Monthly Archives: February 2016

A Case for the Uniform

Random stuff, Things that confuse me

Yesterday was my first post-layoff job interview. The email confirmation I received from them gave me the time and address of the meeting as well as reminder that it is a ‘casual office’.

Hm, this means I can’t wear a suit. But how casual is casual? I assumed that they would be in jeans, but I can’t wear jeans. Maybe black pants? Ok, except that my black pants need to be ironed and I don’t do that very well.

Ok, so a dress, but which one? A ‘casual’ dress? Those make me look like I’m headed to a party or out for date night. A business dress? It’s practically the same as a suit but without the jacket.

Ugh! Why are you messing with my head! I tried on 7 dresses and one skirt, two different colored tights and three pair of shoes.

In the end I had about 2 and a half minutes to get out of the house and grabbed the first dress I had tried on, threw on my coat and tried not to obsess over it.

My meeting was with two women both in jeans, I confessed that I had changed about 5 times to be casual but not too casual and they also confessed that they were pretty dressed up, but they didn’t want to dress up too much because they had told me they were casual.

If I get this job, I’m pretty sure it will be because of our shared fixation on fashion. This seems like as a good a reason to hire me as any, right?

Footnote to this story: Last night I had a dream that I got this job and showed up this first day in a t-shirt, just a t-shirt, no pants, no underwear. It was not a long t-shirt. No one seemed to notice.

tshirt

Why Facebook is an Asshole

Deep Thoughts, Random stuff

Remember when Facebook was a fun and entertaining place where you could log in and see pictures of your high school classmates, find out who just had a baby or who didn’t and spent their Christmas break in Hawaii?

Yeah I remember that Facebook, before I had a smart phone and I would log in one time a day and oh and ah over baby and/or puppy pictures and feel pretty good that even in my most introverted moods I was still connecting with humanity and hadn’t yet completely fallen off the grid.

Slowey and with what seems like ever increasing frequency my feed has become a virtual marketplace. Honestly, if RoseGal offers to send me a seemingly beautiful ball gown made out of 14 carat gold for  $1.75 in USD one more time I’m going to scream. This shit drives me crazy, I don’t go on to Facebook to shop, I go on it to stalk old boyfriends and research potential dog walkers.

But the sponsored ads are just a small part of the problem, inspirational quotes and inspiring message also drive me nuts. Honestly WordPorn mostly just makes me feel like my relationships aren’t deep enough or spiritual enough. Instead of making me feel better most often these quotes just make me feel more shallow and superficial. Thanks to Facebook I now know that I am not living up to my potential. Awesome.

But what I hate more than anything else that happens on the internet (yes, that’s the ENTIRE internet) is when photos/ articles of sick and dying children pop up and I’m told that if I don’t repost or like it than I’m a terrible person. Yesterday I was happily scrolling through ads for Wayfair.com and Oil of Olay and I came across a picture of a girl about Lucy’s age with a giant tumor in her chest and under it is large letters were “IF YOU SCROLL PAST THIS YOU ARE HEARTLESS”. OMG – Facebook? Why? First of all, I can’t possibly read articles about sick children, I don’t think any Mother can. Things like this ruin my entire day – just seeing headlines of things like this ruin my whole day.

So here’s the deal Facebook – I can’t save every starving animal, I can’t cure all of the sick children out there. Not sharing all of these stories, doesn’t make me heartless it makes me aware that my friends also don’t want to feel your passive aggressive guilt trip. We ALL know that terrible things are happening in the world, but there are terrible things happening in our own lives and our own communities and I think we all try very hard to help solve the problems we can and help the people we know, but to make us feel bad about things we can’t help makes you heartless not me and not my friends.

Despite all of this I still log in about 14,867 times a day (don’t judge me, I don’t have a job) its my link to the world outside my living room. If only I had enough technical skills to create some kind of anti-facebook where there would be rules about this sort of thing.

Rant over.

Now Seems Like a Perfect Time to Have Mid-Life Crises

Random stuff, Uncategorized

I’ve been unemployed for six days now  and I’ve spent the majority of those days wondering aimlessly through out my house doing laundry and taking antibiotics to get rid of the massive sinus infection that I have. (Try not to be jealous my life is GLAMOROUS).

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I want to do, but every time I broach that subject my brain kinda shuts down a little, like it changes the station and there’s nothing but static up there, I keep asking it questions and all I get is some kind of emergency feed back loop.

Yesterday I had a job interview. Today I can’t seem to do anything more than play Words With Friends and doodle. I’m wondering if this is a downward trajectory where 4 days from now I’m laying in the fetal position, drinking gin through a straw on the floor of my shower or if it’s some kind of yo-yo and tomorrow I’ll actually fold the laundry and type up a list of references.

I kind of hope its the later but the former does take a lot of pressure off me to accomplish anything, just once I would like someone to utter the words, “Becca… she insisted on getting out of bed today.”

Stay tuned.

 

Update from the Couchside  

Random stuff

The upside of being unemployed:

  • Acme at 8:00 on Tuesday morning is a beautiful place, only old people and stock boys. You can be in and out in 20 minutes without once ever waiting in line.
  • Unlimited internet trolling time
  • No need to wear anything but yoga pants
  • 3:00 Happy hour
  • Relaxed grooming requirements

 

The downside of being unemployed:

  • No one is around to stop you from making an entire batch of blueberry pancakes and then eating them all yourself while you watch an uninterrupted stream of house hunter episodes on HGTV.
  • Unlimited internet trolling time
  • Trying to figure out how to reprogram the digital thermostat so that it’s not 55 degrees in the house during the day.
  • No good reason not to take every single facebook quiz that pops up on your feed.

What’s that sound? Oh, The cookie crumbling…

Life Lessons

So… I lost my job on Friday. Well maybe not lost – I know where it is, it’s just not mine anymore. This is the second time I’ve been laid off and I have to tell you it doesn’t do anything good for one’s self esteem. But I get it, really I do, I might not be a CPA but even I know if you have more debits than you have credits than you are in the red and it’s hard to pay people when you’re in the red.

To answer all of your burning questions regarding this situation here’s a mock interview I just conducted with myself:

Interviewer: So you just lost your job, how do you feel?

Me: Meh, I think working is over rated. Sure it gives you money to buy thigs like food and wine and stuff but as a concept working is total bullshit.

Interviewer: What are you plans now?

Me: Well, without the daily pressure of going to a job I’ll probably just hang out – you know, do things I’ve been meaning to do like wash the inside of the refrigerator – those glass shelves get really dirty!

Interviewer: Do you have a long term plan?

Me: I don’t understand that last question.

Interviewer (getting frustrated): Let’s switch topics do you have anything that you would like to say to the people/person that laid you off.

Me: Oh yes – I do! So glad you asked this question. I have three pieces of advice for woman the who just canned me – 1.) Next time if you know you are going to let someone go don’t harass them to complete their yearly self-evaluation form that you know you are never going to read. 2.) If the person you are letting go takes the train home try and coordinate the firing with their train schedule, otherwise that poor person is just sitting underground for over an hour trying to text all of her friends with a really weak cell phone signal. And finally don’t try to hug that person as they are leaving the office, no one wants your hugs.

Interviewer: Anything else to add?

Me: Nope that about sums it up.

Interviewer:  Can we get serious about where you want to go from here?

Me: Well, it’s 5:30 am Sunday morning, where do I want to from here? Mostly I’m going to head to the kitchen and heat up some of yesterday’s coffee.

Interviewer: You are very exasperating.

Me: Is that a question?

Interviewer: Can you share with me one of your goals now that you have all of his free time.

Me: I can share one with you. Are you asking me if I will share one with you? Sorry, honestly I don’t know why I’m being so hostile you seem like a very nice person. But truthfully I don’t know, I think that spending more time with my child and husband is certainly a goal – but at some point that’s going to get old for all of us. So I’ll probably have to like get a job or something.

Interviewer: What kind of job do you see yourself getting?

Me: I don’t really know – I seem to be pretty good at this interviewing thing. Maybe I can just pretend to interview people from around the world and write a book about it. You know something like “fake interviews about real things”

Interviewer: Huh. I’m not really sure what to say.

Me: Say you’ll buy a copy.

…

The interview really went downhill from there.

As usual I have no good way to end this post. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’ll be around if anyone needs a reliable daytime drinking buddy.

I Really Hope I’m Not the Only One

Deep Thoughts, Life Lessons, Random stuff

This week I am learning all about depreciation schedules and vacation accruals and so many accounting things that make me want to run my hands through my hair and put my head down on my desk. I don’t think there’s anything that makes you feel more adult than trying to manage an audit (Maybe performing surgery, I imagine doctors feel very adult all the time, but as anyone who has seen me handle a butter knife before knows I was never cut out to be a doctor) Also, I’m not really good at adulting either (about as good as I am with knives). I have a tenuous grasp (at best) on what I’m supposed to know as it relates to my professional career. And as a Mom I just fake that I know what I’m doing and stay grateful that Lucy is still too young to have caught on.

I am a giant faker, but I don’t think this comes as much of a surprise to those close to me. I don’t think anyone has ever uttered the words “Let’s go ask Becca, she really has her shit together.” And you know what, I am totally okay with that. There are people that are expected to know things and be in charge and then there are those of us whose parents are just glad that our decisions in our early 20’s didn’t land us in some sex trafficking fiasco.

Sometimes I get home from work at night so bewildered by what is going on that I have trouble processing Lucy’s Kindergarten homework, “if you have three friends on the playground and two more show up how many friends do you have to play with” whoa, back up a minute how did you get to the playground?

This makes me wonder how many of us just wonder around all day, going through the motions of adulting hoping that no one calls on us to explain the reasoning for what we are doing. In my dealings with humanity in general, I imagine that this is most of us – glassy eyed, questioning how we got so far in life without falling down a well or accidently ingesting something that poisons us.

It makes me a little sad that our civilization has evolved in to a place where most of us are too scared, anxious or reticent to be the silly, light hearted, playful people really want to be, at least until we get home at night and change into our sweat pants and allow the real us to come out.

Maybe instead of adding rules to the handbook of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles we should use our collective efforts to build some kind of giant adult size bouncy house where we can spend our days having fun and connecting with each other the right way.

We only live once people, go forth and build that bouncy house.