pick up your check. When I worked as a computer operator at a Bank, the bank gave all of us an account and would deposit our money on payday. Since we were the computer operators, the payroll department would give us a tape with the deposits (no disks, internet, or flash drives way back when) and we would load it into the computer. You could always tell who was broke because they would keep asking you if the payroll had been loaded yet.
When I was young and single, getting paid by the week was great. Get paid on Thursday or Friday, get wasted and broke on the weekend, barely eat the rest of the week, get paid on Thursday or Friday, repeat. As I got older and started getting monthly bills like utilities and rent, blowing my paycheck on the weekend didn’t cut it anymore. I started saving some of my check for the monthly expenses and used some for weekly expenses like gas, food, and laundry. The months with 5 paydays were my favorite, since I had a little extra cash, which is always fun.
When I started working for Wyatt Data Services in 1990, I was just engaged to Kathy and I got paid only once a month. Luckily I was moonlighting for extra cash at the time. The people I was moonlighting for thought I was crazy for insisting on being paid every week, but I was pretty hard up for cash that first month. Once I got a month ahead, being paid once a month was manageable and I let my part-time boss pay me less than once a week. When I got paid once a month, instead of looking forward to the 5 week months, I was now dreading them because it meant another week of expenses but the same paycheck.
I left Wyatt in 1993 and went back to work at an coat manufacturer called Amerex for more money so we could move to Iowa and I was back to getting paid once a week. There were a lot of warehouse workers at Amerex and the company would have payroll truck come to the warehouse on payday to cash everyone’s check. Except for the goons hanging around with guns protecting the money, I liked cashing my check before I went home for the weekend. One time I didn’t check my money until I left the window and I was $60 light. I went back to the window and the goons all put their hands on their guns so I put my hands over my head and asked extra nicely if they could give me my $60. They said they couldn’t since I left the window but I did get my $60 back when it turns out the cashier was that much over for the day. I just cashed my check at my bank after that. One time my friend Frank Brandi (the Finance V.P.) cut through the line to ask the clerk a question and one of the goons grabbed his gun. Frank got right in his face and started yelling “What are you going to do? Shoot me?” The goon backed down and was never seen again at the payroll truck.
At my first job in Iowa, the owner gave us a personal check on the 15th and the end of the month and for 12 years it was back to dreading the 5 week months. When he sold the company, the new owners went to direct deposit and I’ve never gotten a paycheck I needed to cash since except once when my paperwork didn’t make the direct deposit in time for my first check on a new job. I miss not getting a paycheck. I don’t miss taking a trip to the bank to deposit my check, but going to the bank with my check put my job in perspective. Now that my pay is some ones and zeros streaming over the internet and magically appearing in my account, sometimes it feels like I don’t even get paid and I miss the disconnectedness between my work and getting paid.
When I started working at SourceCorp in 2009, I got paid every 2 weeks for the first time in my life and that has continued in my current job. It’s a lot like getting paid twice a month except twice a year there are 3 checks in a month and an extra 2 week’s pay is like a real bonus. Even if the ‘bonus’ gets used for an unexpected expense like a car repair or just to get ahead on the car insurance or property taxes, I feel great when I get 6 weeks pay in a single month.
I’ve noticed the mood of the whole company brightens up on the 3 payday months. Since the government is involved with everything else, maybe they can mandate bi-weekly pay and legislate 6 weeks in every month so we can all get 3 paychecks a month every month. Not only would it help lift the mood of the country, since the workers would have an extra paycheck every month, they could spend that money to boost the economy. I hope when they make this law, there is a ‘Buffet’ clause saying millionaires don’t get the extra paycheck, but if they did I wouldn’t mind too much. After all, have you seen the cost of getting a Cadillac or Mercedes tuned up lately? I can’t imagine a politician getting elected if they went against this proposal.
One really cool thing about getting paid once a month was having a big fat paycheck (This was still in the day when I got paper checks instead of direct deposit). Once I went to the bank across the street from our Hillside, NJ apartment to deposit my check on a busy Saturday and waited patiently in line while the clerk made useless small talk with every customer (This clerk was the inspiration for the widespread use of ATM machines and direct deposit). Finally it was my turn. I didn’t know the teller and was ready to give a New Jersey grunt when the subject of the weather or any other subject came up when I gave her my check and deposit slip. She took a long look at my check and said at the top of her lungs, 'WOOOOOOO!THAT’S SURE A LOT OF MONEY. WHAT DO YOU DO FOR A LIVING?’ Lots of people stared at me and I was pretty embarrassed but I didn’t want to admit I only got paid once a month, so I said very softly, “I kill people for a living and it’s sure been busy lately.” I got my deposit slip back in record time along with a mumbled “Have a nice day”. I replied, “Thanks. I’d like to talk more, but I have to get back to work now.”
I got paid by the week in all my jobs until 1990. On all except one job, my boss or supervisor would give us our check if we were working on payday. If you weren’t working that day, you’d either wait till you were working or just come in and pick up your check. When I worked as a computer operator at a Bank, the bank gave all of us an account and would deposit our money on payday. Since we were the computer operators, the payroll department would give us a tape with the deposits (no disks, internet, or flash drives way back when) and we would load it into the computer. You could always tell who was broke because they would keep asking you if the payroll had been loaded yet.
When I was young and single, getting paid by the week was great. Get paid on Thursday or Friday, get wasted and broke on the weekend, barely eat the rest of the week, get paid on Thursday or Friday, repeat. As I got older and started getting monthly bills like utilities and rent, blowing my paycheck on the weekend didn’t cut it anymore. I started saving some of my check for the monthly expenses and used some for weekly expenses like gas, food, and laundry. The months with 5 paydays were my favorite, since I had a little extra cash, which is always fun.
When I started working for Wyatt Data Services in 1990, I was just engaged to Kathy and I got paid only once a month. Luckily I was moonlighting for extra cash at the time. The people I was moonlighting for thought I was crazy for insisting on being paid every week, but I was pretty hard up for cash that first month. Once I got a month ahead, being paid once a month was manageable and I let my part-time boss pay me less than once a week. When I got paid once a month, instead of looking forward to the 5 week months, I was now dreading them because it meant another week of expenses but the same paycheck.
I left Wyatt in 1993 and went back to work at an coat manufacturer called Amerex for more money so we could move to Iowa and I was back to getting paid once a week. There were a lot of warehouse workers at Amerex and the company would have payroll truck come to the warehouse on payday to cash everyone’s check. Except for the goons hanging around with guns protecting the money, I liked cashing my check before I went home for the weekend. One time I didn’t check my money until I left the window and I was $60 light. I went back to the window and the goons all put their hands on their guns so I put my hands over my head and asked extra nicely if they could give me my $60. They said they couldn’t since I left the window but I did get my $60 back when it turns out the cashier was that much over for the day. I just cashed my check at my bank after that. One time my friend Frank Brandi (the Finance V.P.) cut through the line to ask the clerk a question and one of the goons grabbed his gun. Frank got right in his face and started yelling “What are you going to do? Shoot me?” The goon backed down and was never seen again at the payroll truck.
At my first job in Iowa, the owner gave us a personal check on the 15th and the end of the month and for 12 years it was back to dreading the 5 week months. When he sold the company, the new owners went to direct deposit and I’ve never gotten a paycheck I needed to cash since except once when my paperwork didn’t make the direct deposit in time for my first check on a new job. I miss not getting a paycheck. I don’t miss taking a trip to the bank to deposit my check, but going to the bank with my check put my job in perspective. Now that my pay is some ones and zeros streaming over the internet and magically appearing in my account, sometimes it feels like I don’t even get paid and I miss the disconnectedness between my work and getting paid.
When I started working at SourceCorp in 2009, I got paid every 2 weeks for the first time in my life and that has continued in my current job. It’s a lot like getting paid twice a month except twice a year there are 3 checks in a month and an extra 2 week’s pay is like a real bonus. Even if the ‘bonus’ gets used for an unexpected expense like a car repair or just to get ahead on the car insurance or property taxes, I feel great when I get 6 weeks pay in a single month.
I’ve noticed the mood of the whole company brightens up on the 3 payday months. Since the government is involved with everything else, maybe they can mandate bi-weekly pay and legislate 6 weeks in every month so we can all get 3 paychecks a month every month. Not only would it help lift the mood of the country, since the workers would have an extra paycheck every month, they could spend that money to boost the economy. I hope when they make this law, there is a ‘Buffet’ clause saying millionaires don’t get the extra paycheck, but if they did I wouldn’t mind too much. After all, have you seen the cost of getting a Cadillac or Mercedes tuned up lately? I can’t imagine a politician getting elected if they went against this proposal.
One really cool thing about getting paid once a month was having a big fat paycheck (This was still in the day when I got paper checks instead of direct deposit). Once I went to the bank across the street from our Hillside, NJ apartment to deposit my check on a busy Saturday and waited patiently in line while the clerk made useless small talk with every customer (This clerk was the inspiration for the widespread use of ATM machines and direct deposit). Finally it was my turn. I didn’t know the teller and was ready to give a New Jersey grunt when the subject of the weather or any other subject came up when I gave her my check and deposit slip. She took a long look at my check and said at the top of her lungs, 'WOOOOOOO!THAT’S SURE A LOT OF MONEY. WHAT DO YOU DO FOR A LIVING?’ Lots of people stared at me and I was pretty embarrassed but I didn’t want to admit I only got paid once a month, so I said very softly, “I kill people for a living and it’s sure been busy lately.” I got my deposit slip back in record time along with a mumbled “Have a nice day”. I replied, “Thanks. I’d like to talk more, but I have to get back to work now.”
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Downtown Life
The Capital Square building in downtown Des Moines. The inside of the building is a giant atrium with the offices ringed around the edges. At lunch I sit by one of the trees in the lobby in the picture on the right.
The elevator and escalator can be a site of unspoken aggression. Were you ever late and tried to walk up the escalator while it’s carrying you only to have to stop, stand, and wait behind some sedentary person who looks like they couldn’t climb a flight of stairs if their life depended on it. Or how about taking a leisurely trip up the escalator only to have some fool that’s in a hurry to brown-nose their boss vault up the steps only to come to a screeching halt right behind you and give you a look like you couldn’t climb a flight of stairs if your life depended on it? Been there, done that. But since I work on the top floor of the building, I reserve my scorn for those people who insist on turning my express elevator trip into a local by getting on the elevator at the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th floor. I can never make these people wait for me, so I have no recourse and just have to grin and bear it.
In my other jobs in Des Moines, I’d spend the occasional lunch hour going to the parking lot and using my car to attend to errands, but with a 2 block walk (plus elevator and escalator rides) to the parking garage, I’ve rarely gone out of the building during my lunch break. Instead I prefer to head down to the lobby of the building and take advantage of the free internet and use my amazing iPod to check email and view chess games on the Internet Chess Club’s iPod App. Once in a great while, there is an attraction like a book sale or wine tasting in the lobby, but mostly there is just people walking back and forth to get lunch at the Big City Burgers that is off the building lobby or just getting outside to have a smoke.
I’ve had a turkey burger ($3.95) at the Big City Burgers 3 times in 5 months. Twice a customer paid for my turkey burger and once I bought Jose lunch while we talked about our chess camp. You can easily spend $10 for lunch but the turkey burger is really big and tastes great. There is a Mexican restaurant on the second floor that has a $5 lunch menu (standard fare only) that my boss has taken me to twice. Both restaurants are only open 3 or 4 hours a day and seem packed all through lunch time. It must be nice to own a restaurant and be able to make a living without having to deal with weekends and night shifts, but there is little room for expansion as well.
The News Depot store doesn't have a lot of newspapers, but thanks to yours truly, there is more than enough fresh chewing gum on hand.
After a week of this staredown, the gum supply was replenished with not only new Doublemint gum, but JuicyFruit and Spearmint gums also. I bought a pack of gum from her for the next week, but then the Hy-Vee Drug Store put their Doublemint Gum on sale and I haven’t bought any gum from her store since. For the next couple of weeks, I got some pretty dirty looks from her when I went down to my lobby for my lunch break. I didn’t even go into her store for a while but when the weather turned warm, I went back in and bought an ice cream sandwich from the tiny freezer in the back of the store. The only ice cream sandwiches she had were about a dozen frostbitten chocolate and strawberry of the Blue Bunny brand. I bought about 2 a week and they had that gritty taste that ice cream gets when it melts and refreezes. I counted the sandwiches so I knew I was the only one buying them. Eventually I bought all the sandwiches leaving only some lonely ice cream cones, Eskimo Pies, and Snicker Bars in the forgotten freezer.
I didn’t want the psychic pressure of another stare down over the ice cream, so I stayed away from the convenience store for a week. When I went back in there was a new stock of ice cream sandwiches and the store owner and I have resumed our tenuous relationship. After I went through the first box of Good Humor treats, another box made its way to the freezer within 2 days even though I was starting to work my way through the Good Humor ice cream bars. I think I’ve even seen a few dents made in her gum supply (but not by me, I still have a large supply of gum, thank you).
On the left is the freezer before I bought the last lonely freezer burned Blue Bunny Strawberry ice cream sandwich on June 17th. On the right is the freezer today after I got yet another fresh Good Humor ice cream sandwich. Notice the Swiss Miss, frozen Snickers, and Eskimo Pies in both cases. Either they are very popular or very old.
One of the things I think I’ll miss most is not seeing all the blind people walking around. The Iowa Department for the Blind is only a couple of blocks away. When I was carpooling, I’d wait for my ride outside the building and see half a dozen blind people making their way down the street. I have a lot of admiration for these people. If I was blind, I doubt I’d ever leave my house, and these people are even crossing the street. I captured this video of two blind men making their way around during my lunchtime. I’m not sure if they were taking a walk or playing tag or what, but If I had to put my money down, I’m betting that the dark haired guy lifted the other ones wallet.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Fool me once…
In May, I wrote about how I spent $31 to nominate my blog for the Chess Journalists of America Awards despite having my submission last year voted the worst entry ever. The deadline on the entry form I received was June 15th so I sent in my nomination form the first week in June. I never heard from the chairman of the awards committee, who was supposed to acknowledge my entry, so I emailed a reminder and a week later I received an acknowledgement email. On the 16th, I looked on the CJA website to see which entries had been received since the nomination form said that they'd be posted when entries were closed. No entries were posted. Then on the 20th, I received an email from Mark Capron. Mark is the editor of the Iowa State Chess Association magazine ‘En Passant’. Matt had written the story of his 5th place finish at the National High School championships for that magazine last year and Capron wanted to know if I had submitted it for a CJA award, because if I hadn’t he would submit it on behalf of the magazine. I hadn’t submitted it but I was confused since I thought the entries were closed for a week. I took another look on the website and lo and behold, the deadline had been extended to July 6th.
There was no mention of the extension on the web page, just a link to Alexandra Kosteniuk’s June 16th chess blog posting announcing the CJA awards and the July 6th deadline as if there was no previous deadline. Kosteniuk mentions in her blog that ‘it's FOR YOU that the CJA is running its annual Awards program, and I want YOU to participate and to WIN AWARDS!’ (Her capitalizations)
I don’t mean to seem rude to the CJA president and former Woman’s World Chess Champion, but c’mon Alexandra!! If you really wanted ME to ‘WIN AWARDS’, you could have left the deadline as it was and I’d have a better chance to ‘WIN AWARDS’. The least the CJA could have done was to mention a reason for extending the instead of just breezily pretending that there was no extension at all.
How can groups that pull this kind of stunt have any integrity? How can anyone ever take their deadlines seriously? What kind of message does this send to people like me that sent in their entries on time? I suppose if there were enough people like me that respected deadlines, there wouldn’t have been a deadline extension. After the fiasco of my asking the judge (personally but anonymously) in 2006 what he thought of my submission and being told he never heard of it, I feel like I’ve gotten fooled twice. Well, shame on me but the CJA has seen its last penny from my pocket.
I did manage not to get fooled twice on another more important front. I worked for Fisher Controls in Marshalltown from 2008 to 2010 as a contractor for Robert Half. As a contractor, I agreed to work for the company for 2 years for a set wage. I enjoyed working so close to home, but in the middle of 2009, Fisher decided to cut all the contractors pay. They weren’t losing money, just not making enough. It was described to us as a ‘win-win’ since by agreeing to a lower wage we all got to keep our jobs. I saw how it was a ‘win’, but missed the part about how it was a ‘win-win’ (I had the wrong perspective). Then Fischer ended up letting many of the contractors who took a pay cut go anyway (No, they did not give them back the pay they’d given up in order to keep their jobs a few months prior). I’m sure they saw that as a ‘win-win-win’. Once the company showed they felt no obligation to be truthful or live up to their own obligations, I started looking for a job and a few months later got one.
Since then, Fisher Controls has been making more money and has hired a recruiting company out of their parent corporation Emerson’s hometown to do their IT recruiting and look for programmers. I got an email from the recruiter letting me know of an opportunity in Marshalltown. I wrote back asking if the opportunity was full time or a contract position and how much it paid. I was told it was a long term contract and the salary was open and they would ‘pay the right amount for the right person’. Sounds like the old phrase ‘Salary based on experience’, which means the company’s experience in paying the least amount of salary. I wrote back and asked if the job came with any benefits and if the right amount went up to an absurdly high number I picked out of the sky and was told I could get full benefits ‘which can include 3 weeks paid time off, Medical, and Dental’ and also asking me if I was looking for the absurdly high number in addition to the benefits. I thought the word ‘can’ was odd since if it CAN include those benefits it also CANNOT include these benefits. At this point I called off the game and told the recruiter I wasn’t interested since I’d heard of an employer in Marshalltown who gave all their contractor pay cuts so they could keep their jobs and then laid them off a couple of months later anyway. I’m surprised this guy didn’t even bother to read my resume to see if I’d worked at Fisher or maybe he did, but his job was just to get me in the door, get his commission, and then who cares about me.
It is always gratifying to be pursued by those that have wronged you in the past, but in my experience it’s foolish to expect different results from the same people. If I did go back to work at Fisher, as soon as the economy hit a bump or they decided they just weren’t making enough money, I’d be in the same situation I was 2 years ago. I wish this recruiter had called 2 months ago for a refresher course before I let myself get fooled for the second time by the Chess Journalists of America.
There was no mention of the extension on the web page, just a link to Alexandra Kosteniuk’s June 16th chess blog posting announcing the CJA awards and the July 6th deadline as if there was no previous deadline. Kosteniuk mentions in her blog that ‘it's FOR YOU that the CJA is running its annual Awards program, and I want YOU to participate and to WIN AWARDS!’ (Her capitalizations)
I don’t mean to seem rude to the CJA president and former Woman’s World Chess Champion, but c’mon Alexandra!! If you really wanted ME to ‘WIN AWARDS’, you could have left the deadline as it was and I’d have a better chance to ‘WIN AWARDS’. The least the CJA could have done was to mention a reason for extending the instead of just breezily pretending that there was no extension at all.
How can groups that pull this kind of stunt have any integrity? How can anyone ever take their deadlines seriously? What kind of message does this send to people like me that sent in their entries on time? I suppose if there were enough people like me that respected deadlines, there wouldn’t have been a deadline extension. After the fiasco of my asking the judge (personally but anonymously) in 2006 what he thought of my submission and being told he never heard of it, I feel like I’ve gotten fooled twice. Well, shame on me but the CJA has seen its last penny from my pocket.
I did manage not to get fooled twice on another more important front. I worked for Fisher Controls in Marshalltown from 2008 to 2010 as a contractor for Robert Half. As a contractor, I agreed to work for the company for 2 years for a set wage. I enjoyed working so close to home, but in the middle of 2009, Fisher decided to cut all the contractors pay. They weren’t losing money, just not making enough. It was described to us as a ‘win-win’ since by agreeing to a lower wage we all got to keep our jobs. I saw how it was a ‘win’, but missed the part about how it was a ‘win-win’ (I had the wrong perspective). Then Fischer ended up letting many of the contractors who took a pay cut go anyway (No, they did not give them back the pay they’d given up in order to keep their jobs a few months prior). I’m sure they saw that as a ‘win-win-win’. Once the company showed they felt no obligation to be truthful or live up to their own obligations, I started looking for a job and a few months later got one.
Since then, Fisher Controls has been making more money and has hired a recruiting company out of their parent corporation Emerson’s hometown to do their IT recruiting and look for programmers. I got an email from the recruiter letting me know of an opportunity in Marshalltown. I wrote back asking if the opportunity was full time or a contract position and how much it paid. I was told it was a long term contract and the salary was open and they would ‘pay the right amount for the right person’. Sounds like the old phrase ‘Salary based on experience’, which means the company’s experience in paying the least amount of salary. I wrote back and asked if the job came with any benefits and if the right amount went up to an absurdly high number I picked out of the sky and was told I could get full benefits ‘which can include 3 weeks paid time off, Medical, and Dental’ and also asking me if I was looking for the absurdly high number in addition to the benefits. I thought the word ‘can’ was odd since if it CAN include those benefits it also CANNOT include these benefits. At this point I called off the game and told the recruiter I wasn’t interested since I’d heard of an employer in Marshalltown who gave all their contractor pay cuts so they could keep their jobs and then laid them off a couple of months later anyway. I’m surprised this guy didn’t even bother to read my resume to see if I’d worked at Fisher or maybe he did, but his job was just to get me in the door, get his commission, and then who cares about me.
It is always gratifying to be pursued by those that have wronged you in the past, but in my experience it’s foolish to expect different results from the same people. If I did go back to work at Fisher, as soon as the economy hit a bump or they decided they just weren’t making enough money, I’d be in the same situation I was 2 years ago. I wish this recruiter had called 2 months ago for a refresher course before I let myself get fooled for the second time by the Chess Journalists of America.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Taking a Gamble
I’ve been at my new job for 8 weeks now and am starting to settle in and find my niche. Working on new technologies is pretty challenging and there are days where I don’t know what I’m doing and I wonder why I left a job where I had things under control and wasn’t challenged at all. But then I start to figure things out and I feel great because I know how to do something I didn’t before and I’ve learned from experience that you can never tell which skill will lead to a bigger payoff down the road. I found out today that the company I was working for has merged with another bigger company, so my decision to switch jobs is looking better to me right now since the last time my place of employment changed ownership, I was being pointed toward the exit before the ink dried.
President Obama made a big gamble when he sent in the squad to take on Osama Bin Laden earlier this week. I don’t know whether the mission was to capture or kill, but I remember how bad President Carter looked in 1980 when an attempted rescue of the Iranian hostages didn’t work. I’m not jumping up and down over Bin Laden’s death as he has been mostly an afterthought for many years, but it is great that no Americans were killed or captured in the process. Even acknowledging that the mission took place at all is a big gamble, despite its apparent success. Who knows what the most extreme of his followers will do in retaliation for their leader’s death? After 9-11, I was amazed at how many people in other countries were wearing Osama Bin Laden T-shirts. Whether this guy is dead or alive won’t change the fact that there are plenty of people in the world who hate America and want to damage our country. I like the idea of the burial at sea and I hope no pictures are ever released of the corpse (although some will certainly be leaked at some point). It would be a fitting end to Osama Bin Laden to be featured in the Weekly World News as being spotted alive right next to the article of Bat Boy’s latest exploits.
I’d been looking for a free site to hold my youth chess tournament in the summer and run into a lot of dead ends. Jill Stiles, the parent of one of the chess players whose been attending the tournaments suggested I rent a shelter at a city park. The suburb towns of West Des Moines, Clive, and Urbandale wanted a lot of money to use their shelters, but I was able to rent a covered shelter on Des Moines south side. The south side of Des Moines has a reputation as the home of trailer park trash, so I held off on advertising the tournament until I could check the site out.
I went to the park on Monday. It is a 10-minute drive from my workplace in downtown Des Moines. I was very pleasantly surprised. The park is in the middle of a secluded upscale neighborhood and the covered shelter has room for 80 players. If it rains, I can still have 60 dry players.
Since a tournament outdoors is bound to have a lot of distractions, I decided to set up the tournament to be 3 hours long (instead of 5), have a minimal entry fee, forego the trophies and give medals out to everyone. I’m hoping that the parents who bring their players will take advantage of the surroundings to have a picnic and make the tournament a family outing.
Having a chess picnic seems like a way-out idea, but even having a youth chess tournament in the teeth of the spring sports season like I’m having on May 14th is a gamble since I’ve never had more than 25 players in my previous May tournaments. After 5 monthly youth tournaments I should have enough of a base where I can get 30 players each month for a chess tournament and can budget around that.
Since I have the shelter rented until 9 at night, I’m thinking about having an adult quick chess tournament after the youth tournament is over. It would be another gamble, but every decision is some sort of a gamble. Deciding to do nothing is still making a decision. Staying at my old job wouldn’t have looked like a gamble, but since companies don’t merge so they can hire more people, staying may have been a much bigger gamble than moving on. It’s easy to stick to the routine and delude yourself into thinking you’ve taken the prudent course, but there are going to be times when heading into uncharted waters is the safe play and playing it safe is the biggest gamble of all.
If there is a afterlife suitable for Osama Bin Laden,
forever being a cover boy on the Weekly World News would be close.
I’d been looking for a free site to hold my youth chess tournament in the summer and run into a lot of dead ends. Jill Stiles, the parent of one of the chess players whose been attending the tournaments suggested I rent a shelter at a city park. The suburb towns of West Des Moines, Clive, and Urbandale wanted a lot of money to use their shelters, but I was able to rent a covered shelter on Des Moines south side. The south side of Des Moines has a reputation as the home of trailer park trash, so I held off on advertising the tournament until I could check the site out.
Can there be a better place for a summer chess tournament?
Only if my gamble on no rain and boom boxes pays off.
Since a tournament outdoors is bound to have a lot of distractions, I decided to set up the tournament to be 3 hours long (instead of 5), have a minimal entry fee, forego the trophies and give medals out to everyone. I’m hoping that the parents who bring their players will take advantage of the surroundings to have a picnic and make the tournament a family outing.
Having a chess picnic seems like a way-out idea, but even having a youth chess tournament in the teeth of the spring sports season like I’m having on May 14th is a gamble since I’ve never had more than 25 players in my previous May tournaments. After 5 monthly youth tournaments I should have enough of a base where I can get 30 players each month for a chess tournament and can budget around that.
Since I have the shelter rented until 9 at night, I’m thinking about having an adult quick chess tournament after the youth tournament is over. It would be another gamble, but every decision is some sort of a gamble. Deciding to do nothing is still making a decision. Staying at my old job wouldn’t have looked like a gamble, but since companies don’t merge so they can hire more people, staying may have been a much bigger gamble than moving on. It’s easy to stick to the routine and delude yourself into thinking you’ve taken the prudent course, but there are going to be times when heading into uncharted waters is the safe play and playing it safe is the biggest gamble of all.
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