I hate Twitter. No, wait, I better restate that. I hate what Twitter has done to people. And the media. But mostly people. People are the let-down in all systems. Always been that way, always will. Anyhow. I can roll this in with the whole self-entitlement that people now feel they have. All these people, all owed something by the world, demanding rights they haven’t earned, demanding respect they haven’t earned, demanding their life handed to them.
In the meantime, I thought I would tell another story in-between. It bears no resemblance to the outside one, but I wanted to tell it anyhow. Look, you know the score. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have even gotten this far.
OK, so maybe I am just old, but it is the instant reaction, the ‘something must be done RIGHT NOW’ of it all. For instance, and this is from personal experience, you get people praising a company, then when some minor thing goes wrong, they are all up in arms, jumping about, demanding something be done else they take their custom elsewhere. I am all for great customer service, but these people, oh no. They take their invective to twitter, RTed by the usual suspects, appealing to Stephen Fry to hold their hands.
Subterfuge. Intrigue. You know I am a master at these, mostly because I have the patience to out-wait anyone, and win in the end. But sometimes I hear of scams, and schemes, and am so disappointed I didn’t think of them first. Flash cookies were one, but this is about recruitment, agencies, jobs going and people looking.
When did everything get to be so….aggressive? So immediate? Even the mainstream media, stories spiral outwards, and the old talking heads are replaced by @internet_bum from Chiswick. Lazy journalists, too. Though that trend has been going on a while, where commentary has replaced story-searching, and even ‘send us your pictures’ has replaced photojournalism. The BBC’s Question Time is prime example. Steve Coogan (just for example, he isn’t the only one) shouted down some politician over what he said were facts, and the audience loved it, lapped it up and clapped. He won that. But it came out later that everything he said was wrong. Totally wrong. Dangerously wrong. There wasn’t a retraction (I don’t care about that), but all anyone will remember is that some halfwit comedian bested a politician (which, again, I am all for, but not if they trot out lazy half-truths wrapped in cod scientific validity). But that sums up the Left, the Right have a different set of problems.
I posted a job advert a while back, and use that to give to agents for a job spec, to save me repeating the same mantra to different ones over and over again. I still have to, but the more clued up ones, this helps. Anyhow, we haven’t filled the post, even after many, many agents getting in touch. This story is about one of those. He got in touch. He bought me coffee, although wasn’t as pleasing on the eye as a few of the other agents I have dealt with. But he was genuine, and I liked, and still like, him. I digress. A few days later, he sent me a CV.
Twitter has given a wider voice to the malcontents, and not the good sort. Companies are now wary of hostile hashtags being used against them. (Worse are the PR companies trying to shoehorn their own hashtags in to try and gain some youff cachet. Ugh.) And Facebook is the same: ‘fifteen hundred self-righteous twats signed a page to rail against potato printing as a method of reinforcing the patriarchy’. Why has there been a rush to give instant reaction to everything? There is no consideration, people stomp their feet and expect everything to fall the way they want it. And also, when did customer service become synonymous with giving people financial compensation? Segue that into tax avoidance. Some other chinless comedian got ‘caught’ avoiding tax, and apologised. Seriously, why? I wouldn’t have. Morals? What has that got to do with it? I pay what I need to, no more, no less. Or less if I could. I am drifting here…
And it was a perfect CV. Hit all the right tech, the right history, the right outside interests, the works. So I asked the agent to hook us up, mano-a-mano, so we can see what goes down. More so as one of the companies he worked for I knew the head honcho, and could check up on him at a later date. This is an important plot point, if this was some could-have-seen-this-coming-earlier film. The chap did a tech screening before even getting to me, and all was good. Then he went AWOL, with mucho apologies from the agent. This is fine, it is holiday season, things happen. It was only a day or two. No biggie. I am in a rush to fill this job, but was willing to wait a day or two to bag this one.
And we haven’t even discussed the trolls yet, either. Nor the whole push to ‘verify who you are before commenting’ nonsense. I don’t use my real name, nor will I ever. GooglePlus let me sign up without it, and that was one of their things, wasn’t it? Or maybe I got that wrong. Whatever. Sure, hiding behind an anonymous name to leave nasty comments is cowardly, and I am not going to say ‘man up’ about it, as there is nothing nice about being crudely harassed and bullied. But it is the people, not the medium. And the tools have given rise to the self-entitled, the self-righteous, the bully, the stalker, the sorts who have always been with us, that now reach a wider audience and are listened to more by the mainstream media.
Then I got an email. The subject line was ‘CRAZY NEWS’. It is probably best I quote what was written, in the hope the agent won’t mind. I am going to send him a link to this post, as there is nothing to identify him in here, in the hope he can also laugh.So, a quick update. Turns out ASK ME FOR THE MADE UP NAME doesn’t exist. I did a quick reference check once I realised he wasn’t getting back to me, and it transpires that he doesn’t exist, and his CV is a fake one planted by another recruitment consultancy, designed on getting leads out of chumps like me. Obviously I’m incredibly embarrassed by this, as it’s a waste of yours and my time, and makes me look like a bit of a mug. What’s bizarre is that I did a technical test with the candidate over the phone, and he passed with flying colours. I might not be much of a coder, but I can usually weed out someone who’s making it up as they go along. This guy was good. I mean…really? How good a scam is that?
Wait, that wasn’t anywhere near what I wanted to say. Really, all I wanted to say is for everyone to chill the hell out, relax, life isn’t serious. There are serious issues to sort out in the world, get mad over those. Pop culture must die. No, not that. Vacuous inane celebrity emulation must die. Actually, there is probably room for that, too. People, just relax. You are getting yourselves worked up over the wrong things, thinking of them in the wrong way, coming to the wrong conclusions and just being wrong.
The thing is, I got a few cold calls from agents I hadn’t dealt with, and I just wonder which one of them pulled this scam off. It was all so well constructed. They were fishing to see what positions were going, maybe to help their own candidates. Agents have such a good reputation, while this doesn’t seal it, it makes me laugh at the tricks they pull. That takes balls.
Grief, that was a total mess, even for me, but whatever. I used to be with IT but then they changed what IT was. Now what I’m with isn’t IT, and what’s IT seems scary and weird. It’ll happen to YOU!
