My Ephemerae

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Growing up, I learned Tom Lehrer’s songs and managed to embarrass mother and father more than once.

It is worth sharing.

I have been using Monster (http://www.Monster.com) to look for jobs and was concerned that I was doing something wrong because I kept looking specifically for jobs in my local area, within 10 miles of my home, and was seeing/receiving job listings from all over town.

This was a bit of an issue for me because I live on the very southern edge of Houston, and Houston is 650 square miles. Though I know people who spend more than an hour every morning and every evening commuting to/from work, it is not a desire of mine to spend whatever time I have left on this planet sitting in a car, breathing exhaust and wishing I was already where I was going.

So I wrote monster to ask them:

I want to limit the geography of my search. Are such limits possible and if so, what limits are possible.

Why? I live in Houston, but Houston is half the size of our smallest state and parts of Houston are a 90 minute drive away.

[Houston is 650 square miles and Rhode Island is 1200 square miles.]

Monsters reply:

After sending your issue to our technical department and then to our products team, it has been determined that the site is functioning as designed. When employers post jobs they are able to choose a search location, but their job location does not have to be the same as the search location. For example I may be searching for jobs in Austin, Texas within a 20 mile radius, but I receive a job in my results that is in Houston, Texas. This would be because the employer chose to advertise the job in Austin because they may feel the best qualified candidates would be located here. Also once the system provides you with all jobs that meet your search criteria within your area, it will then move on to the next closest location of job results.

Ah. So, bottom line, Monster does not show you what you searched for. It shows you what their advertisers want you to see.

Google faced this same problem many years ago (a long time in internet years) and (in my opinion, more appropriately) chose to show you what you searched for and even to “penalize” sites that tried to inappropriately game the system.

While Google does show paid ads, it notes, thru it’s presentation, that they are paid ads.

For me, Monster gets a “D-”. It does not get an “F”, only because it seems it may show me what I am looking for, after it shows me all the stuff I do not want to see (without telling me that it is stuff I do not want to see).

I recently purchased a new TracFone. Not cuz I wanted one particularly. But just cuz I’d lost my other cell and wanted a cheap one from Target. I only pay by the minute, don’t talk much, and don’t use any of the fancy features (e.g. browsing).

The other day I discovered that the phone had managed to activate features just resting in my pocket and had drained minutes so I wanted to add some. When I got home I tried to get the phone to do that. Failing in my feeble attempt to use their web service to authorize my phone to recharge, I called for help. After a frustrating 30 minutes in which I repeatedly explained I did not want to buy minutes but did want to enable the ability to buy minutes from my phone the nice help desk lady was unable to make it work and transferred me to tech support.

For the next 70 minutes tech support tried and failed to get it to work, then pledged to escallate the prolem and call me.

Today they did.

Alas, I was in the middle of something in the kitchen and made a fatal mistake. I asked them a question in English and presumed they would understand. I said I needed to go to my desk and asked if they could call me back in “one minute”.

I didn’t ask them to call me back tomorrow or someday or soon. I repeatedly emphasized that I only needed “one minute”.

It has now been  180 minutes and still no call.

Shame on me for believing the answer.

———————-

Update on Tue, 13.Mar.2012

Well, I’ve been waiting multiple days now. Still no call. Guess they lied.

I’ll make the call and find out why they lied to me.

Shame on them.

———————-

Update on Wed, 14.Mar.2012

I called again.

I was unable to get the overly polite telephone operators who work in the Philipines to truly understand me.

The have been highly trained at being polite, just not as well trained at understanding English.

Unfortunately, I made a critical mistake. The operator kept offering to help me buy minutes and I kept insisting I did not want to buy minutes, but instead wanted to have my phone set up so that it would let me buy minutes (without calling) as was offered in the promotional material.

That silly dialogue went round and round and eventually I was wrongly persuaded to allow the operator to do what I was told was required. At the end, to summarize, I’d bought more minutes and still did not have an answer why I could not use my phone to do that.

There is ONE possibility. When I try to buy minutes using my phone it says “Please Enter Your PIN:”. Entering the PIN for my Debit card fails.

It turns out it might be possible that it does not want my PIN but wants the CVV Number instead (http://www.cvvnumber.com/cvv.html).

I’ll wait awhile until I need more minutes then try again.

The whole interchange has been the most frustrating experience.

I’ll keep you posted.

This article (http://dallasne.ws/y3eOHn) in the Dallas Morning News explains great news for my college campus. I attended UD way back when they built the cafeteria mentioned in the article. Back then, “having a car” was less common which, combined with a total lack of public transportation, tended to isolate the campus. These changes will be very good news.

Not mentioned in the article is the fact that the metro stop for UD will be decorated with custom artwork from the ex-chairman of the university art department, and current Professor Emeritus, Lyle Novinski (married to Sybil Novinski, long time Registrar when I was there and now University Historian, Provost Special Projects).