July 2006 Archives

For the first time ever, the woman from company #2 got back to me when she said she would. I am blown away.

I got the verbal offer last Friday. It will be made official...sometime this week. Sometime. Sounds vague doesn't it? That's because it is. The problem has been this:

The company is American with a Canadian presence across the country. Until two weeks ago, there was a Canadian HR person taking care of Canadian HR stuff. They quit, leaving my boss (who now needs a name...I'll call her Dee Dee, or just Dee) stuck. She doesn't know how to do anything in HR. Furthermore, due to certain changes, she now has to deal with the American HR people who don't know anything about Canadian HR. She is figuring out what to do bit by bit. Oh, her boss went on vacation Friday, so she's on her own for this. Furthermore, she's going on vacation on the week of August 14 for I don't know how long.

Basically I am going to start a new job in a new industry in a new language, and I could be mainly on my own.

On the other hand, I am making progress: it's a job I've had before, but it's a new industry. Hopefully I can get involved with all kinds of projects and handle them, thus driving up my value both from inside the company and from the outside.

I may be faced with a major dilemma, though: if this comes through, I have no choice but to jump. And I would feel like a fucking heel for it. But it's a better problem to have than choosing between drug dealing and prostitution.

This is one HELL of a picture. Look at this girl's expression.

Today is Rose's birthday. I can't tell you how old she is, but she is a perfect age. (If you know me and my passion for numbers, you can figure that out. 5 points to the first person that leaves a comment with the right age!)

Rose, despite the fact that I am not particularly financially well off right now, I truly want this day to be a special one. I mean that in the most sincere way. Happy birthday, love!

JonasParker, son of Vincentian expatriates, has been chosen to lead the business development coordination between the members of the Caribbean Union as well as to strengthen relations with the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Parker holds a certificate in project management from HEC, a Masters from UQAM and has received his PMP certification.

"This century requires a careful balance of consolidation of resources and social stewardship," Parker said.

"The West Indies must be seen as more than simply a tourist trap for North Americans and Europeans, but as an innovator and leader. An inspiration. We can do better."

When criticized for his lack of direct West Indian presence in his life, Parker responded, “Yes, it's true. I won't pretend that I am exactly like the residents of St. Vincent, for example. I had a great education. I have met people from all over the world. And I have chosen to reconnect with my roots, use my abilities and be of good service to everyone in the region. I would ask my detractors to examine what they have done other than bicker and amass power for themselves. That is exactly what has been killing us for generations."

Every year, the Canadian St. Vincent and the Grenadines Society puts on a picnic at none other than Brown's Bay, about 10 km west of Brockville that attracts thousands of people from literally, around the world, but mostly from Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. I was there two years ago but missed it last year. This time, although I didn't have much money to spare, I was able to just barely make it there. I had special reason to: family that I haven't seen in 20 years was coming to visit.

I reserved the car Friday. This is not an important weekend like Christmas, so I figured that getting a car would be simple. As it turns out, there were (as usual in my experience) no small cars available. I ended up getting this monstrosity called the Chrysler Pacifica. An SUV hybrid. I never thought I’d drive anything like this. It’s 20 feet long and seats ten. It gets a whopping 500 metres per litre. It has a CD player, a DVD player, seat warmers, back massagers, cock knockers, and a sauna. All of the economy price of very little per day.

Due to logistics, I could not take Rose and Petunia with me to Brockville, but I wanted them to experience this luxury car that I would never own, so I dropped them off at Rose's parents' place in Ste-Fleur-de-la-Bonne-Terre. This took a couple of hours out of my day, but I enjoyed driving them around in a fancy car for a while.

(At this point, I would like to interrupt this entry by telling you that I am writing this from an Internet Cafe in Montreal called Cafr Virus on boul. St-Laurent. There is a guy here openly surfing porn. Is that...okay? Normal? Seems awfully strange to me. I also just learned that my eyes are better than I thought they were considering the distance between us. I feel like going over there getting the web address off of him.)

Here is a letter I sent to the president of my old company:

Pierre,

I would like to start by saying thanks. Thanks for thinking of me for this new position. I have been thinking about how to change my career while at the same time going back to a high technology specialized consulting company like PRE, and your (unofficial) announcement is quite timely. It is timely because as I mentioned to you, I will be starting a program in project management at HEC next month; this email is in fact being written from a tea house on the laptop I bought for the program. From what you have told me, this position would be full of small projects for which I would be responsible. Since I would be learning about the best practices in project both on the job and off the job, I would be doubly well-armed for the challenges of the position. Here are some of the other things I bring to the table:

I didn't get the job at Company #1. The team said that I was too confident. They felt that I thought that I knew everything and wasn't willing to learn. First they tell me that I am not eager enough. Then when I tell them that I want to learn, that I think that I can do the job and that I would like to get started as quickly as possible, they see that as "too confident".

Maybe they didn't like my face and were looking for some reason to not hire me. In any case, that's two opportunities down, one to go.

The opportunity is potentially a dud. On Tuesday I received the following email from the president of my old company:

I need a bit more time to complete my plans for re-structuring the product group. There will be a product management role for sure but I need to complete the org structure before doing anything else. I would invite you to send your resume nevertheless and when I open up the position, I will call you, if you are still available.

Und dann:

I cannot give you a definite time line. As soon as I have a better idea, I will let you know.

Thanks for your interest. I look forward to reading your resume.

Thanks for your interest? This means that nothing could potentially happen until October, who knows? It's very much a shame. This, of course means that I have to take one of the other two jobs, however they haven't offered my anything yet. I am contacting them in about half an hour.

P.S.: My new D-Link router works beautifully. Yesterday's tech disaster is over. Many thanks to D for helping me with diagnostics.

If you need to buy a router, do not buy from Linksys. I bought the WRT54GC more than a year ago and it was working fine until yesterday when I tried to upgrade the firmware. Now it doesn't exist as a router any longer. Its routing and wifi abilities are gone; it's just a hub. Useless. How can an update cause such havoc? I have to buy another one now, unless there is someone who knows how to fix this type of thing. I am open to suggestions. I can't take it back. I don't have a proof of purchase anymore, and it's been at least a year anyway.

This would happen the day I get my laptop.

Originally from March 23, 2003

Knowing myself now, I'm going to make some guesses as to how I (just me, no one else) would turn out if I were female. If I were a woman I'd:

• have grown up very pissed off at the inequalities that prevail between the sexes;
  
• have called myself a feminist when I was a young teenager, recoiled from the term in the wake of a feminist backlash and especially when learning of the failures of the early and middle (and current) feminist leaders for women of colour;
  
• have reclaimed the term on a personal level sometime in university, and would currently be keeping feminist issues near the front of my mind;
  
• be about 5'8", maybe between 125 and 135 pounds; basically somewhere between my other two sisters;
  
• have very similar friend/romantic relationships in high school in that I wouldn't likely have had a boyfriend in high school, and I would have tried and succeeded to make inroads with the popular crowd, only to find out years later that the effort wasn't exactly worth it. I was too different from them. I should have stuck with the band crowd rather than the jocks (I was bi-groupal then);
  
• probably be heterosexual, but in university I would have been VERY affectionate with some of my female friends, possibly even developing a crush on a couple of them;
  
• probably test what I could and could not get away with when it comes to men. I'd see how far they might go to sleep with me. As soon as I got enough confidence and skill to manipulate men, I'd start seeing most of them as beings who want to fuck me (and therefore need to be managed) before I'd see them as people (in university and high school, I'm not sure how far off that is from the truth most of the time.);
  
• I'd be REALLY attracted to the ones that wouldn't let me get away with bullshit. That's similar (but not exactly) how it is now;
  
• have been far more arrogant, patronizing and condescending than I have ever been in this (male) life at that point (around age 20);
  
• later take advantage of being a woman as much as I could; I'd learn to work the system like crazy. I'd try to win respect through manipulation, but then realize that respect wasn't what I was getting at all, just a bad name. This would be either because I wasn't a good enough manipulator, because I didn't have enough of the goods, or because I had too much of the goods;
  
• by now have thrown away all the bullshit I was carrying around and just live;
  
• have gone through my 20s with some key friends of both genders; it'd be about half and half. At least one of those male friends would have been a former sex partner;
  
• have had a pregnancy scare, or possibly more than that, likely in university;
  
• speak out in favour of porn;
  
• be a member of Bust Magazine's Girl Wide Web and several other female-oriented sites/rings/etc.;
  
• call myself JanisParker;
  
• (no, I'd call myself something like Autumn Moonstar or something);
  
• have been pretty athletic, for a girl;
  
• have resented anyone actually saying that to me;
  
• have started out playing the clarinet or flute rather than the sax or trumpet, but I'd have been fairly good at all of the concert band instruments anyway;
  
• be in a long string of relationships starting in my mid-20s, but never get dumped until age 28. That would shock and confuse me for months at least;
  
• still hate fools.

  This is like a "101 things about me" list, just a little different.

  *UPDATE*: I could probably update this list, as it may have changed in three years. Why don't you do the same sort of thing on your blog? I think I might make an entry about what things would be like for me if I were white. That would be much more difficult, I think.

As I said here, I have a few options opening up to me. The followup to the first position occurred on Thursday. I spent the day with the team in the huge company. They all seemed to think that I was hired, because who hangs out with the team all day unless they are hired? I spoke with everyone there, discussing everyone's roles, the perks of the job (of which there are CONSIDERABLE, including awesome annual sales rallies, trips to Vegas, Beijing and iPods) and how a typical day works. It was a pretty slow day as well, so I was not disturbing anyone. The people are super friendly, the atmosphere is fairly calm and it's 50-50 English-French all the way; linguistically ideal. If I were offered the position right there I would have taken it. As it stands, the manager will talk to everyone I talked to, then talk to the big boss and make a decision by Tuesday. As for the other position, she can't seem to get her interviews to happen in a timely manner, so her decision will be made on Wednesday, so she says. I've heard such things before. At least I am still the leading candidate.

But something happened today to change everything. Back in May when I received my letter of admission to HEC, I started fantasizing about going back to my first company in a completely different role. A powerful one, well-paid. So I decided to email some key people there, including "Sylvie" my old boss. Long-time readers might remember my struggles with that guy. (For the record, he wasn't bad. I just hated my position. We were actually quite friendly when I didn't hate him.) It was like this:

Gentlemen,

It's been quite a long time since speaking with any of you. I just wanted to give you a mini update of what I am up to these days.

Rose and I are still living together. She is doing administration in a really cool place (the name of which I am not allowed to discuss, but their products taste great) and will be starting a special care program in September. I am about to start a project management certificate at HEC (trois ans avec une québécoise de souche m'ont aidé. Ça plus le certificat en français langue seconde…). One day, I may return to work with you in a completely different role (emphasis mine, way after the fact).

If not quote of the week:

"Let's just say: There's a difference between people who blog and people who LiveJournal." -AJ Kandy

Agreed.

It's right here.

My first experience of racism occurred when I was in grade 1, in 1980-81. There were a number of kids there that would constantly call me nigger and other, more childish names. I took it personally and obviously felt shitty for much of the year. Luckily, I had a good friend in the class so that I wasn't isolated and completely alienated. Plus, I was smarter than any of them or all of them combined. I know that other kids haven't been so lucky. My mistake was in telling the teacher about it. Mrs. McIntyre did absolutely nothing about it except to say that I should ignore them and "take the high road". Back then I believed that teachers knew best and that their word was gospel. Unfortunately, this advice didn't help and I was resigned to the fact that there was no one that could help me.

What I should have done was to tell my mother. She didn't take shit from anyone, and when someone was bothering her children, well, that was pretty much the end of them. If I had realized this then, things would have been a lot different that year. I never mentioned it to her until about 8-10 years later. I wasn't hiding it, I just didn't think to bring it up. Actually, that's not entirely true. After Grade 1, it didn't really come back for many years, but in that year, I saw it as a sign of weakness to run to your mommy. Teachers are different because it's their job. At least that was my 5-year-old logic.

Some of you may know that I have been teaching myself how to draw during the time that I have been out of work. Inspired by Jeph Jacques' Questionable Content, I have decided to try my hand at the seemingly elusive art of drawing people.

And now I have decided to start another blog, an art blog, although this isn't high art by any means. It's a place to post my drawings online, and nothing more. I have such diverse interests, don't I? Let's summarize.

The Scrawl at the End of the Hall - Personal life and goings-on. Feelings, even. Me.
A World of Cheese, For Your Pleasure - All the cheese you need. Various other topics that I find worth talking about.
Blue Nuit - Porn, pure and simple. NSFW.
Hey, I CAN draw! - At least, I like to try. It's fun.

I will have to update the main page to reflect the changes. I would actually like to put a little flash content in there, but I don't know how. If anyone would like to help me, I wouldn't turn you down. Oh, and if anyone can figure out how to get my images from my images directory to show up without throwing strange errors (such as this file), that would be great. This is the reason why there's a big blank space up top if you look at the individual archives.

Firstly, I thank everyone out there for not giving me a hard time during my non-blog period. The simple fact is that I was bored with the whole thing and simply didn't feel like it. Several things have occurred last month, but even though they were blogworthy, I simply couldn't be bothered to talk about it. However, here are a couple of salient points.

I think that I may start a job soon, as in the next two to three weeks. I have been interviewing like mad lately, and I have been able to have two companies keep a real interest in me. I have had second interviews with both of them, and I could get an offer as early as Monday.