Right Management

Does anyone have any experience with Right Management?  As part of my severance package, I get 1 month of career management services from Right Management and am interested to hear if anyone has any testimonials.  I'm pretty skeptical at this point that it's worth my time to contact them, but I'm open to the possibility.

Let me start out with what I know about their services.  One of their representatives came out to my office and sat down with everyone for a 1 on 1 chat.  The first thing she said to me was, "how are you doing?"  "Fine" I replied, to which she responded, "I don't believe that, I would be pretty upset if I were in your situation."  So starting out with her more or less calling me a liar was a little off putting.  From that point, she handed me a packet of written material and then pretty much looked at me waiting for me to ask questions.  All I was able to get out of her was a broad overview of their services: they offer resume writing assistance, interviewing tips, and access to their job board.  All things that are available for free on Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, as well as other sources.  The one thing she mentioned that interested me is counseling for transitioning into other industries, although I was unable to determine how they go about it.  Do they look over my resume and recommend what other industries my skill set might apply to?  Do they interview me to determine my skills and interests?  Do they give me aptitude tests like a high school guidance counselor?  All of the above?  None of the above?  Long story short: I walked out of the meeting without a lot of confidence that Right Management provides any value that isn't readily available elsewhere.

My next issue is that they will only let me sign up by phoning them.  I find the phone to be a very inconvenient and inefficient means of communication.  I could fire off an email in less time than it would take me to dial the number and wait for someone to answer.  If some information is needed that's not readily available, one of us is going to have to sit in silence while the other looks it up.  In addition, the phone does not allow me to forward my resume or send links, nor does it give me a written record of the exchange for future reference.  I thought there was hope when the sent me a letter including an email address along with the ubiquitous phone number, however when I emailed said address for further information, the reply I received was, "please call our toll free number."  And maybe it's just that I was already experiencing a heightened state of irritability that day, but frankly it pissed me off.  It just gives me the impression that any contact with them will be either via phone or physically going to their office, which will be so time consuming and tedious as to not be worthwhile.

Despite my reservations, I'm happy to receive assistance if they are effective, so I spent some time googling them.  Unfortunately I've been unable to find much information.  It has been limited to a few reviews from employees and one Wall Street Journal article about outplacement services.  The employee reviews, like this one from Glass Door (which is an outstanding resource, by the way) are mostly negative, which gives me pause.  If the people with daily access to the resources to find me a new job are unhappy, but unable to find a job they are happy with, then what does that say about the effectiveness of the company?

The Wall Street Journal article covers outplacement services in general, with some specific mentions of Right Management, but is no more encouraging.  Some of the pertinent information is quoted below:

Skeptical employees are voting with their feet: Executives estimate about 40% of workers offered outplacement services don't show up; some ask for cash instead. Some industry participants, too, are troubled by reports of mass-produced resumes, canned job advice and slipshod counseling.

Mr. Shubert says he got access to job-posting sites and group workshops on topics like preparing a resume or closing a deal; equivalent material can be found online, he says. He says his coach didn't offer useful advice. Mr. Shubert's verdict: "truly boilerplate" and "lacking for middle and upper management."

Eighteen months later, Ms. Service says outplacement was a waste of time. She says the job-search training was rushed. During a practice lunch interview, a coach chided her for ordering cranberry juice, saying it could be interpreted as a sign of a urinary-tract infection, she recalls.  Her resume was sent to a prospective employer with a cover letter that included a typo and bore her signature -- which she says she never saw.

Documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal showed the materials resemble those of another ex-Pepsi job seeker sent to the same firm -- including the same typo and quirky date style. The firm's president says he eliminated both women from consideration as his executive assistant. "We didn't take the letters seriously because they did not reflect an understanding of our company -- and they looked alike,'' he says.

So there it is.  I'm very skeptical of the efficacy of Right Management and outplacement services in general at this point.  My time is valuable to me and I'd rather not waste it.  I'm hopeful that I'm wrong, though.  So if anyone has had some experience with them, good or bad, I would appreciate hearing more about what I can expect should I contact them.

Solar Power

I've seen some solar panels advertised recently, and out of curiosity I decided to do a little research.  What I decided to do was look up a middle of the road panel at Costco, look at the output, and do a cost/benefit analysis.  What I looked at was this 500 watt, grid tied panel.  It will set you back $1,899 before shipping and taxes.  Assuming you pick it up at the store to avoid shipping charges, the total cost will be approximately $2,050.  What do you get for that price?  According to Costco, the monthly output is between 30kWh and 70kWh - roughly enough to power a 15 cubic foot refrigerator. 

Of course the output varies according to the amount of direct sunlight, and since this area is under cloud cover a good portion of the winter, not to mention winter days are pretty short at this latitude, we'd be on the low end of the scale, and would get very little output in the winter.  But for ease of calculation, I'll optimistically say we would get 50kWh. 

According to the Puget Sound Energy web site, residential rates are currently 8.5 ¢ per kWh for the first 600kWh, and then 10.3 ¢ beyond that.  Again, estimating on the generous side for ease of calculations, let's say I average 10 ¢.  That means that for an investment of $2,050, you can reduce your electric bill by $5 a month.  If rates stay static (which they won't), it would take 410 month, or 34 years and 2 month to pay for itself.  Well beyond the 25 year warranty. 

With such a horrible return on investment, I can't help wondering why anyone buys any.  Without significantly coming down in cost and/or increasing in efficiency, solar panels are just not cost effective.  If your intent is to save the planet, you're much better off purchasing higher efficiency appliances, windows, etc to reduce your energy use.  I would really like to go 'off the grid' eventually, but at this point it seems highly unlikely that it will be economically feasible in my lifetime.

In unrelated news, I recently saw that this story was taking the internet by storm:  Hiker claims bear saved him from cougar attack.  According to the man, he was taking some pictures of a bear and her cubs when a cougar jumped on him from behind, and the bear came over and attacked the cougar.  At first I thought that this was an incredible story, if true, and now it seems that the rest of the world is beginning to question the validity as well.  Here's my theory.  A 'cougar' is slang for a sexually aggressive middle aged woman.  Or a WSU graduate.  Or the feared double cougar - a sexually aggressive, middle aged WSU graduate.  Also, a 'bear' is slang for a large, hairy gay man.  So, I think he went home, and when his wife asked why he had scratches on his body and he cooked up the story, when in actuality he had been at a brothel where a 'cougar' got a little too rough with him and the bouncer, who was a 'bear', pulled the woman off of him.  He simply changed the locale from a brothel to a wilderness hike.  Once the story got out and gained popularity, he had no choice but to stick with it.  And as a further update, the San Francisco Chronicle is questioning the account as well.  The man is sticking to his guns though.

April Fool's Day

After seeing this short video on the history of April Fool's Day, which may or may not be accurate, I'm thinking of adopting the time honored tradition of attempting to covertly tape a picture of a fish to someone's back.  I'm not entirely sure how that makes them look foolish, but it sounds like fun anyway.


In other news,season 2 of The Killing is starting shortly and I'm pretty excited about that.  Hopefully this season we'll find out who killed Rosie Larson.  For those of you who haven't seen it, it's a riveting murder mystery that takes place here in Seattle, although it is actually filmed in Vancouver, and all you see of Seattle are aerial establishing shots - kind of a pet peeve of mine.  Anyway, it's based on the  wildly popular (or so I'm told) Danish series Forbrydelsen and follows 2 homicide detectives as the try to find who murdered high school senior Rosie Larson.  Was it her teacher? The city councilman, whose campaign owns the car in which her body was found?  Was it the family friend?  Was it the scumbag classmate?  Was it someone else?  Anyway, like most of the content on AMC these days, it is very well done and I highly recommend it.  I also recommend checking out the Season 1 recap if you are unfamiliar with the show to get yourself up to speed.  You can thank me later.

Take Me Out To The Ballgame

I'm still in full NFL mode.  The majority of my sports focus is on free agency and the draft, but with spring training winding down and opening day of major league baseball closing in, I've been trying to prepare myself for baseball season by watching Ken Burns' Baseball.  I've realised something very important, Ken Burns needs to learn the meaning of the word editing.  Baseball is not an exciting enough sport that you can afford to really slow it down and not put people to sleep.  There are 10 episodes, roughly 2 hours each, and so far I've made it through 3 and a half and it took over 6 hours just to get up to Babe Ruth.  I almost fell asleep on the bus ride home today while watching.  I've seen a few other Ken Burns documentaries, and they are all extremely long, slow moving, and self indulgent.  I don't know that I'll make it through before opening day.  I did learn something important though.  Rube was a much more popular nickname a century ago than it is today.  I'm going to have to nickname one of my acquaintances Rube, I don't yet know which one. 

I watched parts of the Mariners spring training games that were televised on Wednesday and Thursday nights.  There are quite a few guys I'm not familiar with, and I think this is going to be another long season.  I'm already tired of Rick Rizzs' terrible nicknames.  I can't sit through another season of just slapping a y on half of somebody's name.  A true professional broadcaster would be more creative.  This year I'm pushing for broad acceptance for Carpe Bat - or seize the bat in Latin - for Mike Carp.  And Peg Leg for Carlos Peguero if he makes the major league roster.

On the subject of announcing, I've decided that if I were an announcer, my home run call would be, "ding dong, the pitch is dead!"  If you can come up with something better, I'd like to hear it.

Left Hand

For no particular reason, other than to prepare myself for the possibility of injuring my right hand and being unable to use it, I decided today to make it a goal to be able to do things left handed by the end of the year.  I'm starting out slowly with seemingly easy tasks and plan to work my way up to more complex tasks.  Step #1:  brush my teeth left handed.  This seems like it should be easy enough, but feels extremely awkward and difficult thus far.  I have no doubt that my 2 and 3 year old nieces brush their teeth with greater confidence and skill than I do with my left hand.  I estimate it shouldn't take longer than a month to master, although by that time I may need a trip to the dentist to get some fillings.  Maybe I'll do a little left handed hair combing as well for some additional practice.

From there I think I'll move on to throwing footballs and baseballs left handed.  I experimented with left handed throwing in high school and college and found it exceptionally difficult.  I'd say I threw like a girl, but I most girls throw more gracefully than I do lefty.  When I can throw an accurate fastball, I'll move on to the curve.  Of course, I can't throw a curve worth a damn righty, so any hopes of getting any movement opposite handed are pretty far fetched.  While in the sports milieu, I'll also see if I can serve a volleyball left handed, and maybe play tennis lefty.  I've been batting lefty for many years so I think playing tennis shouldn't be too hard to master.  Based on past experience, however, I think it may take longer than the remainder of the year to learn to throw. 

The final step will be doing some rudimentary writing and drawing.  I think that may be the fevered dream of a madman though.  I currently draw with all the skill of a trained chimp.  A poorly trained chimp at that, so writing legibly might be an unrealistic expectation.  I can always stick with typing if I have to. 

Annual Daylight Savings Rant

It's no secret that I can't stand Daylight Savings Time.  I see absolutely no benefit to it, only detriments.  And so it is that I will once again subject the world to my annual diatribe.  In the past I've discussed the rise in traffic accidents the first week that DST goes into effect, so this year I'll shift my focus to lost productivity.  According to this article, millions of dollars are lost at this time each year because employees are less focused and spend more time on non-work related activities.

“Using existing data that shows that people exhibit poorer self-control when they're tired, the researchers said that the lost sleep due to the time change -- an average of 40 minutes that Sunday night -- makes employees less likely to self-regulate their behavior and more inclined to spend time cyberloafing, or surfing the Internet for personal pursuits while on the clock,” according to a Penn State report on the research.

The article also attributes some lost productivity to DST coinciding with March Madness, however I will focus only on the time change.  Just to provide some anecdotal evidence of my own, I witnessed 3 co-workers chatting instead of working for at least 30 minutes. While it's entirely possible this has nothing to do with DST, it's at least coincidental.

I've got a reasonable proposal.  If we absolutely must change our clocks twice a year (and I see no reason why we should) instead of shocking everyone with the hour change, why not ease into it by changing 10 minutes a day for 6 days.  That would be much easier to adjust to.  Otherwise I have to start looking at jobs in Arizona or one of the other states that doesn't recognize DST.

Comedy

I've been watching old episodes of Frasier recently and I can't help wondering, what happened with clever, witty comedy?  Judd Apatow and whoever was responsible for the American Pie movies have relegated movie comedy to purely lowest common denominator.  Nothing but juvenile, low brow sex and fart jokes with some drug humor thrown in.  Movies have become a race to the bottom where, I imagine, the directors end filming not with the traditional 'cut' but instead 'the Aristocrats!'.  Judd Apatow is the worst thing to happen to comedy since the laugh track.

Which brings me to television comedy.  The majority of shows seem to fall into the category of formulaic sitcoms.  Stereotypical characters (who come across more as caricatures) getting themselves into ridiculous situations followed by forced laughter from a presumably drugged studio audience.  Throw in some outlandish characters doing off the wall things (i.e. Tracy Morgan's character on 30 Rock), some characters with funny sounding names (the entire premise of the now cancelled Outsourced), and a guy with funny hair and glasses (see The IT Crowd) and you've got yourself a show.  I'm reminded of Ricky Gervais' character on the show Extras - his dreams seemingly come true as he gets the opportunity to star in his own sitcom but soon turns into self loathing as the network turns his character into a guy with a funny wig and glasses shouting catch phrases.  This excerpt from Extras between Ricky Gervais' character (Andy Millman) and his agent just about sums it up:

Andy Millman: It's bad.
Agent: It's not BAD, is it.
Andy Millman: It is.
Agent: No, "bad" suggests that, you know, it's evil or something. You know, it's not - It's poor... it's rubbish... you know, it's shit - it's a shit sitcom.
Andy Millman: It's a shitcom! Oh, we've sorted that out, thanks very much. That's the career over.
Agent: That's what one of the reviewers said!

 
And while I'm thinking about it, I have to throw in this clip of David Bowie on the show. 


Even shows like the Big Bang Theory which started out clever have devolved into your standard relationship jokes which have been done a thousand times before on a thousand other shows.  The main characters are supposed to be brilliant physicists, but I saw a recent episode where they spent 3 or 4 straight minutes making erection jokes.  I believe that's jumped the shark.  And I won't even get started on the steady decline of the Simpsons or the re-introduction of Futurama which has been nothing short of a disaster. 

So I guess my question is this:  is comedy dead?  Is this the fallout from the writers strike a couple years ago?  Is there some other reason behind the death of comedy?  I'm hoping for something fresh and original to come along, but instead I'll just have to settle for the resurrection of Arrested Development and hope it doesn't let me down too. 

Since blowing up my knee, I have gotten terribly out of shape.  Yes, a lot of it has been that, for months exercise was impossible, and after that difficult and painful for quite some time.  But a lot of it has also been laziness.  When you are this out of shape, you have less energy and exercise requires more effort. Frequently I get home from work and can't seem to summon the effort to spend an hour in the gym.  Thus I've enacted phase 1 of my new plan. 

I've started getting up early every morning to get a half hour on the exercise bike before heading off to work.  This is difficult for me since I already have a hard time getting up in the morning, and getting up earlier is a burden.  Regardless, this plan went into effect on Wednesday, and after 3 days I thought I was going to die when the alarm clock went off.  Exercising when you're low on energy after a long day is one thing, but exercising when you're half asleep is quite another.  Wednesday and Thursday I pushed through, but by Friday I managed to spend 5 minutes on the exercise bike before I started thinking about calling in sick and going back to bed.  I'm going to try to keep up this regimen, however if it is going to be successful I'm going to have to start getting to sleep earlier which will be difficult. 

The plan is not to replace evening exercising with morning exercise, but to augment it.  I figure that getting the cardio out of the way in the mornign will free me up to focus more on weights and ab toning in the evenings.  And a second round of cardio until I can burn off enough pounds that I feel better and sleep better.  I've never been a fan of jogging - it is torment - and a bad knee just makes it that much worse.  So I've been focusing on the elliptical trainer and exercise bike instead.  I try to get a minimum of 30 minutes and 3 miles on the elliptical, or 30 minutes and 10 miles on the bike, and despite the hate I try to get on the treadmill at least once a week, even if only for a half mile. Usually I finish with a soaked shirt and a puddle of sweat on the floor. 

Ultimately the goal is to lose 30 pounds - I'm about 200 right now and it's a lot of effort hauling around that much weight.  If I can get it done in 4 months I'll be happy.  Staying motivated is the hard part.  And eating better.  I can't seem to keep a healthy diet going for more than a month at a stretch. 

On a tangent, I realized that the recent rash of injuries started after cutting my hair.  No sooner than the long hair is gone and I start falling apart and spending all my time in hospitals and physical therapy.  I never headed the warning of the story of Samson.  And what's worse, I don't get the benefit of a Delilah to pleasure me before dragging me down.  I did all this to myself.  And growing the hair back won't put humpty dumpty back together again, and I have my doubts that it will halt further crippling.  It's just going to be a slow, steady decline from here on out.

On the eve of the Superbowl, I've realized that I truly dislike both teams. Bill Belichick and Tom Brady are completely unlikeable, not to mention that thought of the most loathsome people in the world - Bostonians - celebrating makes my stomach turn. I'm not sure why I dislike the Giants, I guess because Eli Manning comes across as a bit smug and I have left over hatred from when Bill Parcells was coach.  Maybe I hate all coaches named Bill.  Come to think of it, I didn't care much for Bill Walsh either.  Where was I?  Oh yes, unfortunately both teams can't lose, so the real losers end up being America and football fans worldwide.  And so it is that I find myself think of things other than the big game.  Specifically I find myself thinking of technology - what the next step in football technology should be.

Visors have become pretty commonplace in both the NFL and college.  Maybe high school too, I don't know.

I think these visors should be combined with a heads up display to allow coaches or the quarterback to call audibles and have the play pop up on all player's visors.  No huddle offenses and two minute drills would be easier to run and more exciting.  Noise would be less of a problem, so some teams may have a problem with losing home field advantage, but this will be implemented eventually, so why fight it?  The technology exists now, so I'm looking forward to some team making this happen.  Paul Allen is a tech guy, he should outfit the Seahawks with this next season.

Andrew Luck

Everyone is fawning over Andrew Luck, and will for at least the next several months, and for good reason.  All I ask is that you please shave that horrible beard before you step on stage in front of a national audience to accept that Indianapolis Colts jersey. 

Every time I see you, Mr. Luck, I'm reminded of the creepy neighbor kid from the Burbs. 

If teams begin to suspect you have a furnace in your basement that you use to dispose of the bodies of hobos you've murdered, it might hurt your draft stock.