Twenty-nine

What are your holiday plans for Christmas?

To quote Jeff Spicoli, “I don’t know.”

I’m kind of bound where I am, and there’s nowhere I really want to go.  We’re supposed to go to some friends’ place for a short celebration for St. Nicholas’s Day.

I do still have friends I want to see.  Family, *shrug.*  There’s a variety of reasons for that.  Instead of making an issue with disagreements, I just go away.  It’s how I operate.

I think we’ll probably head in to the District one night to see the National Christmas Tree.  Maybe have dinner somewhere nice.  Day of?  I don’t know.  I’d be okay just spending time with my wife.  We actually had a good time doing that last night, keeping each other warm.  Maybe that’s the way things are supposed to work.

I will say that watching the Christmas special she’d chosen was a bit strange with the emphasis on kids.  We’re not having any.  The make-believe world has one Butters Stotch;  a real world incarnation isn’t needed.

Somewhat-unrelated, though, I do need to rap a bit about work.  It’s been an endless stream of job inquiries lately.  At first, I attributed it to lag from my unemployment in Norfolk in 2017.  Now, though, I’m seeing it as mainly laziness from the recruiting assemblage.

First thing — recruiters really don’t know what to say when you refuse a lucrative contract offer.  If it is contract-to-hire, I counter with something along the lines of, “you will make a full time offer during the first six months, or the contract terminates, and you owe me another six months’ contract pay.”  When unemployment was 8%, maybe you could have gotten away with that shit, but it doesn’t work these days.

Second.  Because of the way your clients are operating, I am no longer adhering to whatever you learned in your point-and-click recruiting seminar.  No, my resume isn’t going to be two pages.  It’s going to be as long as it needs to be to cover my twenty years’ experience.  It’s also putting my few remaining full-time jobs up top, and my contract positions in a subsequent section. Not that I think that matters, as you’re using a fucking automated tool to search for keywords, but when you actually do look at it, you might notice that I do direct to the applicable sections.

At some point you have to be firm on these things.

Maybe one of those contract positions would be more interesting than what I have now, but I doubt it.

But it’s time to stop for the evening.  Go take pills, and grab a nap before the Saints’ game.

One more day of the eighth year of this.  I have a problem, no?