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14:50 - 17.08.07 I got up at that point wide awake. Travelled around the house securing doors and windows against whoever might be outside. I thought I would sit down then and post to you while the day was fresh in my memory, but there was no connectivity with my service provider. Rebooted several times after checking that all the cables and wires were in place with no success. What was bugging me at that point was the fact that several techie type things have gone amok in the past couple of days and there isn't even the excuse of Mr Mercury Retrograde to account for it. First it was the VCR not having a picture even though the television has one. Still not fixed either. Yesterday that was exacerbated when one of the five local channels I get (remember I cancelled the cable a couple of months back) disappeared from the tuner or whatever. Happened when I tried to tune into that channel for the news - the one broadcast that I actually make the time to watch. Then the computer starting to crash - what's up with that? Around 3:30 in the am my youngest wandered upstairs jiggled one wire and, la voila,it connected. Bleagh. By the time I had read all my email it was 4:30 am so I went back to sleep. Yesterday I spent about eight hours just applying for different jobs throughout the day. At two applications per hour that is still less than 20 attempts. I spoke with number five son as well asking how his job hunting was going. He is encountering the same kind of response as me. The one worksite where he has a friend working already is the one interview he has managed to get. He said that the process for that one job has been incredibly time consuming and frustrating. Two interviews in he has simply been through several tests. Ones he wasn't advised about until the actual moment of execution. Part were the skills which makes perfect sense, but the other part were the behavioural questions. The problem with that is that they are administered by interviewers who are not psychologists and therefore don't have the training to interpret the responses. When I was volunteering with the family support and intervention clinic I was given the opportunity to have a private dinner with one of the developers of one of the major behavioural test programs. He said he was appalled by the application those tests were put to especially with respect to corporate screening. His comment was that in the hands of someone not competent to do so - hr personnel or managers - that the applicant was at risk of being mislabelled and adversely affected as a result. My son said the person interviewing him was doing his first ever interview and he was unsupervised at that. He took extensive notes when my son responded but who is to say whether they reflected my son's responses and intentions with respect to communicating his feelings or whether they reflected the interviewer's own beliefs about what he had heard. My son said too that the people who had agreed to stand as references for him were appalled at the questions they were asked about him. Some of the questions are downright illegal under our labour law. The only questions that are legal to ask is if the person has the skills and attitude to do the job posted. Information about a person's personal life, health and preferences are not supposed to be asked. That seems to confirm a pattern of industry wide violations of labour law as I have documented in my posts to you when different agencies and employers - including the Alberta justice department - have called me for a reference check on someone who has worked an election for me. Again one has to ask if there really is a labour shortage or if corporations are simply creating the illusion of same by their own willful - and illegal - behaviour. On that note, I did have a phone intake interview for one of the applications I sent out yesterday this afternoon. There was one violation of regulations regarding what an employer can ask but if one doesn't respond or objects the penalty is not to be considered further for placement in the job one hopes to acquire. My son's read on it is that employers are looking for employees who are easily cowed and who can be bullied into doing whatever they are told - even if it is inappropriate. I can't really argue the point although I am hoping that he is wrong. When I chose people for positions one of the things I wanted and looked for was someone who had a lot of initiative and who would speak up if there were problems because the quality of their work is usually much superior to people who are passive about their position. Maybe employers should take that into consideration when they complain about the productivity of their staff. You get what you ask for in most cases. In the news,(gophercentral - Where are they now?) I came across this video of Vicki Carr. She is the type of person I think should be featured in entertainment programs and promoted as a role model for aspiring young adults. Her quiet attention to building up the community from which she came and her giving back into society from the good fortune she experienced as a singer would seem a much better choice than all the drama kings and queens that seem to be inflicted on the rest of us now no matter what form of media one interacts with. Then there is a further proof of Bell's Theorem announced today by two German scientists. Einstein and moving faster than the speed of light. Opens up all sorts of possibilities from Schroedinger's cat to the experiments of Rupert Sheldrake. The other science debate of note is the continuing scrutiny of the development and use of non-renewable resources both from the point of view of depletion as well as their very damaging effect on humans as well as the environment.
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