Ghost Job: Flamboasting the Nation

An article in Psychology Today discusses ghost jobs:

What's a Ghost job? As our good friend put it, it's a job that's not a part of your bigger career aspirations, but one that will certainly tie you over and cover the bills for now. It's the job you took with the intent of leaving when the job market picks up again, whenever it picks up again. Most importantly, it's also the job that stays off the resume.

They explain why they're discussing this topic:

Our hope in writing this Ghost Job blog is that we bring attention to the reality that many people are facing today so that hiring managers and organizations will acknowledge and welcome resumes with jobs that may seem out of place. This would acknowledge the character building that such an experience requires from a person.

An astute commenter replies:

I used to be in operations for RJR Nabisco: Oreo Division. Not a single Oreo would come off the line w/o me personally licking the cream filling to make sure it lived up to our customers high Oreo standards. However, the strain of licking 1200 creamy fillings an hour (that's what she said!) and the Bush-driven economy have conspired to leave me unemployed.

I have since moved to Woakyland to try my hand at flamboasting and slumlawding! No need to wish me luck, my medium-large sized pimp skills are proving more than sufficient to insure that this brotha never need holla back.

Onward and upward, or, as they say in my hood, "Tally ho, bitch!"

Quoted for Truth

Faster Please: The Imploding California Edition

I love the stories of CA's demise. Finally, as one famous presidential spiritual advisor put it, the chickens are coming home to roooooooooost.

After hiking our taxes, the state legislature asked us to vote ourselves another tax increase. Californians, in a rare outburst of common sense, voted against increasing their own taxes. The pro-tax side (unions, et. al.) outspent the anti-tax side by a 10-1 margin and still lost. After decades of craven and misguided policies, our wise solons in Sacramento are finally starting to feel some pain.

Granted, it's nothing like the pain Maria Consuela Guitierrez feels every single second of her waking life. You see, Ms. Guitierrez is what is now called an "undocumented American." Just like you and me, minus the documents and plus the treacherous desert passage to El Norte. Just like me, trying to raise her 6 kids (one is autistic) by 3 fathers; all the while, tremerous w/ fear, she lives life in the shadows, afraid of deportation due solely to her prior felony conviction (she was drunk, doesn't really remember, plus, details pollute the narrative).

She has said as much, or at least tried to; she doesn't speak English. Or Spanish. She speaks Texaquilquo, the native tounge of a small Northwestern Mexican village. Her pain is unique and exceptional (except for the 5 billion other people who have it worse); the sine qua non, if you will, for the existence of the Democratic party in California.

For only they can feel her pain, and the pain of those similarly situated. Only they possess the empathy and intellect to propose innovative policy solutions (take money from me, give to Maria, keep a cut for self) to these unique problems (OMG! Somebody's poor!) that are to everyone's satisfaction.

By the way, the picture is of Karen Bass. Assembly Speaker for the great state of CA. I double-dooky-spacedog-dare you to guess what her career was prior to "public service."

Community Organizer.

Everything Old is New Again: "The One" Edition

Cap and trade, universal health care, economic "stimulus", 28 "czars" and counting: all done in our name, for our own good, and in only his first 6 months!

If only there were some historical parallels; or some commentary on the matter expressed more eloquently by someone much smarter than me.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

— C.S. Lewis

There you go; I knew I'd find it.