One of the happiest, yet sadest days

This week our daughter earned her Masters Degree. It was a long haul as anyone who has earned one can tell you. I am beyond estatic over it.

It is also a very sad time for me as well.

Although she still lives at home, this marks the end. At least to me. Now my little girl is all grown up.

Gone are the days of watching her play with her fashion dolls, gone are the days I'd wait to put her on the school bus or take her off, gone are the days she would cuddle up next to me and fall asleep on my lap, gone are the days when I would scoop her up and put her to bed. Granted I have not done that in years, but now to me it makes it official. She is not my baby anymore but a grown woman ready to go out and concure the world.

There is a special relationship that exists between father and daughter. One that simple is not there with a son. It is different. If you are a dad with a daughter you know exactly what I am talking about.

Time has made her grow up in front of my eyes. It seems like only yesterday I was walking along with her at my side and her little hand held onto one finger of my hand and those little legs moving to keep up. Yes only yesterday. Today I watched her as she went up on stage wearing the black gown and the colorful hood signifying that she earned a Masters Degree.

It will not be long now before she gets married and leaves the house.

I knew this day would come. We all did. But I am not ready for it. I still see that little girl with pig tails all hippity bipity skipping along into my arms to spend some daddy daughter time. But now, it is gone forever.

'till next time.

So far it has been cold here and a lot of rain.  Yuk.  Better than snow.

No luck in the job search front.  Not even a nibble.  A few recruiters did ask for a copy of my resume from LinkedIn but that was that.  No other action.

I was talking to an ex-coworker a few days ago and a friend of hers met up with us.  She has heard how bad the age discrimination is in New York from a lot of people.

My daughter was in a car accident recently.  She was parked and a woman did an illegal u-turn and hit her.  The woman has a brand new BMW.  She got out her her BMW and said that she never hit my daughters car and then threatened that she will testify against my daughter in court.  Then she said she did not want police involvement or report it to her insurance.

I responded to the scene and took photos.  The woman was all freaky about the fact I took the pics.  Next thing you know the police showed up.  The woman did not want to give her info to the police for she was late for a luncheon.  Guess what?  Te police took her info and made a report.  Guess she was late.  Sucks for her.

The damage to my daughters car in minor.  But she now has spinal problems.  The woman's insurance will not step up to the plate and do the right thing so my daughter had to o through her insurance.  I really hate new York.

I am making more connections on Facebook.  I am starting to invite some people to connect with me on LinkedIn.  I hope that someone there really has some sort of network connection that can help land me a job in the Keys.  Never know.

But if something crops up here, I will need to go for it for I have to pay bills.  But if that KW job materializes....

'till next time.

Today I am going to address the issue of employment recruiters from my perspective.  This is based on my experience in working with them in the past and present along with information that I obtained from the workshops at the unemployment office.

One would think that the recruiter will work their tails off in finding you the prospective employee a new position.  Well that is the furthest from the truth that you can imagine.  They work for the commission only and do not care who they place.  You are nothing more than a name in a pile of names.  And the commission can run as high as 1/3 of your first year’s salary.

Now you would think that they would work hard on getting someone who makes $150,000 a year a job.  But the chances are that they wouldn’t for there are not that many jobs in that salary level at their disposal.  Instead it is easier to place 3 candidates who make $50,000 and still get the same amount of commission.

Recruiters get hundreds of resumes a day.  More than what they have jobs for and with the outsourcing of jobs to places like India their client base has shrunk dramatically.  Their simply are not enough jobs for them to fill.

A recruiter gets a job in, they take only the newest resumes that they have and try to place them with the current openings.  If yours is not a fit then it goes into the black hole and is never looked at again. 

I have heard claims that even though that there is no fit today, they will enter you into a database that they can run when jobs come in that are a potential fit.  Of course that for the most part is a crock.  The recruiters simply do not have enough time to scour the database to look for a potential candidate for a client.  The client wants to fill the job now and the recruiter wants their commission so the newest prospects have the best shot.

Recruiters also are in the position in practicing age discrimination which is epidemic on Long Island and in many areas of the country as well.  They do so without ever meeting the prospect.  But how?

Let's say they are looking at a resume.  They see that you got your BS in computer science in 2010.  Two years ago.  They also notice the dates of your past jobs and the level of employment that you had.  Say sales clerk, or fast foods, gas attendant, etc. and you are applying for a position of a JAVA programmer.

By doing some simple math we can very easily figure that this person is around 22 to 28 years old.  Naturally there are people over 45 who are getting their bachelors for the first time but looking at the percentages it is generally the younger crowd that takes the lead.  Plus with the work history in the resume can also give a clue as to a person’s age.  Of course there really is no way to determine that without a face to face meeting.

When you send a resume to a recruiter I was told not to expect a response unless they have something right in front of them when they review the resume.  I was told this at one of the workshops that was run by a former recruiter.  Seems to be so since I have contacted numerous recruiters and not one of them has responded.

I worked with several recruiters in the past and was told by most of them to call them once a week to keep my name fresh so they would work in finding me a new job.  I did that.  After the third time calling I was told I would be better off looking for a new recruiter.  How is that for service?  I have never had any luck with any of them.  Not even one.

One recruiter told me to get a job flipping hamburgers.  Here it is a person with my enormous experience and training in information technology that would be a major asset to a company being told to get a $7 an hour job flipping burgers.  Obviously I would never consider using them again.

A dirty trick that they like to use is if and when you meet them, they will ask you “where have you looked?”  As if they were going to work in getting you a job at one of those locations.  In reality what they are doing is gathering information for other possible candidates and not you.  They really do not give a hoot about you and they never work to get you into any of those places.

According to the workshop at the unemployment office, you have a slim chance in getting work through any of them and they should count for less than 15% of your job search.  This tells me and reaffirms what I have experienced with them is that they are not very reliable at all and should not be counted on as a resource in finding work.  But should they should still be considered in contacting for what if your resume is the one they open at the time the perfect match is on their desk.  You really would not want to pass up any opportunity at all.

There might be a good recruiter that will work and get candidates jobs, but I have yet to meet any.

Right now looking at the webcam at the Hog’s Breath Saloon it is a wonderful 81 degrees and looking at the webcam at Mallory Square the sky is picture perfect.  Here in East Egg we have a break from all the rain today with the sky being very overcast.  More rain is expected for the rest of the week.  The temperature right now is a chilly 62 degrees.

Yesterday was May 5^th, the 75^th anniversary for Sloppy Joe’s!  Congratulations to the owners and staff of Sloppy Joe's!  I saw that they had a street fair with a stage setup in the intersection of Duval Street and Greene.  Looked like that there was a great crowd.  Too bad I was not there.

I was on my Facebook page and one of my FB friends started a chat session with me.  Gail reached out to me and gave me a great site to add to my research in finding work in Key West, conchtv.com.  I am using Mile Zero at milezerokeywest.com which was also given to me by a FB friend.  Conch TV will be added to that as another source for information.  Who knows, I still might land that ideal network engineering job there.

Anyway time to send out more resumes.

‘till next time.

It is raining right now in East Egg.  It is to be like this all day long, like as if I had someplace to go today.  But looking at the radar I don't think so and I think it will clear up by lunch time. But it is a chilly 58 right now.
I watched the TV show on Fox News on Ch5 about outsourcing making babies to India. In my opinion the whole thing stinks. But I can understand why to a point. According to the news it costs about $100K in the United States to have a surrogate have your baby. Outsource it to India it is half that amount so no wonder why American families look in that direction.

Again by sending American jobs to India the companies save millions for the labor rate there is a lot less than here. A JAVA programmer here gets about $80-120K per year plus benefits. In India that same job goes for $12K tops with no benefits. No wonder jobs are being outsourced. This same practice has now hit parenthood.

The women who are surrogates often come from impoverished areas so the few nickles they make go towards making ends meet. With the way a lot of India is in poverty there is no short supply of wombs.
But families who go this route and outsource the making of their babies are taking major chances. The laws in the United States are designed to protect both the surrogate and the baby-less family. One of the reasons the cost here is so high. Tons and tons of red tape which you do not have with outsourcing, or at least not as much. The quality of medical care in places like India is very questionable as they do not have the same standards as we do. So no wonder the costs here are high.

But the family also have another problem, what if the surrogate does not want to give up the baby and takes off?  It happens here in the US but at least we have laws, attorneys and courts that the family can turn to.  Our laws do not apply to other countries and the family has little recourse should the surrogate disappear.   And if that happens the family could be out all that money.

One thing on the show scares the crap out of me, in one clinic the surrogate stays in the clinic from the moment of implantation of the embryo until birth.  Is this a form of imprisonment to be sure that she surrenders the baby?  Of course she may never get the chance to hold it in the first place.  And with the economy being so bad in India who is to say that they are not abducting women to use them as brood mares since making babies has now been outsourced?  Sounds far fetched?  I bet it can and might just happen.

To me, this is outsourcing at it's worse and should not be permitted.  What needs to be done is for the costs here in the U.S. come way down so it will no longer be profitable to be outsourced to a third world country.

Today I am doing more resumes.  Like always.  The workshop at the unemployment office on LinkedIn was the best so far.  I picked up a lot and am going to use it on my LinkedIn profile.  That too is in today's game plan.

My wife and I have been talking about going to Key West.  The answer is YES!!!!  Now to concentrate on how much this will run and nail the particulars down.  I am going to use June 12th as a target for arriving in Key West.  We might do the 13th instead as the target date depending on several factors.  To save money the 12th would be the date.  It will cost more if we do the 13th for that would require an additional day or so in Key West for the car rental place in Miami is closed on Sundays.

Part of today's fun is to come up with numbers and more numbers and more numbers.  The big part that I am doing right now is researching hotels for the best price.  I reached out to three of them with some questions, Travelers Lodge, Days Inn and Ibis Bay.  The email to the first two hotels bounced back and I got their email address right from their websites.  Ibis Bay has not responded as of this writing.

Looking at the webcam at the Hog's Breath Saloon it is 77 degrees there and it is pouring rain.  Not fun weather.  Looking at Duval Street from Sloppy Joe's webcam I see that there are more people than I did yesterday, but the rain!  Just for the heck of it I went to the webcam at the Conch Tour Train and see that it is down.

Right now I have 267 friends on Facebook.  That is 267 potential networking resources for a new life in Key West.

Anyway I have to get back at it.
'till next time.