I'm Neurotic, Just Like My Buddies Hannibal and Sheldon

I swear to God there was once a time in my life when I was well-adjusted.  The more I write this blog, and the more I actually read it, the clearer it becomes that I’m a total mess.  If I didn’t know me, and all I knew of me was what I read on this blog, my neurotic personality characteristics would have me right up there as a cross between my favourite movie character, Hannibal Lecter, and my favourite TV character, Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory.  How in the hell did that happen?

                                            Sheldon Cooper, my neurotic hero                                               

According to this blog, I’m dependent on a mobile device, without which I have no idea how I’d function; I’m addicted to a flashing red light that I can feel blinking in my sleep; I don’t like people talking to me on airplanes; I certainly don’t like being touched by people I haven’t touched first; and I’m not opposed to pushing down old ladies so I can be the first to get onto a plane.  With this list of qualities, can you imagine who EHarmony.ca would match me up with?

You guessed it...My E-Harmony match:  They don't come more bat-shit crazy than this one

My latest neurotic addiction, and when I say latest, I mean in the last year or so, is a prolific little social networking tool called Linkedin.  I know you’ve heard of it.  It is a significant part of my work-life.  It’s always open on my desktop, and it’s always launched on my blackberry.  I know in real time what’s going on with my entire network, which has now grown to approximately 372 people.  I don’t think that’s a lot in Linkedin terms, but the odd part, when I really think about it, is that I know every single one of those contacts.  I’m addicted to it, but not to the point where I would regularly add random people I haven’t encountered in real life.

My daughter Haley mocks me because she says I have 12 facebook friends.  In reality, I have about 77, which is perfect for me (She has 210 Facebook friends).  She’s pretty unimpressed when I tell her that I have over 350 Linkedin connections.  I am as attached to Linkedin as she is to Facebook.  I could live without Facebook.  If it went down for a week, I probably wouldn’t notice, but if Linkedin goes down for maintenance for 8 minutes in the middle of the day, it’s a major inconvenience.  I use it as my address book.  When possible, I check out people before I meet them, and if not, then I check them out after I’ve met them.  If I’m interviewing someone, Linkedin is the first place I go after I look at the resume.  When I have been job searching myself, it’s the main tool I use to find opportunities and to network.  

The most amazing thing to me is that the 372 people that I know on Linkedin can connect me to 84,000 people, and those 84,000 people connect me to 5,524,300.  To think in high school they all said I’d never be popular.  I can’t even properly process 5,524,300 people.  Based on a quick Google search, that means that I am three degrees separated from a number of people equal to the population of Finland.  Or Denmark.  It’s staggering.  According to the people at Linkedin, I had over eight thousand people join my network today.  Today alone, I am now connected to eight thousand more people than I was yesterday.  That’s the approximate population of some country called Tuvalu, a Polynesian island country I hadn’t heard of until five minutes ago.  It’s staggering.

Tuvalu...I may want to visit, now that I'm connected to the entire population.

I look at Linkedin because I like to see who’s looking at me.  I’m interested to see who clicked on my profile, and I always wonder what made them do it?  Why me, and why today?  What were they doing that caused them to find my profile.  I recently had the husband of one of the people I work with click on my profile.  “Curious,” I thought to myself, then wondered what the hell the person I work with was saying about me that caused her husband to want to check me out.  How do you bring that up without sounding like a completely anal nutcase?  Well, go back to the top and re-read.  I’ve become a completely anal nutcase.

I'm so neurotic now I'm never more than one step away from going all Gary Busey on you

I hate it when I look at my profile and it says that an ‘Anonymous Linkedin User’ checked me out.  How is it helpful for me to know that?  And who are you, Anonymous?  And why do you think you need to hide?  It even makes you more of a creepy stalker when you’re hiding behind the ‘Anonymous Linkedin User’ profile name.  Apparently you pay extra for that.  

Either a Toronto Maple Leafs fan, or an anonymous Linkedin User...Either way, you have nothing to be proud of

It’s also bothersome when I look at my profile and it says ‘Someone from ABC Company,’ and you click on the link and you get a list of ten people from that company who ‘may’ have checked you out.  How are you supposed to know who’s stalking you.  Well, the nice folks at Linkedin have solved that problem for you, pay extra and you get to find out.   You have no idea how often I’ve thought of ponying up the cash to get a look at my full list.  So far, shockingly, I’ve resisted, but I’m fairly certain that I’m going to break one day.  Just wait, Linkedin, you’ll get my money soon.

What good is this to anybody?

I live in fear that one day, it’s all going to go away.  That some evil venture capital firm is going to buy into Linkedin, and they’re going to want to generate more revenue, and decide to hold my connections hostage until I start paying a monthly fee to use the service.  I can’t help the feeling that the social networking sites are like drug dealers…giving us just enough access to get us addicted and dependent, then whammo, monthly subscription fees. 

"Hey man, gimme 10 connections..."

For me, Linkedin is a kind of study in human behavior.  I’m always interested to see if my predictions are correct, based on the behavior of my contacts.  When they start adding contacts like crazy, are they getting ready to start a job search?  More often than not, when a contact adds a bunch of new connections, within a couple of months, you see a new job title, and a new company name come across the virtual wire.  Sometimes I see someone I haven’t spoken to in years check me out, and I count the days til I get a call or an email with an offer to sell consulting or other services.  It’s an amazing tool.

Could ole' Sigmund predict behaviour using Linkedin clues?

I would like to meet the people at Linkedin who create the algorithms for the “Jobs I May Be Interested In” feature.  Occasionally the jobs they serve me up are pretty appropriate, but the likelihood of me ever applying for a job as the Vice President and Chief Anti Money Laundering Officer for any company is slim to zip.  But I’m flattered they thought of me.

Somewhere in here it tells Linkedin that I want a job in the Anti Money Laundering industry.

I don’t know if 372 connections is a good number of people to be connected to when you’re in your forties (common, my early forties) after you’ve been in the working world for over twenty years.  Is it bad to want to have 500 connections?  Linkedin stops counting when you hit 500, and you get the magic “Over 500 Connections” designation.  I want that one.  It’s like winning a virtual prize in a virtual world.   Next thing you know, I’ll be starting a Dungeons and Dragons club.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  Penny...Penny...Penny...

Pardon Me Madam, But Do You Have A Man?

The earliest memory I have of wanting to crawl under a rock and disappear because of embarrassment is June 1984.  We were screaming toward the end of year dance.  For almost a year I had sat across the science room from Allison Reading, and I was bound and determined to ask that girl out.  Instead of waiting for a quiet moment, like all the suave guys did, I decided that the end of class, when everybody else was busy cleaning up would be the perfect time to put it out there.

It could have been so beautiful.  But alas....

I had absolutely no indication that Allison would be open to a date with me, and I had no wing-man to check it out in advance.  So, during the chaotic clean-up period, I mustered up all my courage, and because it was really noisy in the room, I turned up the volume, and said, quite loudly, “Allison, will you go to the dance with me?”   Somewhere between the first and second syllables in Allison, the entire room went silent, and they went from my classmates to my audience, and let’s just say the show didn’t go well.

I was a complete laughing stock.  Sorry, Allison.

She was shocked and embarrassed, the teacher was dumbfounded, and I wanted to melt into a puddle.  Thank God the bell rang and everyone took off.  Including Allison.  She never spoke to me again, and I never again asked anyone to a dance.  I changed schools (for other reasons) at the beginning of grade 10, so at least I didn’t have to deal with four more years of embarrassment over that one.  And hopefully, neither did Allison.

I mention this because when I joined world of work, I sadly didn’t leave behind the world of embarrassing moments.  I’ve had my share at work, too, and like at school, embarrassing moments at work tend to stick.  Except at work, we refer to them as CLM’s, or Career Limiting Moves.

Kanye knows about CLMs-Just ask Miss Taylor Swift

Early in my working life, I was doing my best to become bilingual.  I lived in Ottawa, and worked for a car rental company, occasionally on the Quebec side of the river, at an office located inside a federal government complex.  Most of our customers were federal civil servants, and of course, they were slightly militant about doing business in French. 

Most of the time, I was pretty OK, en français, but on one day, it all went to hell.   A regular customer came in, but because I wasn’t a regular employee at that location, I didn’t recognize her.  She was a snooty Assistant Deputy Minister of whatever, and she was accustomed to being recognized.  I was already at a disadvantage because I didn’t know her, and when she walked in, every French word and phrase I knew just completely exited my head.  It was like my first day with the language. 

Leona Helmsley...neither french, nor an ADM, but you get the gist

“I have a reservation,” she said, en français.  Do you think in my wildest dreams I could think of what to say?  I couldn’t even remember how to ask her name.  Instead of a very simple, “Votre nom, madame?” I thought I’d go with something less formal and much more stupid, “Avez-vous un nom?”  Do you have a name?  Being the big Frenchy that I am, it never occurred to me that I had just completely offended this snooty federal employee by asking what sounded to her like, “Avez-vous un homme?”  Do you have a man?  She reported me for my stellar French skills to the manager of the location, and I wasn’t allowed to work in Hull again for a long time.

She came to rent a car, not find her perfect mate...

Still with the car rental company, I was working at the Ottawa Airport location, as the daytime shift supervisor.  Since I typically opened the location in the morning, I was always the one to pick up the shift notes from the evening shift the night before.   Normally there would be notes about a challenging customer, or directions about some cars the following morning, or a computer problem etc, but the woman that worked the evening shift a few nights a week used the opportunity to write her manifesto.

She liked to leave a note for the morning shift

The notes would be about overfull garbage cans, and the mess left by the day shift, and how nobody cared about her, and how she was all alone, and how could we rent all the cars and leave her with nothing.  Day after day, week after week, I read these notes.  It got to the point where just the sight of her handwriting would send me into a rage.  It’s a good thing I never saw this woman.

Like the Unibomber's manifesto, her handwriting could send people into a rage

One day, I was working a later shift.  Her notes were the same as they always were, and at the beginning of my shift, I had my rage filled moment, and moved on.  As it turned out, our shifts overlapped that day, and I got the pleasure of seeing her.   She walked in to start her shift, and opened her mouth.  All I heard was “lazy day shift, overflowing garbage cans, take responsibility,” and I lost it.  I was at the end of my rope with her.  In front of customers, I let her have it.

I don't think my rant was as bad as Ole' Charlie's, since I still had my job when it was over

I went on a rant of my own:  “I’m so tired of your complaining, You never have anything nice to say, Can’t you just start with hello, Why do you always have to nag?”  I totally went off on her, in front of some pretty stunned customers.  As soon as I finished up with my customer, I stormed off, into the airport to put some distance between me and the nagging freak.  I was sitting on a bench when Mr. Pinder, one of my regular customers who had been in line and witnessed this meltdown sat down beside me…he wanted to know if I was OK, and we just sat their quietly until he had to board his plane.

 

I went back to the desk, and as I walked in, she asked if I was OK, and I apologized to her for going off on her, but asked her in future to not be such a nag, and especially not to start bitching about stuff when customers were there, and she said, and I’ll never forget it, “What the hell are you talking about?  All I said was hello, and how are you?”   Talk about embarrassed.  Crap.  All I heard was some imaginary crazy nagging.   She, my co-workers, and some of the customers looked at me a little sideways after that one.

Many years later, at a different job, we had a handyman in our office that worked for the building landlord.  Whenever we needed lightbulbs changed or that kind of thing, we called him.  He was a great guy, but he stunk.  I’m not just talking about run of the mill body odour, I’m talking about eye-watering, nostril burning B-O.  It was terrible, and even though people had made complaints about him, his unique smell never changed.

 

I found myself in an elevator with him one day, and instead of going up, which I wanted, we went down, to the parking level.  I was just about dying, being stuck in the elevator with this guy, and couldn’t wait for him to get off.  We got down to the parking level, the doors opened, and he got out, but his stench remained, hanging in the air like mustard gas.  I had to go back up to the 5^th floor, and just as the doors were closing, a hand reached in and the doors re-opened.  Who else?  Our CEO.

Riding 6 floors alone with our CEO could be awkward at the best of times. Now that the elevator was filled with the nostril-burning stench of body-odour, that he could only believe to be coming off of me, it was the most awkward 34-seconds-that-really-felt-like-five-hours of my life.  What are you supposed to say?  “Really, Jim, that stench isn’t mine?” or “Wow Jim, have you considered showering before coming to work?”  Instead, you say nothing and you stare at the floor.  Then when the doors open, you bolt to your desk as fast as you can, call your boss, tell him the story, and beg him to relay it to the CEO so he doesn’t think you’re smelly.  Or at least that’s what I did.

It's great when the president of your company thinks you stink

I’ve had many embarrassing moments in my working career… grabbing and hugging somebody I thought was someone else at a trade show; falling asleep at meetings and at other inappropriate times during the work-day; slamming my office door so hard that everyone in the office thought my glass walls were going to shatter; and offering a customer a nice putain (a hooker) instead of a poutine (a Quebecois cheesy french fry treat).  I’ve found that when you make an embarrassing or career limiting move that the very best thing you can do is hold your head up high and find a job somewhere else.

My Holiday Poem

I once worked for a company for about thirteen years, and each year, I wrote a Christmas poem, and it kind of became a little tradition.  Here's the latest in the series of holiday poems...I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you have a wonderful holiday.

It’s the week before Christmas

And all over town;

It makes people nuts

This festive smack-down. 

The malls are just crazy,

Our nerves are all frayed;

One stop at the mall

And I wish it’s home that I stayed.

At the office, it’s wild

Trying to tie up loose ends;

Clear the junk off my desk

Before Christmas descends.

This year was so great

I started exciting, fresh work;

A new role, a new firm

And the boss: Not a jerk.

A leader with vision

Is all that I asked for;

Ole Santa came through

I got that, and much more.

I love my new job,

The people, the place;

But I travel so much

I need a brand new suitcase.

 

I’ve flown so many miles

Air Canada now treats me swell;

But it took forty-nine flights

Of being treated like hell.

On your 50^th flight

The sun starts to shine;

Now you’re someone so special

They give you free wine.

 

Lots of time in Quebec

La belle province, c’est vrai;

I feel like I visited,

And decided to stay.

I miss my three pretty girls,

And gorgeous Laura, it’s true;

When I travel away

To do what I do.

So now we use texting

And occasionally Skype;

But don’t ask Laura to cam

She’s just not the type.

My family is patient,

They’ve embraced this big change;

We can handle the distance

Except when I’m out of cell range.

And that’s my wish, Santa,

If you have no objection;

Build me more cell phone towers

So I get better reception.

Cuz it’s a part of my life

That blinking  little red light;

Seeing me with no Torch

Is an unpleasant sight.

 

Santa, you know how I feel 

‘Bout my friends over at RIM;

Give a couple of good quarters

To my buds, Mike and Jim.

So on this note I’ll end

It’s Christmas, once more;

7 days left for shopping

You’d better hit that last store.

Share time with those close

Over coffee or beer;

Enjoy good times together

With lots of love and good cheer.

From our home to yours', have a great holiday.

Sean, Laura, Haley, Ainsley & Madeline

Soul-Sucking Jobs for $1000, Alex

I’ve been lucky.  I have never been unemployed for too long, and for that I’m very grateful.  There were many years where I had part-time side jobs just to help make ends meet.  I loved some of those part-time jobs, and others were just grim.  A couple lasted years and others lasted for days.  In one case, I couldn’t even make it through the entire shift.

When I was in university, I was racking up credit card debt like a madman.  When you arrived at university in the eighties, you got handed a form with all the credit cards listed, and all you had to do was put a tick in a box beside each of the ones you wanted, sign your name, and wait.  Within 6-8 weeks, your mailbox was full of new plastic.  I had a Petro Canada card and an Esso card, but no car.  I had cards from the Bay, Sears and Eaton’s.  I had a MasterCard, two Visas, and an American Express card.  I needed an extra wallet to carry around all my plastic.

I was living the high life, but as with all good things, it came to a crashing end.  Those creditors wanted to be paid.  When I had maxed out all the cards, and had already been using my MasterCard to pay my Visa, and vice versa, and I could no longer eat at the Eaton’s restaurant because my card was declined, it was time to get another job.  Enter BiWay.  For those who don’t know, BiWay was like the dollar store, before there was such a thing.  Except the stuff wasn’t a dollar.

My first shift was on inventory day.  If you ever were in a BiWay, you will recall that there were tons of big bins, all filled with little things, like individual Bic pens, and lighters.  We had to count every one of those individual things.  OMG.  I was forced to count a barrel of Bic pens, separating the red from the blue from the black about four times before I got a number that my manager thought was acceptable.

Approximately 4000 individual Bic pens fit in a huge oil drum sized bin at the BiWay

The most bizarre thing about the BiWay was that it had one of the most formal structures I’ve ever worked in.  I had to call my supervisor, and my manager, both of whom were younger than me (remember, I was only in my early twenties at the time), Mr. and Miss.  Who does that?  I’ve worked in law firms and multi-national organizations where senior partners and CEOs didn’t want to be addressed so formally.  I didn’t last long at the BiWay.

At BiWay, the bosses expected to be called Mister.

After my stint in discount retail, and in the midst of a recession, I had a day job at a law firm that I really liked, but that wasn’t paying the bills.  I was engaged and saving for my new life as a married dude, so I decided to go ahead and get a part time job to supplement the savings, or to pay off some bills or something.  I had already done my time in fast food, and decided that my new job should not involve asking the age-old question, ‘Do you want fries with that?’

I also was not that into the idea of telemarketing, but I was looking for something that would fit into my work schedule, so when I saw an ad for a job doing fund raising for the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, I figured it couldn’t be that bad.   I called up, and they hired me without an interview.  That should have been my first red flag.

The National Arts Centre.  Could they survive without me?  Yes.

My job was to call a pre-screened list of people that had previously supported the NAC, and from whom it should have been easy to squeeze some fund raising dollars.  It turns out that we were not simply asking for donations, but rather asking for specific levels of ‘patronship’.  Being a patron means you’ve donated much more than a sponsor or a regular donor.  The cost of becoming an arts patron was between 1500.00 and 5000.00.  In a recession.    Good freakin’ luck.

They handed me the list, pointed at the phone, gave me a script and wished me good luck.  I settled in, and dialed.  After one call, it became evident that shaking down arts lovers for cash in the midst of a recession was not for me.  I spent the next two hours fake dialing and talking to a dial tone.  I clearly did not get any donations, and after what felt like a year, my 15 minute break arrived.  I stepped outside, and ran like hell.  They never even called to see what happened.  I’m sure it must have been a fairly regular occurrence for them.   On the positive side, the National Arts Centre remains a vibrant thriving enterprise, even without my help.

The telemarketing job from hell

In 2011, if you watch A&E on Wednesday nights, Dave, Jarrod, Brandi, Barry and Darrell make self storage look pretty cool.  However, in 1995, it was not cool.   Not one bit cool.   In another desperate bid to generate some cash, I took a part-time job as the Sunday guy at a self storage facility.  I don’t know how I thought I could possibly handle sitting in a remote office, at the side of a highway, seeing absolutely nobody for an entire day.  But I did sit there Sunday after Sunday, occasionally renting out a storage locker, but never meeting a co-worker and rarely talking to a customer.  I could feel my soul getting sucked out.

I read a lot of books.  I dreamed a lot of daydreams.  I watched the clock tick by, minute by minute, every tock felt like another nail in my heart.  There was no internet, no ipods, not a TV, it was horrible.  One day, I discovered that the phone system had an intercom.  I’m not sure why Canadiana Self Storage needed an intercom, as the office was a one room shack at the side of a highway, but an intercom we had.  I passed the rest of my days at the self storage empire singing karaoke to myself through the intercom.  After a few more karaoke Sundays, I had to quit.

A regular Sunday afternoon in the Storage office

There were times when I tried on my entrepreneur’s hat.   I figured that working for myself would allow me to make some extra money, on my own terms, and on my own schedule.  Still in the nineties, I decided that, while living in a small Alberta town, I could make lots of loot by, you guessed it, cleaning other people’s houses.  My lovely wife was working as a desk-top-publisher, so I told her my idea, and before you knew it, I had business cards, and A Man and His Mop was born.

My first client was a guy who hadn’t cleaned his house since forever.  It was the most disgusting thing I ever saw.  The moment I walked into his house was the moment I decided that A Man and His Mop was over.  I agreed to clean the sty, so I cleaned it.  I couldn’t get the whole house finished in one day, so I was supposed to finish it the next.  I got up the next day and couldn’t face the thought of going back, so I didn’t.  I didn’t get paid, and I spent the next year sneaking around the small town, trying to avoid this guy.   I can’t imagine cleaning people’s houses for a living, but I have a boat-load of respect for people who do.

I don’t even want to tell you about my next entrepreneurial experience, Pooper Scooping.  I don’t know why I thought cleaning up after dogs would be better than cleaning up after people, because it isn’t.  I got one gig, actually got the cash, and shut down the business.  It never occurred to me that once I cleaned up the dog crap, that I would have to take it somewhere to get rid of it.  Toting around bags of dog crap in the back of my car was nasty gross.

I know that none of these are even close to being the worst jobs in the world.  But, I've learned that I can’t work alone, and I have to believe in what I’m doing.  To top it all off, I have what my brother-in-law calls ‘computer hands’, so not so surprisingly, cleaning houses,  heavy or dirty work, or picking up dog crap turned out to not be for me.