I was once rear ended at a red light. I was knocked unconscious and the driver drove off. A few kind witnesses called police who took a report. They got half his plate imprinted on my bumper, but never tracked him down. I had State Farm, and I was even paying extra for the “uninsured driver coverage”. They said they couldn’t cover it because until they had another driver’s information I was automatically at fault, even with the police report and witness accounts. They said it didn’t count as uninsured driver because it’s possible the guy had insurance. I was flabbergasted.

In the end I had a concussion and needed to take time off work for recovery and my short term disability insurance ended up suing State Farm because they didn’t want to pay for my medical treatment. State Farm agreed to cover medical care but only if it was recorded as my fault and I paid my deductible. In anger I tried to switch insurance companies but found out they have a shared database and since it was recorded as a hit and run my fault, nobody else would take me. And State Farm jacked my rate up 30%…

Think of other topics and questions than work, Americans care too much about work outside of work.

Switch your phone apps to celsius and start your brain switching ASAP.

Knowing what country or region you’re going to would help

I once worked in a division of ~3500 employees, every year the division produced two profit forecasts one called “pessimistic” and another called “optimistic”. My first year the division made $335 million MORE than the optimistic forecast so the division CEO approved every employee a $335 bonus.

The next year it happened again but only $285 million, so $285 bonuses that year.

Both times I scoffed and quietly pointed out to the delighted Boomers I trusted that it was less than one third of a percent of the total money.

The next year apparently the corporate office found out, fired said CEO and quashed the bonuses forever. Apparently the distribution of the crumbs was more than they could handle.

Lisbon’s main plaza was a parking lot from the 1950s to 1997…

When I last visited Argentina Uber was using the official exchange rates which were just fantasy numbers. As soon as you match with a driver they’d message you and you’d negotiate the cash price. Then the ride in the app would be cancelled.

Uber didn’t mind because they were still getting the ~$1 or so cancel fee for basically being a messaging app.

Boeing™ is committed to innovative solutions to problems like opening a cabin door mid flight

And underwear, airplanes, driveways…

I’m doing my part!

https://archive.ph/yateC

The Portuguese word for turkey 🦃 is Peru

“Have you tried applying on LinkedIn? Messaging recruiters or hiring managers on LinkedIn?”

“Oh no don’t use LinkedIn, everyone ignores those because of bots, apply directly”

“Put keywords from the job listing in your resume so the algorithm will rank you hire”

“Oh no don’t use words from the listing in your resume or you’ll be flagged as a bot”

“Hire a headhunter to apply to many positions for you”

“Avoid headhunters because when they spam your resume, you’ll get flagged as a bot”

“Complete a tedious and time consuming project for the company and post it on your personal site so they see you’re not a bot already qualified”

“Oh they didn’t even open the link to look at it? Well do one for the next company and the next and the next…”

Looking for a white collar job today is basically an arms race with the net result recruiters spend the bulk of their time weeding out bots, and applicants spend the bulk of their time trying to not look like bots. It’s ridiculous and I kind of wish places just accepted in person applications again.

In my state you can file a claim with the state labor commission. But they don’t have the resources to investigate “small” reports and their website encourages you to just hire your own lawyer.

It’s fascinating the imbalance, if you take $20 from your employer’s till that’s a crime, they can call 911 and within minutes police can respond and take the money back and possibly arrest you. You could have a criminal record that negatively effects your life for many years.

Your employer shorts your paycheck $2000 and it’s a ‘civil matter’, the police won’t even take your report. Instead you must file a claim with an understaffed beaucratic office that may not even open your email much less recover your money. If any recovery happens it will certainly take many, many months so hopefully you don’t have bills due this month! The employer is free to continue stealing from your paycheck and anyone else’s paychecks and is unlikely to face any meaningful consequences.

A story from back when I worked in HR. Finance handed HR a list of teams to reduce. HR saw who had lowest performance metrics or was most recently hired and earmrked them to be fired. Then HR emailed the managers and said, ‘we want you to follow around Angela and Brian today, the first mistake they make, write it up and terminate them’. The company had laid off too many people and several states it operated in warned the company they would seek payment if too many more ex-employees filed for unemployment insurance.

Most employees skewed right politically and wouldn’t dream of fighting the company for their rightfully due unemployment benefits since they legitimately thought it was their fault, and many thought UI was socialism anyway.

After witnessing this I immediately began switching careers.

Remember folks, HR is not your friend, HR exists to protect the company from employee related lawsuits.

I use to work in HR for a medium sized, publicly traded company. Here’s how it works:

Wall Street banks set quarterly profit targets for companies. If the companies hit the target, stock goes up, if they don’t it goes down.

If stock goes down too much, C-suite is usually fired. This is what motivates them.

There is usually a few weeks between when the company calculates it’s quarterly numbers and when they are legally obligated to report them.

If the profits aren’t up to the Wall Street calculation, the C-suite panics and 95% of the time will go on a firing spree so when the numbers do become public they can claim they analyzed the company and magically found it was overstaffed, and already took care of the “problem”. This is an attempt to save their own jobs.

In truth they did the firings in such a hurry nothing was seriously looked at, no significant problems were discovered, and the employees let go were closer to random than carefully selected based on performance and need. This happens every quarter all across America. It’s rare the Wall Street targets are scrutinized. Often the companies were actually profitable too, just not as profitable as Wall Street wanted them to be.

The human factor is entirely removed at this point. Most people who were fired were perfectly good at their job, and their job was just as relevant as any other. Some analyst on a spreadsheet just calculated how many people from each team would be fired to appease shareholder feelings. It was sad to watch people take it so personally and blame themselves when it had nothing to do with them or their performance. Just a corporate wheel turning around. Many would also be rehired within months too.