As expected …

The job prospect I mentioned last week was looking great. It took place this last Wednesday at 10 AM, I showed up looking sharp, hair perfectly, freshly cut, wearing business casual as advised, a nice color coordinated sport jacket over new slacks and polished shoes which fit and accentuated my newly rebuilt, honed down, buffish bod like a glove.

The company is a solid, respectable outfit, great benefits, super neat story of how it developed and grew. The thing I like the most about them is, unlike so many corporations in the world today, this company has a great business; they actually help people. They make people happy. The company designed and maintains a stable online platform that allows people from all over the world, the well-off and the poor, the young and the old, the handicapped and the terminal, you name it, to buy and sell items of all kinds. collectible items, hand crafted ones, very rare or poignant things that make people smile and bring back great memories. They allow folks searching for a bargain a shot at getting great products at a price that person can afford, and in some cases people of all ages have become so adept and the platform so scalable, that really sharp people have learned to buy and sell and trade all kinds of items, making themselves a few badly needed dollars in this tough economy.

I knew going in this was a good company. But during the extended job interview I was even more impressed, by everything I saw, the building, the people, and the policies. On the latter, I can’t into detail because I signed a disclosure agreement. But I listened to  calls from people who were upset, and I can say with complete confidence I feel much better about issues like privacy protection, how they back up their customers, how they honor and resolve mistakes that aren’t even the company’s fault, how they protect their customers from scammers and data thieves, how focused they are on making the honest customer whole again at the company’s expense if possible in any way, even when the customer might and probably should have used better judgment.

You’ve probably guessed by now, the company was eBay, and from what I saw eBay isn’t a good company, they’re a great company. A company I would like to work for. The sky could be the limit for someone with my work ethic, background, and number crunching extroverted idiosyncrasies at a winner like eBay. In a few years I could be making a living wage again, after more than three years of scrapping by on near poverty pay, and rejoin the lower middle class. I might be able to once again apply for a home loan or get a car on credit and enjoy all the things I once took for granted and now can barely remember, the memories that feel more and more distant, more more and more surreal, like it happened long ago in a youthful dream.

The Austin campus is truly an impressive work environment with on site access to a four star gym. Best of all they are just now fully staffing this new, modern, spacious center, now almost fully built, just a few blocks from my apartment, I would be on the local ground floor of my department. Being a college grad, a former stock broker who has a long successful record of dealing with emotional people on critical financial matters, coming in with years of fresh customer service experience including the numero uno top performer out of hundreds of people in my current online customer service job for all of 2012 —  it looked very promising.

 

And I am a bad ass: I’ve been doing this so long I can now respond via live web chat by text while listening to a second customer on a live call and still scan over and close out a third web ticket all at once. I am greased lightning, no one can catch me on speed and my CSAT and FCR scores are way above average when I triple task too boot. Add in to that they are hiring dozens of people for a very large contact facility and that led me to believe, if I wasn’t a full-blown shoe in, I was at least facing way better odds than the unknown or 50-50 chances that keep defying the law of large numbers and rolling against me in past interviews.

Make no mistake, this is not a high level job, it’s not a dream job, it’s not a six figure job, or a job opening where only one or two of the best out of many applicants get hired. But even if it was I have to figure I’d still have a shot because I am one of the best qualified, most experienced applicants they’re likely to come across for that kind of starting wage. The job would have started at only 16 bucks an hour, but joining the working poor after being comfortably middle class has taught there’s a big difference between the $12/hr and change I make now after three years of stellar performance and no chance or ever moving up, and the $16/hr this would pay with room to grow. I mainly worried about being over qualified — if there really is such a thing.

Did a skills test, it was super easy, there was only one techie issue and it was basic, something I probably walk customers through 30 times a day in my current position. I carefully counted the number of words in the typing test and made sure I exceeded the threshold with zero mistakes. There were four of us taking the skills test, I finished way before anyone else and they told me I did great, that I had made it to the next step, a short interview with a team manager which seemed to go fine. They showed me all around the place like I was in and they said I would be hearing from them soon.

And they kept that promise, on Friday this was in my work email from a no-reply address:

Thank you for taking time to apply for the Customer Solutions Teammate position. We appreciate your interest and the opportunity to review your background, qualifications, and eligibility.

We have reviewed your resume and have carefully considered your qualifications. While your skills are impressive and you have met the basic requirements of the position, we will be moving forward with other candidates who exceed the basic and preferred qualifications for the position. We also encourage you to take another look at our current openings and consider other opportunities within eBay as they become available.

I’ll probably take them up on that. I got a really good vibe from the place. But my understanding is that kind of invitation to reapply is often done to ease the blow of rejection. That once you’re out, you’re out.

Worst of all, I don’t know what went wrong, maybe they hit a quota of hirees before my app came up? Maybe a reference confused me with someone else and skull fucked me? Who knows? I can only assume they’re telling me the truth about the skills test, maybe they went by total words typed per unit time instead of a pass-fail thing like I was told. I have to assume eBay is smart enough not to engage in age discrimination. But I’ll never know, so I’ll never be able to correct it if is correctable.

I’ve had a lot of let downs like this over the last few years, where I knew I was super qualified, had a great interview for a low level easy job, then either heard nothing back at all or got a form letter quickly indicating I was cut out of consideration early on.

But even in that dim light, this one was a huge let down. If I can’t get a low-level job I’m that qualified for, my future is truly bleak. I don’t know how long I can survive the way things are, it’s just a matter of time if nothing changes. I’ve spent all my non qualified savings now, I have some retirement left but I dip into that regularly to make ends meet, it won’t last five years at the rate I’m going. And all I get for slowly bleeding out my last IRA is a tax penalty and a miserable, drab, lonely life. Sooner or later I will run out of that last bit of retirement money, an expense will come along I can’t handle, and I’ll eventually become car-less, or homeless, or worse.

A dellion here, a dellion there, & pretty soon we’re talking about real money

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Microsoft 1978: Would you have invested?

Here in lovely Austin, a growing bloom of progressive blue America encroaching steadily in to the red blight that has infested the Lone Star State for a generation, it’s not unknown to meet a real, full-blown dellionaire. That term may not be familiar to everyone so here’s a little background: back in the day, IBM had a big plant here. My whole family worked there at one time or another. But a few influential employees got together in the 80s and decided to found a new company focusing on IBM compatible computers, as Big Blue had recently standardized a diverse, chaotic PC market around the Intel 8086 architecture running a neolithic disc operating system from a small start up company called Microsoft. The founders of MSFT are shown above; would you have invested a big chunk of your life savings with those kids? Well, that’s another story.

This merry band of former IBM engineers and proven PC pioneers called their new company CompuAdd. It had every advantage. The best and the brightest designers, veteran quality assurance pros, sales execs with a big swinging book of business shipping the growing reseller channel, the latest in manufacturing methods, all sitting atop a cheap, youthful manufacturing and PC literate clerical workforce like a cherry on a money sunday. But they weren’t the only ones to see the writing on the wall, not by a long shot. There were several others in Austin alone. One IBM PC clone was even started up around the same time by a college kid who dropped out of UT and made a few PCs a week, essentially handcrafted and built to custom order. Which one of those box makers would you have invested in?

Well, if you chose CompuAdd, you lost every dime a long, long time ago. In fact it would have been hard for a retail investor to invest at all, CompuAdd never even made it to the NASDAQ. But if you bought Dell common stock on the secondary market after the IPO in 1988, at about $10-15 a share, and held on to it through the dot-com boom in the late 90s, with splits and appreciation, you bagged something like a 100 to one return. Which made the college drop out, Michael Dell, the first of many dellionaires.

Today Mr Dell has another idea, sort of a repeat, but this one isn’t drawing anywhere near the applause of that past miracle. In fact it’s causing a lot of neurosis and fear, from here in Central Texas to the elite boardrooms of Wall Street and beyond. What is it? Follow me below. [Read more…]

Another opportunity lost

It hit me today just how terrible the last three years have been for me. I came into work earlier and my company was offering a voluntary separation deal, full pay, full benefits, job placement help, for three to six months. It would be perfect for me. But I haven’t been here quite long enough to qualify.

It’s not just that the economy has been terrible for the last three years, it’s that it happened at the worst possible time it could have happened in my life, when a couple of loved ones were diagnosed with deadly diseases, when the layoffs began in earnest and my friends and family and me all lost our benefits when we needed them to literally survive, when I begin to hit age fifty and could count on obvious age bias in trying to find any job that paid a basic living wage, even one far below what I’m used to making, etc. On top of which every goddamn job, relationship, or source of money or happiness of any kind that might have worked out in my favor over the last three years instead fell through completely, or worked out against me in some way, the separation deal above being only the latest such opportunity lost. And when I did have a heads-I-lose tails-you-win decision to make, inevitably it turned out I chose the worst of the two. It seems improbabale my luck could continue being so lousy, but I’ve said that time and time again for several years now and it just gets worse.

It’s just been awful. The worst, most horrible, joyless, agonizing, hopeless, loneliest three years of my life. Nothing that ever came before even remotely prepared me for it.

Bank still refusing to pay woman for stolen items

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It looks like First National Bank of Wellston of Ohio has a bigger problem than they thought: Katie Barnett, the lady they ripped off and are refusing to pay full value to, is photogenic and not a minority. Which means even local teatards might sympathize.

The President of the bank is a fellow named Eric Emmert, let’s make sure that incompetent buffoon never escapes the consequences of his greed and stupidity. This all could have been avoided had the bank simply paid Katie Barnett back for what they stole. She was only asking $18,000, the bank refused, demanding receipts for a life’s worth of possessions, receipts the bank had thrown out anyway along with everything else she owned. Click the image to sign the petition.

Generational economic mobility in easy to read map form

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I’m not going to be the first one to say this — you’d have to be blind not to notice it. Dixie is damn near a third-world hell-hole within our borders. We can argue about which fucked up idea caused most of it, and it’s seems fair to infer no one policy could fail quite this spectacularly, but there is no denying the anti-economic correlation between the know-nothing fundamentalist-ruled neo-confederate non-unionized racist deep south and the rest of the nation.

GOP head assures fundamentalists his party not serious about being tolerant

The Republican Party has a terrible problem, too many people think they’re a bunch of old creepy white guys who only care about a few creepy old, rich religious fanatics! Some conservatives have even been running around saying they might be more inclusive to immigrants or gays and lesbians, perish the though! So party chairman Reince Priebus took to the fundie airwaves to quietly assure the right-wing faithful that his party will not waver from a course of religiously inspired hatred and intolerance, but they will rename hatred love and intolerance they’ll call grace: [Read more…]

The new bait-ball economy

GOPUSA sends out a news flash known to everyone who works for crap: most job gains are in shitty paying or temp niches and many of those are part time. Temps are becoming increasingly popular, and one has to wonder why it has taken corporate America so long to utilize them to this degree. They allow the underlying employer to avoid screw low level employees even more. No health insurance, no sick days, not even Christmas or Thanksgiving are comped. [Read more…]

Reports of military coup underway in Egypt; unconfirmed

 Update: CNN live reporting a coup is underway

Via NYT — CAIRO — With a potentially violent showdown looming between Egypt’s military and the Islamist backers of President Mohamed Morsi, the country’s top generals summoned civilian political leaders to an emergency meeting on Wednesday to discuss a new interim government while moving tanks toward the presidential palace and restricting Mr. Morsi’s travel — new signals of an impending military takeover. A top presidential adviser said a coup already was under way.

Hashtag #Egypt; #Cairo; Twitter feeds RichardEngel: Reports military deploying at key sites and intersections, not only in #cairo . Also highway to Alexandria

Bear in mind the military in Egypt is by some accounts I;m seeing, the less extreme, more secular interest. How it would play out if they take over though is anyone’s guess.