Stan Has Issues™

Job Shit Archives

June 28, 2009

Comedy Bronze

Hey, remember The Webmaster? Good, because I…basically forgot about him. Per that last entry, we left off with me deciding I’d wait a week before asking him to remove all my content, plus my login/password, and then I’d post them all here. That was on May 2nd, and I haven’t posted any of that stuff here. Why? I…basically forgot. That, I guess, illustrates how much that crappy film-review site means to me in the here and now.

Thankfully, my friend Mark decided to jog my memory by e-mailing me a Craigslist posting featuring the following hi-larious “job posting,” written by The Webmaster:

[Website name redacted] is looking for interns to review films and TV shows on DVD then write reviews. There also exists opportunities to attend press screenings and perform interviews with filmmakers and celebrities via telephone or one-on-one.
This is part-time work which typically only takes up roughly three to four hours of your time per project.
This is a non-paying internship.
Anyone who tells you they can make money off the web is either lying to you or does not understand how the web works. Only a handful of sites make any real money. We have been in business online for 13 years and have yet to make a profit. We do this because we love what we do, and you should, too.
If you’re interested, send writing sample and level of interest. Be honest; if you cannot meet deadlines then you probably should not try this - deadlines are a part of any writing job.

Bitter? Nah…

Mark sent me the posting because it gave him a good laugh, and he thought it’d do the same for me. It did, but it also reminded me that I had yet to write The Webmaster back and make my demands. In fact, The Webmaster sent me one final (apparently) e-mail on May 27th that I ignored, then forgot about. It’s similar in tone to the previous e-mails, but it sort of maintains the passive-aggressive pseudo-guilt trip while heightening the defensiveness. Check it:

To: Stan From: The Webmaster Subject: [Blank]
Hey, Stan,

Just checking in to see what’s up. That last email from you was really a surprise and honestly out of left field. I had not heard from you in some months then tried reaching you for several months and was wondering what happened to you and was a little bit concerned. I apologize for calling the old phone number I found on some class papers from that class, but you weren’t answering emails or your phone messages. In all fairness, how am I to know who you want me to call or not call if you don’t tell me before hand? Seems a little unreasonable. And you seemed more upset at me than it just being about that. If you’ve been upset at having agreed to do the work on the site but did not share that with me, then how am I to know what you’re thinking or how you’re feeling.

I appreciate all you’ve done. It’s a huge improvement. But to suddenly disappear and then respond with such negativity really surprised me, because you hadn’t voiced anything about being upset before. I’m sorry if you resent me or what you’ve done, but I did not cause it. You volunteered to do this because you were interested in doing something with your time. I did not coerce or force you to do any of this.

I’m open to discussing any of this.

All the best,
The Webmaster

If you go back and read the post I linked above, you’ll note that most of the first paragraph is a heady combo of bullshit and revising history. If you change “several months” to “several days,” it’s a little more believable, but then, I think, it makes my reaction a little less “unreasonable” and “out of left field.”

However, “in all fairness,” he does make a semi-decent point in the second paragraph. I did volunteer because I was interested in doing something with my time. Now, as I explained to him in my last correspondence, I am working two jobs that pay actual money. Why would I continue to make something that I’ve always been aware has never paid and will never paid a high priority?

As I’ve said, I never ignored him — in fact, with the exception of the Twitter debacle, I handled most of his requests pretty quickly, because they were mostly easy tweaks. But I did stop volunteering to review things, and I did stop writing my column. I could blame it on my increasing wrist pain, but the honest truth is that I grew disillusioned with it. I’d worked on it for over a year without hearing any feedback from anyone except Mark and my mom, so I felt safe in assuming nobody was reading. This was reenforced by the total lack of reaction when I stopped working on it, unannounced. Not even The Webmaster noticed this until about three months after I’d stopped.

Admittedly, this was irresponsible, but I did intend to get back to writing it. It turned into a low priority, but it didn’t cross my mind that I’d never write another column until I had to see a doctor about my wrist, couldn’t type for a month, and then had to deal with a massive influx of scripts throughout April and May, during which time all sorts of shit went down with The Webmaster. But even if I were still writing for the site, I would have looked at the ~18 columns I’d need to power through in order to catch up and said, “Fuck it. It’s over.” At which time I would have likely e-mailed The Webmaster to tell him someone else can take over the column for me, or we can just archive it. And if that doesn’t sound like professional behavior, you’re right, it’s not. But it’s amazing how professional I can be when somebody’s handing me a paycheck.

Anyway, while The Webmaster did not “coerce” or “force” anything upon me, he did — as I pointed out previously — make certain promises that convinced me to participate in something I would have otherwise turned down, like that he’d use his elaborate network of contacts to help me find a decent, well-paying writing job. He also sort of misrepresented the site, leading me to assume it was a semi-professional endeavor. It was not, at all. I’m still wondering how he got so many actual PR firms to send real press packets and screeners to himself and his staff. The only conclusion I can draw is that it’s really, really easy to make a shammy film-review website legitimate in the eyes of soulless publicists.

Point being, he can deny responsibility all he wants, and at the end of the day, he’s not responsible. I found out pretty quickly that I’d been handed a lemon, and I stupidly wasted a couple of years trying to turn it into lemonade. So yeah, that’s my bad. Now I’m making up for it. Still, I think I have the right to resent someone, at least a little bit, who more than once made promises involving big fat dollar signs that actually amounted to big fat steaming turds.

So I had my laugh, but then I realized I should shit or get off the pot in terms of getting all my old articles. I was very angry when I wrote my last post, and I wanted to be pseudo-confrontational in demanding he remove them, but it’s been nearly two months. I’m still pissed, but I’ve regained enough of my trademark cold, calculated rationality to realize that a mini-confrontation like that just isn’t worth it. I figured I’d just go to the site, load up my writer page, and copy/paste all the text.

I figured wrong.

The reviews? They were fine. I actually grabbed the HTML source so it’d retain all the formatting, so that was cool. But the column? They showed nothing but blank HTML files…

Why? Well, it goes back to one of the ways I had to design around the CMS. Like most CMSes, it allows for multiple categories. However, it doesn’t strictly allow for different templates for each category. I developed a workaround, using a plugin that tells the system to use X template for Y category and sticking that code into the basic template. My column had its own category, but I discovered as I clicked back to the main page that The Webmaster had replaced my column with another…

I looked at the new version of my column — which, as of my discovery last night had no posts — with horror and disgust. It’s not that The Webmaster’s new web monkey — don’t think for a second I believed The Webmaster decided to take an interest in HTML or graphic design — did anything offensive to the web design; in fact, it displayed a test page that looked exactly the same as my design, with two key differences. First, it had none of my columns, instead listing test posts. Second, the new web monkey had altered my header image.

Look, I don’t have a background in web or graphic design, either. I redesigned the film-review site largely by the seat of my pants, rolling the site’s old, ugly layout into a new, more aesthetically pleasing package. The only real creative input I had was in differentiating what I considered different “main sections.” Each of these sections — reviews, interviews/features, and TV — had different color schemes to separate them aesthetically. For another holdover from the old design, the image of a film reel shoved into one corner of the web page, I added an image of a TV screen to differentiate the TV stuff from the film stuff. It’s pretty elementary.

So the header images were pretty simple: either a film reel or a TV set in the corner, the name of the section in big block letters, and the section’s color scheme highlighted in the background. I had always intended to send the Photoshop files with the templates for each header to The Webmaster, in case he ever needed to change them. Some of them — including the one for my column — specifically mention the writer’s name or mention a particular sort of mission statement for the section that may end up changing. However, The Webmaster never took much of an interest in the redesign, so I never took the time to send him those files.

As a result, I guess theoretically one could argue the new web monkey did the best he could. He took a portion of the original header image that did not contain any text, enlarged it to cover the full area of the header, and added new text describing the new version of the column. The new typeface doesn’t match the one I used for graphics — Futura, one of the most well-known and easy-to-get fonts in the history of time — and the web monkey made the mistake of also keeping the non-enlarged TV in the corner. The result? A jarring, somewhat comical change in color and background-pattern sizes, with no attempt to feather it or anything else to make it look the tiniest bit professional.

You know what I would’ve done if I had to come in and clean up after somebody else’s design? I’d just find new graphics and start from scratch, to give the overall site coherence. But hey, maybe I’m just anal. And for those of you thinking that’s a lot of work to change one aspect of the site, you’re wrong: it’s nothing more than one background pattern in three different hues, with different text for each section and a different “icon” in the corner. I used one .psd file for the entire thing, simply hiding and unhiding layers to create the appropriate combinations. Like I said, I have no background in graphic design, I barely have an idea of what I’m doing, yet to me this is just common sense.

What could I do, after discovering I could no longer access the text of my columns because (a) I lacked access to the backend, and (b) this new/horrible design for a new/horrible TV column had decimated my column’s HTML files? For all The Webmaster’s goofy paranoia in stripping me of said backend access, he’s made no effort to change any of the passwords for FTP access or the MySQL database (it’s entirely likely he doesn’t even know what the latter is). He also never deleted my CMS account. I guess he realized doing so would permanently erase all of my reviews, as well, so he merely unchecked every available preference to lock me out. Funny thing about that, though: the MySQL database stores all the username preferences, which one can easily toggle by replacing a “0” (no permission) with a “1” (permission!).

With my “superuser” access restored, I logged in to the database and saved every one of my columns into one large text file. I took a few moments to snoop around and confirmed my suspicion that he’d brought in another web monkey: the activity log was flooded with this user deleting templates, creating templates, creating test posts, altering templates, etc., etc. I snooped around to look at the other new templates, but I only found one — a test template for a new version of the index page, which retains my design but adds horrible/unnecessary ClipArt to each of the sections. Again, it doesn’t fit with the aesthetic at all, and… Seriously? ClipArt? This shit is so generic, it might actually have been taken from MS Office’s stockpile of ClipArt. Or maybe a free GIF site. To each his own, I guess, but it’s fucking ugly.

At first, it pissed me off: some douchenozzle is soiling my design. My mind combines three unfortunate personality traits: intense anger manifested through elaborate pranks concocted with the maturity and wit of a 12-year-old pothead. I had the following thought, and even though I’ve tried to push past it, committing to this prank is so fucking tempting: rather than allowing them to sully my design, I should rewrite all the templates to reflect The Webmaster’s old, rickety, crap design. Fine, keep the CMS backend. Who cares? But all my graphics and spiffy Web 2.0-ification can go. He can return to his GIFs and his GoLive default templates, and the new web monkey can try to concoct his own redesign.

The only thing holding me back — other than the vague, nagging realization that it’s not worth my time (not just the time required for redoing the design, but the time required dealing with the fallout) — is that this isn’t really my design. The Webmaster was very hesitant about the prospect of a redesign, so I didn’t do much more than make his version of the site look a little spiffier. Once he’d dipped his toe in the water, I’d start springing more advanced features like horizontal menus, non-Verdana fonts, and redundancy elimination. Of course, we never got to that point. I didn’t even last six months after launching the redesign.

Let’s talk about the redundancy, though, because it’ll become important in a minute…

I’ve always felt the site suffered because of The Webmaster’s odd choice to repeat information all over the site. Right off the bat, we have two main pages: index.html and main.html. The index is the first thing you see, and there’s a link to the main from there. Although they have different layouts, both pages contain pretty much the same information, listing the latest reviews. There’s an archive page that also lists every review on the site — this, at least, is necessary because the reviews fall off the main pages once they get too old. But because the archives page — as mandated by The Webmaster — is divided into full lists of each category, is it really necessary to include separate archive pages of these categories? (To make that clearer: you have an “Interviews” portion of the archives page, and then a separate archive page listing just the interviews. Necessary?)

Well, I discovered this morning — now that the reinvention of my old column has officially “launched” — that The Webmaster has mandated still more redundancy: they have a TV section that lists all TV reviews — except my former column. Now they have the new version of my column, which…lists all TV reviews. They’ve also added new sections for “theatrical releases” and “DVD releases,” despite the fact that these categories already exist. You might ask why, but merely asking yourself that question means you’ve officially put more thought into the website than The Webmaster has.

Does this rambling collection of thoughts have a moral, or any kind of point? If it’s not “never do free work for people,” it’s this: people aren’t worth it. I’m an angry and spiteful kind of guy, but I’ve reached a point of spiritual awareness where I can — for the most part — avoid making horrible snap decisions as a result of anger. When I calm down, I always realize that it’s not worth the time, energy, and/or expense. I could completely decimate The Webmaster’s site — do much worse damage than merely rewriting templates to give the site that vintage 1999 look it had when I started writing for it (in 2006) — but life’s too short.

I guess where I’m at is: will The Webmaster learn a lesson? He’s already justified his side of things to such a degree that, in his mind, he bears no responsibility. Although, if you parse those e-mails again, it’s clear to me that most of his defensiveness comes from guilt. Despite that, he’s justifying and spinning so he doesn’t have to consider that maybe he doesn’t know how to run a website or a business or interact with other humans respectfully. If I fuck with him, it’ll only reenforce his conclusions and wash away what little guilt he feels. Other than briefly amusing me, how will that help? He’s not worth it.

Oh, and here’s the happy-ending postscript: since I had to hack the database and log back in anyway, I just quietly deleted all my old posts myself, without interacting with The Webmaster at all. No muss, no fuss.

Posted by Stan on June 28, 2009 10:53 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (0)

May 2, 2009

Communication Problems

Here’s the deal: this is the first free time I’ve had since my last post. Now, I had some free time prior to that post, but not much. The combination of work and my own writing led me to abandon you, lovely readers, and then, approximately 30 seconds after I published the last post, a deluge of horrible scripts forced me to work, on average, 850 hours over the past 10 days. I have not had time to do anything that I enjoy. Okay, technically I enjoy scripts, but only when they’re good, and of the 738,243 scripts I’ve read this year, four of them have been good, and one of those was not a script I read for work.

In other words, over the past 10 days I’ve been busy exclusively with work, but over the past few months, I’ve divided my time between an increasingly busy work schedule and writing projects that I hope, someday, will lead to me getting paid. That’s the key part of the story I’m about to tell: I need money, and I’m sick of doing shit for free. You guys are lucky I need to vent, or I would have abandoned this blog two years ago.

First, you need the background. Occasionally I’ve bitched and moaned about “working” for a guy I call The Webmaster. I don’t think I’ve ever gone fully into the absurd history of our “working” relationship, but it’s required for this rant. In fact, much of this rant will work better if I write it in a vague, chronological order to separate it into bite-sized chunks.

January 2004

The Webmaster started out as my college professor. I took an awful class with him in the spring of 2004. He had zero control over the class and had a thinly veiled contempt for the subject matter, but he was a reasonably nice guy. More importantly, he bragged about this film-review website he had created that “really took off.” Many of us took him at his word and saw this site as a brass ring to cling to, tailoring papers to impress him in the hopes that he’d ask us to write for it. Ironically, none of is ever really looked much at the site. If we had, it would have spared us all a great deal of embarrassment and wasted time.

July 2005

While browsing Craigslist for jobs, I saw a posting from this film-review website, looking for a “web guru” who might contribute to the site in addition to helping him handle the backend. I e-mailed The Webmaster personally — again thinking this was a semi-legit pursuit, I wanted to use what little traction I had to guarantee the job — and he laid it all out: in addition to what was written in the ad, he would also require me to spend a great deal of time cold-calling to get banner-ad sponsorship. Also, the job didn’t pay anything. Like so many jobs appealing to college students and fresh graduates, this paid in “experience.”

I told him I’d be willing to go along with the job, but I’d still be pursuing a real job and, once I did, I would not have the time to devote to his site and not get paid. The tone of his response changed suddenly: he had no interest in an arrangement like this and figured we should just consider me the wrong man for the job. Ouch.

October 2006

After not hearing for him in over a year, I received a surprise e-mail from The Webmaster, saying his “web guru” had “moved on” and asking if I still had any interest. To sweeten the deal, he made the job seem extremely relaxed — no cold-calling or corralling writers. I would only have three responsibilities: edit and post articles by a contributor with a weekly direct-to-DVD horror column, take over for him for a few weeks per year in editing the full site when he vacationed, and — if I wanted to — sign up to write reviews of my own. As it was the year before, I would not get paid, but it wouldn’t take nearly as much of my time/effort, it wouldn’t require me to be a salesman, and it would offer a semi-legitimate place to gain some exposure as a critic. Oh, also, The Webmaster promised he would use his extensive contacts in the film industry and Chicago’s extensive advertising industry to get me a decent job.

I accepted the position.

March 2007

At my urging, my friend Mark started reviewing for the site. Since he saw movies on a weekly basis and usually sent me condensed reviews anyway, he, too, figured it would be a nice place for exposure with a minimal time commitment.

Once Mark started writing for the site, he immediately started me on the disillusionment train by confirming much of what I’d thought since joining the site: the reviewers, largely college students, were almost exclusively horrible, the site’s design was pathetic and outdated, and he suspected it didn’t have nearly the wide readership that The Webmaster claimed. His meager yet plausible evidence: when was the last time anyone quoted one of this site’s reviews on a poster or a news story? It was not exactly Ain’t It Cool News, a site neither of us liked but grudgingly admitted had a legitimate media presence. What did we have? College students and five different reviews of the same big summer blockbusters that all said the same basic thing.

This disillusionment continued to grow through the rest of the year, as did my dissatisfaction with “working” for nothing. All of it was intensified by suffering in a dead-end job without The Webmaster coming through on his insistence that he’d help me find a job. Instead, he merely forwarded CareerBuilder results for jobs that were mostly spam. (No joke: you try searching for jobs in advertising, and it’s almost wall-to-wall temp concert-promotion street team bullshit or pyramid schemes.)

September 2007

The Webmaster pitched a concept to me: lots more work, but possibly some payment at the end of the tunnel. He wanted to create a YouTube competitor that would allow independent filmmakers to showcase their shorts. A good concept, except for the part where he wanted to charge people $30 to upload and $10/month to keep the film on the site. When I casually pointed out that YouTube is both free and extraordinarily popular, so how did he plan to unseat them with a startup he couldn’t afford to promote that would cost them money?

He had no answer, so I decided to divert his focus to the actual film-review site. I made him see it needed a massive design overhaul to bring it into the 21st century, and I was the man for the job. Further, I demanded the opportunity to write a weekly television column to enhance my exposure on the site. In the meantime, he could come up with a sound business plan for his video site, and I’d gladly work on it if he could afford me some guarantee that, at the end of my hard work, I’d see some money.

I’m sure it will shock nobody to discover he never mentioned this video website idea again.

January 2008

I quit my dead-end job, so I didn’t even have a dead end to hurl toward. I had nothing. With few job prospects, I decided to concentrate full-bore on redesigning the website. Using a CMS engine, I came up with design templates and began to frantically import articles. The site had existed since 1999, so at the time I started importing, there were nearly 3000 articles to post.

March 2008

I got a script-reading job, which started to eat up time but not enough to keep me from continuing to import articles. It did slow me down quite a bit, however.

September 2008

Fed up with what he considered a sinking ship — the quality of the writing had gotten worse as some longtime writers left and were replaced with horribly incompetent students — Mark “quit” writing for the site. We both felt pretty much the same: where we once optimistically believed our reviews would rise to the cream of the crop and garner attention, we realized not enough people looked at the site to take notice. I decided to stick with it in the hopes that the redesign would help me luck into some kind of web-design job. This was very hopeful, since any prospective job would have to ignore the fact that I have no idea what I’m doing.

October 2008

Although I hadn’t yet finished importing articles, I felt I had enough posted for us to launch the new design, with a rough goal of December 31st to finish the remaining articles.

December 31st, 2008

Work, then life, caught up with me, and I didn’t come close to meeting the deadline. Fortunately, The Webmaster had already forgotten I had more to import.

January 2009

Priorities continued to shift to endeavors that paid in actual money. Despite sending lengthy, detailed, step-by-step instructions to keep the new, CMS-driven site neat and tidy, The Webmaster ignored them, making a mess of my painstakingly created templates. When I had the time, I’d clean up after him.

February 2009

By February, the combination of script reading, writing, and importing articles had taken such a toll on my injured wrist that I had no choice but to see a doctor. The doctor shot me up full of cortisone, and I spent most of the next six weeks unable to type at all. Fortunately, the economy had taken such a toll on everything that I had no scripts to read from around mid-January to mid-March.

In Mid-February, I decided to bail on the site, but I decided I’d wait until the end of March, which would mark six months from the relaunch, more than enough time to let The Webmaster sink or swim on his own.

Now, we get into the nitty gritty…

March 12th

The Webmaster took on a new writer who pitched to him absolutely the worst concept I’ve ever heard: a Twitter site that creates digest-sized reviews of movies…for some reason. This writer wanted to spearhead the site himself, somehow thinking he’d make money off it, of which our film-review website would receive 25%. The Webmaster e-mailed me, asking me to add a link on our website.

Oh yeah, I guess I should mention something in case you didn’t read my other Webmaster posts: although he’s run a website since 1999, he doesn’t know a goddamn thing about web design. I’m no genius, but I cut my teeth in the halcyon days of Netscape 2.0, when SimpleText was the best web editor out there. I still need a lot of reference material to help (fortunately, there’s stuff all over the Internet to provide that), but I hand-coded the entire redesigned site, from scratch. The Webmaster can’t even create a simple HTML link himself. I’m not saying this to brag about myself or denigrate him. Okay, I sort of am, but mainly I’m trying to explain why he’d come to me for such a simple task.

Because I’d grown so wary of the site, I’d developed a “correspondence” strategy that was simple yet effective: The Webmaster would e-mail with some sort of problem, and in lieu of a direct response, I’d simply fix the problem, letting the work be the answer.

Things were different this time, though. Allow me to go on a sub-rant to explain why:

Ever since Twitter became a phenomenon around, I dunno, a year or so ago, I wondered why. Maybe keeping a blog makes me a dinosaur, but I have no tolerance for such meaningless communication. I enjoy long-form prose, and I know that’s just my opinion, but my opinion is right, goddammit. What information can one glean in 140 characters? I’ve seen enough Twitter pages to know that I don’t care about most of the content. If it’s not a generic, commentary-/context-free link, it’s a mundane statement of action or purpose. I don’t want to know that you’re going to the grocery store — I want to know why. What are you buying, what’s the shopping experience like, what the fuck is wrong with every shopper who’s not you?

Short-form film reviews adds insult to injury. It’s bad enough when people obnoxiously criticize people like Roger Ebert for giving X movie Y star rating. The context of the rating is in the review. A 140-character “review” can do little more than state an opinion. Opinions barely mean shit as it is; in order for them to have any validity, they require something resembling support. Even if people disagree, they can understand why you drew the conclusions that formed the opinion. It’s pretty basic.

So when The Webmaster e-mailed me, I conveniently ignored me, assuming he’d forget about it. (He has before.) A few days later, I got over myself and added the link, exactly where The Webmaster told me to: replacing the sidebar link to the now-defunct blog. Per usual, I didn’t e-mail to tell him. I figured he’d just see it when he loaded the site.

March 28th

The Webmaster e-mailed again. Ugh, all I can do is quote it and parse the obnoxiousness. Summarizing it does not do it justice:

To: Stan
From: The Webmaster
Subject: Where’s Stan? What’s up, yo?
Hey, Stan,

I need to add a link to a new [film-review site name] Twitter site but my meager attempts have failed and now I don’t know where Stan is! Egah!

This makes a number of irritating and unfortunate presumptions:

That I have no reason to be pissed off after what amounts to wasting two and a half years on something that has gotten me nothing. Although I put most of the blame on myself for sticking with it and trying to make something out of it, that whole “I’ll find you a decent job doing something at least remotely related to what you love!” lie really stuck in my craw.

That I’ll continue to have a sense of humor about his ineptitude, when his ineptitude is the only reason I’m still shackled to the site. (I feel small pangs of guilt for saddling him with a design that he’ll never, ever be able to change unless he gets help elsewhere.)

That I’ll believe he made any attempt to make a link himself.

That he’s expended any effort to contact me other than this one e-mail, right now.

So yeah, I’m pissed, and my skin has thinned to the point that I don’t find playful e-mails like this amusing, especially when the subtext is, “I’m a fucking retard. Drop everything and do this for me.” He doesn’t want to learn. He just wants it done. I’d honestly rather him be a dick than cutesy.

The tone of the e-mail bugged me, so I ignored him again.

I also decided to delay my “notice” e-mail. I didn’t want him to think I was quitting over Twitter, or a minor responsibility to updater the site, or whatever. I wanted to let time pass where he didn’t bug me at all, then quietly send him an e-mail.

April 1st

The Webmaster sent me a text message, asking first if he had the right cell phone number and then how I’d been doing, since he hadn’t heard from me at all. This annoyed me for three reasons:

I don’t have texting built into my plan because I don’t use it (it’s as retarded as Twittering, to me), so one text costs me 20 cents.

I don’t have him programmed in my address book, so when I saw the local but unfamiliar number from what I assumed was an old friend, I got a little excited. I received the text message while driving, so I had 15 wonderful minutes of anticipation before Googling the number and finding it attached to The Webmaster’s personal site. I know that’s not his fault, but it still pissed me off.

It had only been four days since his e-mail.

April 2nd

The Webmaster sent another e-mail, forwarding a press release advertising new seasons of Law & Order: Criminal Intent and In Plain Sight for my TV column. The TV column I hadn’t updated since January, which he apparently just noticed, but even then, he may not have noticed at all. After all, he didn’t notice that I’ve never, ever, ever covered either of those shows in the 16-month history of the column. His personal message at the top of the forward said, “In case you’re still around?”

I don’t know why, but this e-mail annoyed me, too, and I put off my response yet again, because he was pissing me off.

April 3rd

I finally gave in and responded, saying I’ve been busy and I’d add a link if he tells me where and what website.

April 7th

The Webmaster wrote back, telling me the link is for the Twitter site and that he wants it to replace the blog link on the masthead.

Note the same amount of time elapsed between his March 28th e-mail and his April 1st text message, yet he thinks nothing of it. Hell, I think nothing of it except for the part where he started getting all needy and weird in his efforts to seek me out.

The sidebar and the masthead are two different things. In the earlier e-mail, he never specified the masthead, so I only changed the link on the sidebar. Know why? THERE HASN’T BEEN A MASTHEAD LINK TO THE BLOG SINCE THE FUCKING SITE RELAUNCHED SIX MONTHS AGO!!!

Despite it pissing me off, I decided to placate him by swapping another redundant link in the masthead for the Twitter site. Per usual, I “replied” by doing the work. I figured this would be enough, he’d leave me alone, and I could give it a couple of weeks, e-mail that I was quitting, and be done with it.

April 14th

The Webmaster called my cell phone, leaving a wounded puppy-dog message asking—in a seemingly shocked manner—if he’d managed to upset or offend me in any way.

When I got home, I discovered an e-mail timestamped an hour after his call, with a snippy, passive-aggressive note to me, followed by a lengthy reply history. He was actually CC’ing me and primarily e-mailing a sponsored who had queried him on April 1st about trading links. The Webmaster’s response whined that he doesn’t know how to make links, and his “web guru” is “unavailable,” so his hands are tied.

Keep in mind: HE DIDN’T CC ME ON ANY OF THIS UNTIL APRIL 14TH. If he’d CC’ed me on the first response, it would’ve been done already.

April 16th

The Webmaster did all of the following:

Called me around 1:15. Didn’t leave a message.

Sent an e-mail around 2, CC’ing another writer, forwarding the opportunity to interview the star of In Plain Sight, along with a note asking the other writer if she’d heard anything from me in awhile. (This made me laugh because this particular writer is someone I can’t stand on either a personal or professional level. The fact that he thinks I’d ever associate with her for any reason is one reason I’m so pissed off at him.)
Called me around 6:45, from a different phone number (I assume his home number).

Called my parents’ home phone — a number I didn’t give him.

E-mailed Mark and possibly others, wondering what happened to me.

More than anything, it was the “bring other people into it” aspect that bugged the hell out of me. Asking around is presumptuous, whether I’m friends with the people or not. It’s even worse to call an unlisted phone number that I am certain he gained access to by unethically snooping through my college records. He later told me he dug out a phone sheet from our class five years ago, but I parsed the wording and decided he’s full of shit. I can’t recall giving my parents’ home phone number to anyone, for any reason, since maybe 2001. I never had reason to, because a cell phone is always better for reaching me. If — and this is a pretty big if — I put down that number on a phone sheet, I would have also put down my cell phone number. Except my cell phone number in 2004 is different from the one I have now.

So when The Webmaster writes things like “the phone sheet had a number I didn’t recognize, so I tried calling it” — bullshit! It either had two numbers, or it had my old cell phone number.

Here’s the other thing: look at the dates. Less than two weeks had passed between me e-mailing him and him going nuts and trying 500 different methods to contact me. If you want to consider my adding the Twitter link a “response,” then it had really been nine days since he’d “heard from” me. So what the fuck?

April 17th

I sent a polite but stern e-mail, explaining I’m working two jobs (true) and have almost no time to myself (almost true), but that I did the things he’s asking (true), so why is he sending out a stalker search party (yeah, why?)? Then I raked him over the coals for calling my parents’ home phone number, implying that a call from him both confused and concerned them, as they were worried about me (not true).

An hour later, he responded, apologizing all over himself and announcing that he’d be “on set” all weekend but urging me to call him so we can touch base. By the way, he was “on set” working on student shorts. Look, when I was in college, I tried to make myself sound all important by saying things like that on my student shoots. The difference? I was 20, not 50.

Confusingly, he sent another response 20 minutes later. It was a similar response but not exactly the same — the tone was less apologetic and more rigid. I sort of thought it was funny, but then I was a little pissed. Like I was privy to his emotional state: at first wounded and apologetic, then obnoxious and defensive.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t call him. Not only did I not have time, what the fuck is up with him trying to act like he’s deeply concerned and wants to know what’s going on with me, but only if I squeeze it into his busy schedule?

April 26th

The Webmaster sent a follow-up response I can only describe as “bitchy”:

To: Stan
From: The Webmaster
Subject: Stan
Stan,

You vented quite nicely here. But I had no idea what was going on with you since you did not tell me what was going on with you. I have no idea what I did to upset you other than to be concerned enough to try calling an old phone number I had to dig through class archives to find.

Are you through with us? It would be great to actually know and not have to guess.

Thank you.

Love the passive-aggressive tone and the attempt at a guilt trip because I got offended by his “concern.” Look, what can I say? I know I haven’t been communicative, but it’s not because I feel like I don’t need to explain myself (after dealing with him for this long, I have absolutely no delusions that he really doesn’t understand why I’d be pissed) — it’s because I don’t feel like there’s anything to explain. For six months, he’d send me e-mails with problems, I’d fix/change them. He never made frantic, desperate attempts to contact my friends or call random, possibly disconnected numbers in search of me.

And, really, what am I getting from him or his site? Not a goddamn thing. Does he really think acting like a prick over e-mail will encourage me to open up and explain my annoyance and disappointment with the whole experience?

Instead, taking the tack once again that actions speak louder than words, over the next few days I took what little free time I had — very little — and dedicated it to finally finishing the article import. Then, I thought, when things slowed down, I’d take more significant time and clean up the messes The Webmaster had made over the past few months. Finally, I’d give my notice leaving the site as good as I can possibly make it look, and I’d have fulfilled my promise to complete the redesign — simply making the designs isn’t enough.

Cut to: this morning.

May 2nd

I thought I had a lull in my weekend reading, so I loaded up the CMS to start importing and discovered…

The Webmaster stripped me of my access privileges. Not only did I not have administrative access — I had no access. To anything.

Now, look, I know I didn’t respond to the April 26th e-mail, and I know I should have changed my “ignore him and he’ll go away” policy before he went nuts. I know that now. I didn’t know it a month ago. But, really… Less than a week later, and he’s already thrown in the towel and removed my privileges, instead of waiting in good faith for a response?

Per usual, the question is: does expect that acting like a dick will make me stand by his side? He’s not paying me, he didn’t live up to his end up the meager bargain. If I were in his position, I’d kill everyone with kindness if they had even a small amount of talent. His dickishness caused Mark to leave. I’m sure it also caused plenty of other good writers to leave. What he’s left with are the dregs.

And that’s fine. I tried to help, even after he got creepy and needy and stalkerish, but now I’m done — forced to be. And I’m fucking pissed. However, while I am pissed enough to vent on this blog, I’m getting it out of my system. I don’t care enough to fight with him, especially not to fight to stay affiliated with a site I no longer have any interest in, a site and a Webmaster that’s given me nothing in return for loyal, unpaid service.

The Webmaster can go fuck himself.

My tentative plan: wait a week, then ask him to remove every single word I’ve written for that site. Once he does, I’ll put them up here. Because why not? I didn’t get a goddamn thing having my actual name in pseudo-lights. Why should I leave his shitty site with what I think are some pretty solid movie reviews and pretty middling analyses of television shows?

And yes… I don’t get passive-aggressive. I play it passive until I reach my Billy Jack-esque breaking point. Then, I take off my shoes and get fucking aggressive. So I will not let him keep my material without a fight. He can blow me.

End rant.

Incidentally, I don’t want to be one of those bloggers whose all “you should be lucky I’m gifting you with my brilliance and wit,” but… You should be lucky I’m gifting you with my brilliance and wit. Ninety minutes ago, I thought I was done with my weekend reading. While writing this post, I got an a metric ass-ton of scripts. Yet I didn’t drop everything to read. I finished this post. For you.

xoxo

Posted by Stan on May 2, 2009 4:06 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (3)

July 16, 2008

Getting Shit On

For nearly a year now, I’ve been writing a weekly column about television. Similar to Zap2It’s TV Gal, but way less retarded, it’s basically an uncompromising look at the TV shows I waste my time watching. It’s not a big thing; mostly, it exists to lend enough legitimacy to myself to apply for the TCA, get in, get invited to the upfronts, then hobnob until I can get a good job and shake off the dust of this shitty review website. It’s a sound plan.

Now, I’ve mentioned this site and the occasional run-insI’ve had with the site founder, but man did he rile me up last week — and he tried again this week.

USA Network’s publicist sent me some screeners to promote the upcoming seasons of Burn Notice, Monk and Psych. Now, I’ve asked him specifically — multiple times — that anything coming his way that involves television, he can forward to me and I’ll take it. I don’t care if I’ve never seen the show before or if I’ve watched it since episode one. I’ll take a look at it and use it, in some way, in the column.

He hasn’t listened to that. At all. So I have to fight to get these screeners. It’s a little frustrating. On top of that, he doesn’t strictly want me to use these TV reviews with the column; look, at the end of the day, I’ve been doing the column for nearly a year, and he couldn’t give two shits about it. For months, he only provided one link to it, and that link directed everyone to my very first column, way back in September. I asked him repeatedly to point the links to an index page with a list of columns; he never, ever did it. I solved that problem by using the file the link did point to as the index.

Worse than that, I’ve written at least quite a few reviews, separate from my column, but in order to help him, I’ve put them into his cruddy HTML templates myself, uploaded them, then e-mailed the links, asking him to make sure to put them on the main pages. He hasn’t done this since September of last year, and I’ve written at least a half-dozen reviews since then (in fact, one of the people from a distributor recently came to me wondering where my review was; I pointed her to the review, and though she was effusive, it really pissed me off because the review was more than a month old). And it’s for this reason, and this reason alone, that I posted my Juno rant on this blog instead of his site. I wouldn’t be ashamed to put my name of it, I wouldn’t be ashamed to unleash the hate on a semi-legitimate site, especially one that has a monthly column called The Rant. But fuck it. Even if he put up a proper link to it, I’m just starting to get disillusioned by the shoddiness and the total disinterest the webmaster takes in his own site. There are certain things I get out of the site that compel me to continue doing work for it, but I’m not going to donate any unsolicited material to him. I know now that his acceptance of it means very little; he’ll post pretty much everything without question.

I needed to go into some of that background so what happened last week is perfectly clear. Per usual, I posted my weekly column — this one a special edition on Burn Notice — on Sunday, like I usually do. (Okay, on Monday but backdated to Sunday — deal with it.) To find it, all you have to do is click the link to the column, click the link on the index page that takes you to the newest one, and you’re there.

So I was a little surprised when The Webmaster e-mailed me on Tuesday evening. He was forwarding me a promotional e-mail from the publicist regarding Burn Notice, along with a sternly worded note basically telling me, “You haven’t done this, so do it ASAP.” He CC’ed it to two people from the publicity firm.

Now, I know why he did this. He wants to create the illusion that he’s a stern taskmaster, fully in charge of the site and deserving to wear the EDITOR-IN-CHIEF propellor-beanie. Although I don’t believe he had to word it quite as strongly as he did, especially since I had already written and posted it, I tried not to take offense. I wrote him back, telling him I’d done it and posted it as part of the column.

Here’s the part that pissed me off: on the rare occasions that this has happened, first of all, he hasn’t CC’ed others; secondly, I usually just send him the link and he says, “Great, thanks!” and forwards it to whoever’s asking about it. This time, he replied — again, CC’ing them, even though I hadn’t done a “reply all” — with a snippy, “We do main-page links for things like this.” Just like he does main-page links for the seven reviews I’ve written since September, right?

I wrote him back saying, “Fine, just add a direct link to the column review,” also adding that I intended to do the same thing with the following week’s reviews of Monk and Psych. (And by the way, he never added a main-page link to the review.) So what happened, a week later, when the USA publicity people sent another e-mail about the upcoming premieres of Monk and Psych? Sends me a CC’ed e-mail “reminding” me to let him know when I’ve posted the new column. The new column that I had already posted. And, again, no main-page link to it.

For me, it comes down to basic etiquette. I don’t mind people treating me like shit if I’ve done something wrong, and I fully admit that it was wrong to merely post a review of something as part of a column without telling anybody (but I felt justified because this was the only way anyone would see the review). Where my problem lies is in the lack of follow-through. The Webmaster wasn’t bitching me out because he was truly angry or annoyed; he was bitching me out so he looked good in front of those USA Network people. But what looks better? Publicly bitching at some dude they’ve never heard of because of a review he has already written, or privately saying, “Hey, did you do this?” and then just sending them back a link, and making sure to post a link from the main page.

I know I should just let shit like this roll of my back, but it bugs me, and this is my outlet for shit that bugs me. Deal with it.

Posted by Stan on July 16, 2008 5:09 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (0)

June 23, 2008

Reader

Ugh… Well, I hope it works out, but I haven’t heard anything all weekend. Amelia e-mailed me on Friday to tell me Murdstone & Grinby is looking for paid readers — decent money for the scripts, but no details on volume or whether or not this will come close to being permanent. She just wanted me to send her some coverage samples to give to her boss, Jim; I did, and I’m hoping for the best. Also, of course, preparing for the worst.

Posted by Stan on June 23, 2008 1:19 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (0)

June 18, 2008

The Porn Review Site

For nearly two years now, I’ve done glorified volunteer work on a former college professor’s film site. It started as a pretty basic thing — he needed someone to help him post reviews once a week; in exchange for that, I got free screeners and the opportunity to have published reviews in a semi-legitimate location — but gradually I wormed my way up to a full-fledged web guru, spending a shitload of time using my limited web-design knowledge to bring the site into the 21st century.

Despite the lack of substantial payment, I’ve found the work rewarding enough to not bail. I mean, there are a lot of things I look to get out of the experience, and as long as I get a few of them, I’ll be okay for awhile.

And then The Webmaster sent me an e-mail that, for lack of a better phrase, made my brain explode, then melt.

He sent it to myself and three others — the supposed site leaders. Apparently I’ve scaled the wall into the upper echelon, reserved only for founders of the site, each of whom has been involved with it for nearly a decade. I’d feel a little better about it if this somehow padded my wallet, but okay, I’m one of the site leaders. Now what?

“Let’s make a porn review site.”

That’s an abridged version of the e-mail. Essentially, The Webmaster has little interest in it other than the financial aspects — he believes it’ll be a huge moneymaker, for reasons he did not expound on — so all he really wants to do is set up a WordPress blog, plug in a customized template, and then start reviewing hardcore porn.

While I sat there, baffled and wondering how one even reviews porn. Full disclosure: I have a few friends who will discuss, in detail, certain clichés found in porn that they can do without, but that’s more of an all-encompassing, universal thing. It’s a little different when one has to account for certain things like specific, personal sexual peccadilloes, meaning I may find a particular film incredibly arousing while others look at it in disgust. Sexuality, I’d argue, is even more subjective than art. And, to that end, pornography is even more disposable than mainstream cinema.

Here’s what I know about porn: it’s the cheapest, most disposable commodity on the planet, and therefore it is worthless. A review of something worthless, in turn, doesn’t have much value, either.

You can find pornography all over the Internet, for free, within seconds. You can dig a little deeper to find something that’s actually good, but it’s still free. It’s as simple as downloading a wide array to sample, deleting what you don’t like, keeping what you do. I don’t need to read a review to know what I like, and I’m sure I’m not alone on that assessment. I have actually seen reviews of porn movies, but I’ve only ever used them as a guide to find out the scene order, so I know when a particular star (if that’s why I’ve downloaded it) appears.

Which brings me to my next point: porn is all about fast-forwarding to the good parts. Why should I, as a reviewer, have to sit around watching the entire thing for the small percentage of people who are titillated by the anticipation of fucking, the boring talky scenes I always skip because I don’t like knowing how rock-stupid the stars (of either gender) are. I also don’t like the gimmicks most of these movies employ to create the illusion of variety. Nobody’s going to sit and read a review and say, “Wow, it has ‘surprisingly good cinematography considering it was shot on handheld’?! Must-see!” Few will read it and say, “Yes, it’s loaded with suspense before the actual magic begins!” Nobody wants to know about the “plot,” if it even attempts to have one — they just want you to concentrate on the act itself, and if they’re anything like me, they don’t even want to know how you feel about the level of eroticism present, unless it’s something generic like, “This is a pretty hot DP scene!”

Keep in mind, also, that I’m the youngest of these “founders,” all of whom are approaching 50. So, you know, I just have this mental picture of middle-aged computer spazzes thinking, “You know how to make money on the Internets? Porns!”

I don’t object to it out of hand; after all, I’ve reviewed my fair share of erotica. I just wonder who the prospective audience is, what they’re looking for, and whether or not we can meet their needs. If we can’t, I question the possibilities of the site as a sure-thing moneymaker. The only thing I can see as being a moneymaker is the type of site that reviews pay sites, but unfortunately, one would assume the advertisers would be said pay sites, and they might expect some kind of favoritism. But I’ve seen a couple of sites that exclusively review paysites and judge them solely on the basis of content: is this worth paying for?

The Webmaster sounds like he’s more interested in reviewing movies, but maybe that’s only because he doesn’t realize what’s out there that’s worth reviewing.

Probably a bigger problem: who does he think will write this stuff? Right now, he has a pretty large group of reviewers for mainstream and indie movies — all of them unpaid, doing volunteer work because, like me, they have various things they want to get out of the site. Even The Webmaster himself said that he’d separate his name from it; I know I’d do the same, so that begs the question: what do they get out of it?

A legitimate place to publish clips? Yeah, I’ll be sure to put my review of Malibu Ass Blasters 7 in my portfolio of writing samples next time I go in for an interview.

The fact is, if he’s going to start a porn review site, he’s going to have to start paying people. How much does he think this site will make? Is it worth it after he considers how much he’ll have to spend? I know almost nothing about web commerce, but I’m going to have to go ahead and doubt it; if he intends to support this with per-click advertising, and you believe my theory that even if someone did read they reviews, they wouldn’t be buying porn — who’s going to do the clicking? If he intends to set this up as a pay site in and of itself — holy shit, who will pay a monthly fee to read reviews of porn. Almost every recent title listed on the IAFD has links to free reviews just below links to purchase the movies. That’s all anybody needs, so why would they pay for the luxury of reading the review?

Have I told The Webmaster any of this? Nope.

To be honest, I’m a little concerned. It’s not that I have a problem shitting all over his ideas, especially when what I’m providing is the “young-person’s” perspective (e.g., their demographic), and that perspective is “waste of time” — no, my problem lies in not feeling like part of the gang. If they’re going to go ahead and do this, that’s fine. I’m not really going to help, I won’t waste the time reviewing any of the movies, but I harbor no ill will. (But I will secretly say “I told you so” when it makes $0.) But who am I to come in and say, “Even though I’m the youngest and newest member of this ‘leadership’ group, I have too huge reasons why this is a flawed idea, so you should at least consider them before going ahead with it”? It’s not my place.

Really, I’m just baffled they’re even considering this. They all seem like pretty straight-laced guys, married, affable. I dunno, maybe that’s the demographic to appeal to — aging codgers who don’t get much nookie and have to rely on porn but don’t have the time or resources to waste on just anything. It has to be special.

And suddenly I’m wondering if this isn’t such a bad idea, after all…

Posted by Stan on June 18, 2008 1:17 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (0)

April 18, 2008

Job Shit

Update on that law firm job I wanted:

Over the course of the past month, one thing became abundantly clear: nobody at that firm was interested in hiring me, despite the fact that the HR lady told me in no uncertain terms, “It was down to you and one other person, and it was a really difficult decision.”

I called the HR lady several times, left a couple of messages, sent her e-mails, applied using the “apply online” form on their website, and when I didn’t get a response (okay, technically, one time I did get her on the phone, but it seemed like an accident and she tried as hard as she could to get me off the phone ASAP), I brought out the big guns. I don’t actually have any big guns, but what I mean by that is I e-mailed the department manager directly, since he was supposedly the one who liked me so much. He forwarded my resume back to HR, and the lady sent it back to me with a snippy e-mail saying she was already aware of my interest in the job but they were looking at candidates with legal experience first. Fair enough, although the fact that my “friend” Mark works in a library in a law firm doesn’t exactly make him Clarence Darrow, so I didn’t understand the big deal. Also, if the department manager wrote anything to her — like, for instance, “I loved this kid! Bring him in immediately!” — she deleted it when she sent the forwarded message back to me.

Meanwhile, Mark has sent me vaguely paranoid updates on his proceedings with the job. I’ve sent him responses designed to undermine his confidence under the illusion of supportiveness. Actually, after what I’d been through, I really did feel like I had no shot at the job — if even the department manager ignored my resume — so I guess I can’t be too mad at him. I was being stonewalled, and that, at least, wasn’t his fault. The HR lady definitely knew of my interest, and now the marketing manager also knew. So I figured, even though I didn’t really want Mark getting the job, I shouldn’t be a total asshole to him. At least he was honest enough to tell me…even if it was after-the-fact and only because I e-mailed him to say I saw the listing and was still interested.

Mark actually broke through to the second interview phase, and I thought, That’s it — I’m done for, he’s got the job. He e-mailed me at some point last week wondering how similar his experience was to my own. I told him it was pretty much the same, so he shouldn’t necessarily feel optimistic.

And, shock of shocks, he e-mailed me yesterday:

Subject: Does this sound familiar

Body: HR Lady: “It was down to you and one other person, and it was a really difficult decision.”

That pissed him off, and it pissed me off, and what’s worse, it’s not exactly a confidence booster. If “it was down to you and one other person” is her standard line, it crystallizes all the other bullshit I’ve put up with from the HR lady. Granted, she both excels at and enjoys railroading prospective candidates, so I guess it wouldn’t have any real effect on her to know that telling this to an applicant still gives them hope. Most job interviews, if you don’t get it, you don’t hear back, and if you do hear back, they just tell you they went with somebody else. Saying “you were ridiculously close to getting this job, but [insert minor, possibly bureaucratic reason for not getting the job]” just tells you, “You should troll the company website until the job pops back up and then pounce.” Finding out she told Mark the exact same thing, phrased the exact same way (only omitting the part about an internal candidate, since he was the internal candidate), makes me assume it was never down to me and one other person, or that if it was, the chasm between myself and the other candidate was impossibly big.

Lucy has a different, more optimistic perspective. She really does seem to think that — miracle of miracles — they really did like both of us, but for various reasons went with somebody else. In my case, they went with an internal candidate; with Mark, they apparently hired an actual attorney, which became a joke in his department. “An attorney got hired for a staff job? He must really suck.” I’m not sure if this means the responsibilities and/or qualifications for the job have changed, or maybe they just got along with the guy a little bit better. Who the hell knows?

Posted by Stan on April 18, 2008 4:07 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (0)

March 19, 2008

Undicked?

Just got an e-mail from Mark regarding the job. To his credit, he’s trying to undo the damage he’s done by feeding me little bits of info.

I sort of snickered when he mentioned that he was the first person to interview for the position and that she didn’t schedule a follow-up with the marketing department right away (as she did when I interviewed for the position). Then I felt legitimately bad when he mentioned he was replaying the interview in his head over and over again, thinking of questions he answered poorly. It wasn’t just his penchant for honesty that did him in — it’s his unrelenting negativity. After feeling bad, I got pissed off again: he knows he’s the kind of guy who will walk into a job interview knowing he didn’t get it — so why go for it in the first place, when he knows I need it (and, in this particular case, want it) more?

Based on the questions he thought he botched, Mark attempted to coach me into giving “correct” answers. The irony, of course, is that I’ve already got my bases covered. His main concern was saying “no” when asked if he’d ever have interest in pursuing a career in law; I stated flat-out in my cover letter that I’d love to get some firm experience, even in the marketing department, before pursuing a J.D. His other big concern was “hyping” my web skills. Yes, there are two positions open — yet another reason to be annoyed he didn’t mention it; he really was just trying to eliminate any competition, no matter what, for this job he didn’t believe he’d get — one for print material, the other for web. According to my largely fictitious resume, I have ample experience with both media, but I did hype the web skills more. I remembered from my previous interview that they were shifting to focus more on the web, and the web-design group is part of the marketing department.

Now, here I am, taking my accumulated knowledge and blitzing the HR lady, without any success (so far). Meanwhile, Mark has had his first (and probably only) interview. What the hell?

Based on what Mark told me, I decided I should wait until Friday before contacting the head of marketing. I still feel kind of strange about doing it, but like many others have said: if I don’t risk pissing some people off, I’d never hear anything. So either they’re going to be elated and the ball will start rolling, or they’re going to be pissed and it’d be the same basic result. What’s the harm in going for it?

Posted by Stan on March 19, 2008 11:57 AM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (0)

March 18, 2008

Dicked Around

Longtime readers might remember a passing reference to a job interview I was pretty stoked about awhile back. It’s pretty clear that I didn’t get the job; if I had, I probably wouldn’t be quite so enraged about everything. What I neglected to mention is that — perhaps adding to my rage — it was down to me and one other person, and the other person got the job. I received a pretty heartfelt phone call in which they told me they had to go with the other candidate, strongly hinting that they felt he was unqualified (not that I was, but hey, they liked me) and he was being pushed on them because he was an internal candidate.

Well, I got that interview through my friend Mark (now would be a good time to check out the new Cast of Characters link in the sidebar), who worked for the law firm. He would send me periodic e-mails with other jobs I might be good for. Many of them I felt like I was too unqualified for, and I didn’t want to keep applying to jobs I had no shot at and risk pissing off the HR lady. Around September, a similar job in the same department opened up. I applied…and heard absolutely nothing.

I was never sure why. At first, I thought the “we really wanted to hire you” call was bullshit, but why? I had interviewed for a totally different position prior to that, and I discovered the hard way that company policy is to just send a polite rejection letter. They didn’t need to call — in fact, they called me on a Friday afternoon and by the time I returned, they were gone for the day, so I spent the whole weekend assuming I had the job. That kind of sucked, and it’s probably one of the many reasons why bland rejection letters are preferred. I thought the call was really nice — not as nice as getting the job, but again, they didn’t have to call at all. They could have left me assuming that I’m a crappy, unskilled, and inexperienced prospective employee.

So I moved on to pinning it on the HR woman. Either she believed the open position wasn’t a good fit for me, or (more likely) she already had a candidate she was rallying around. I know the way the human resources game works: they get a candidate or two for a position and run them as far as they can down the line. If you come in too late, you’ll never hear from them, because they don’t want to upset the balance of the candidates they’ve already chosen. I was tempted to go to the people who interviewed me, circumventing HR completely, but I decided not to. It seemed like a breach of etiquette, and I didn’t really want to have the people who nearly hired me get pissed off and not hire me.

Cut to: today. A position pops up on their website — the exact position I nearly got lo those many months ago. I check the website maybe once every two or three weeks, just in case something relevant pops up. I was under the impression Mark quit the job several months ago, so I didn’t figure he’d be keeping up with their employment postings. So I filled out the online application and sent it in.

Then I thought, Maybe this time I should harass the head of the department. If the HR woman is never going to contact me, I really don’t have much to lose by going over her head…right?

I tried to remember if anyone — of the six or seven people I met in the department — had given me a business card — essentially granting permission for me to harass them — but I couldn’t find one. His communication info is splattered on his profile on the site, though. I thought, I could say he gave me a business card. This was in May — would he really remember? The only way he would is if they never gave anyone a business card.

Still concerned, I e-mailed Mark. I figured he’d at least know the ins and outs of this company’s particular hierarchy. He could tell me whether or not it would be a problem to contact someone I barely know, who isn’t in human resources, about an open position.

Mark had been strangely MIA the last 10 days or so. The last I heard from him, he sent me an e-mail; I replied, asking a few basic questions, but never heard anything back. It was weird, but not in a suspicious way. He does that sometimes, and since he got married I don’t see him as much. No biggie, right?

Wrong. Turns out, Mark never quit the job. I don’t know why I thought that; I remember him getting really frustrated with his boss and quitting. Maybe he just said he was tempted to quit but never went through with it. I honestly don’t remember, and it was obviously not something we discussed over e-mail (yes, I went back through the old ones). He e-mailed me back within an hour to tell me, sheepishly, that he wasn’t sure he could (or should) give me any good advice because he had applied for the same job — and was interviewing for it this afternoon.

He fell all over himself with apologies and half-assed explanations: the only reason he didn’t let me know was because I’d been given the runaround the last time, he didn’t think he had a shot in hell of getting the job, he wanted to show the company he had interest in a full-time position (right now he’s part-time, but as he describes it, he makes a full-time salary working half the hours), blah blah, etc.

I don’t want to be mad about this. It’s his prerogative to tell me or not tell me. It’s his prerogative to decide, “Hey, if Stan almost got this job, I’m a shoo-in.” And in some ways, it’s on me for not checking this particular site for jobs on a daily basis, cutting him off at the knees by asking him for a referral before he even sees it on the site himself.

I’ve been dicked around by this company more than once (even in the optimistic interview stage, the HR woman gave me the runaround), and now I’m being dicked around by a good friend. I feel pathetic for paraphrasing Michael Scott from The Office, especially since he’s talking about his girlfriend and not just a regular friend, but it all comes back to this: you expected to be dicked around by your job (even one you haven’t gotten yet) — but not by friends.

I talked it out with some other people. I don’t know if it’ll get me anywhere, but I think I found a pretty good strategy for contacting the department head without pissing off either him or the HR woman. If they liked me as much as I thought they did, he can bug HR for my resume. If he didn’t, that’s that.

I hope this strategy works out, even though it has FAILURE written all over it, because then I can fuck Mark over. We’ll be even, and then we can go back to being normal friends again. No muss, no fuss.

If it doesn’t work out, though…I’m a hell of a grudge-holder.

Posted by Stan on March 18, 2008 4:48 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (0)

May 16, 2007

Employment Horrors

Earlier this week, I had a phone interview with a woman at a classy downtown law firm where a friend of mine works. It went pretty well, as it is one of the rare job interviews where I’m not at least partially bullshitting my experience level, and even better: it’s full time, pays really well, good benefits, all that jazz. The only real problem, aside from the fact that I don’t actually have the job yet, is that it’s on the 66th floor of the Sears Tower. The combination of my comical fear of heights and propensity toward seasickness* might be a mitigating factor; I just hope 95% of the job involves being seated in a cubicle with no windows in my sightline. But we’ll see how it goes. I have an in-person interview with HR on Friday, followed by an interview with the department manager at a later date (it’ll be pretty obvious if the second interview is not scheduled that I didn’t get the job).

Lately, I’ve tended to not tell my dad about these jobs. He has a tendency to stress me out more than I already am, acting like the fate of the world is riding on me getting a job as soon as possible (and to him, it probably is — he’s been wanting me out of the house pretty much since I came back). He also takes it way too hard when I don’t get the job (a part of the whole “fate of the world” mentality, I guess), so I usually just tell him after the fact on the day of the interview, or after I’ve confirmed whether or not I have the job.

This law firm interview is no different; it’s a better lead than I’ve had in awhile, what with the whole “I actually have experience” thing, and it’s coming at the recommendation of a friend who is (apparently) well regarded at the firm, but like any job it’s not a sure thing. I planned to just not say anything until after the second interview, or after the first if I don’t get a second and therefore know I didn’t get the job…

…and then I got an e-mail from my dad. A position where he works — a definite sure thing — has come up again. I stupidly turned it down last summer because I had this misguided belief that a café job, while paying less, wouldn’t be as stressful. Because my life would be nothing without constant irony, turning down the first job led me to the most stressful café job I’ve ever worked. I ended up semi-quitting when I took a quick trip to Los Angeles for a job interview. Technically I was fired for not showing up to work, but I made the decision knowing what the consequence would be; I could have begged for the job back, but shit was it miserable. This led me to the total opposite of my “cafés pay less but are less stressful” theory: if I have to deal with the same bullshit, I might as well get paid for it.

In yet another ironic twist, the guy my dad’s buddy hired in my stead was fired for not showing up to work. He decided to restrategize, training somebody he’s already got to do the job part-time (and do his normal job the rest of the time), then hiring another part-time person. That way, if the part-timer is unreliable, disappears off the face of the Earth or quits with no notice, he has a backup. But if the part-timer is reliable, he can be bumped up to full-time eventually.

So here we have it: a part-time (for now) sure thing where they know me and would be okay if I ditched out with no notice to pursue something better, or a gamble on a much better job. My dad’s buddy wants to train both a new part-timer (i.e., me) and the guy he already has simultaneously, starting next week. I had to spill it about the job interview, which has managed to fuck everything up. My dad, who hasn’t tried to find a job in 20 years, seems to be under the delusion that the typical interview process goes like this: you go in for an interview and are hired the same day, starting the following day. I’ve only had this experience twice in my life: one was a shitty retail job (where I think that type of hiring process is more common, since it’s monkey work), and one was an office job.

I’ve been on a lot of job interviews, and all but two have been a long and irritating multi-tiered process. When I told my dad about the other interview, he said, “Okay, call him on Friday after the interview and tell him whether or not you’re interested. He wants to start training you guys on Monday.”

I told him I might know if I don’t have the job, but I definitely won’t know if I do have it. I offered to train for the job with my dad’s buddy, since he has a hard-on to do it ASAP, and then if I get the other one I’d be out the door. I sorta think that’s a waste of my time, but I should probably keep my bases covered. I’m just not sure why it can’t wait another week…

*The Sears Tower one of the many modern skyscrapers designed to sway with the wind, and the higher you get, the more you feel it. [Back]

Posted by Stan on May 16, 2007 10:19 AM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (0)