Nevergirl’s

In other news, I’ve started to look like a dragon.

A few scales here and there, wings, and a foul mouth capable of breathing fire and I really would look like a dragon. That is how ugly I’ve become. I’m lucky I’ve the most low maintenance skin this side of the planet. Given how little I’ve been sleeping these days (toss in the fact I only wash my face when I shower), it’s nothing short of a miracle that nary a pimple has popped up. I really have to stop being such a horrid workaholic. I’ve been taking employment so seriously that for two weeks now, I’ve my work face on at 6 in the morning! Who does that? Who?

We’re scrambling to finish a really important project, and I’ve been manically pounding away at the keyboard every day. I’ve been so busy I haven’t had the time to Facebook, in fact. I chuck the work face only at 10 in the evening, at which point I’m so tired I ask the husband to drag me to bed. I wish I could say I’m joshing, but I’m not. He really does end up carrying me to bed every time I fall asleep beside my laptop.

Make no mistake — I love what I do, and I love that I do it from home. However, I also have days when I’m so tired from work I want to run away from everything and just spend all my days staring at toothpaste. Like now. Like this.

Posted in Blathers, From the workdesk | Comments Off

I’m tired, tired, tired. I’ve been pulling in 15 to 16 hours at work every day, leaving me with very little time for rest and play. At the end of every workday, I stumble to bed more zombie than human, more dead than alive. I’ve been living on Red Bull, vitamins, and fruits. I should have lost weight by now, given how little I’ve been eating, but because I’m sorely sleep-deprived, I’ve been gaining weight instead. I can’t wait for this project to end. It’s crazy emailing at least 15 people from roughly eight different time zones every day! My concept of day and night is now nonexistent. If this keeps up for long, I just might end up bigger than a truck by the time the project is complete.

God of weighing scales, help me.

Posted in From the workdesk | Comments Off

I learned something new today, something lots of people around the world would pay tons of money for. I learned how to do keyword research. No, it’s not the kind where you just type a series of words or copypaste a URL and leave the spiders to do their job. It’s not the kind where you randomly pick out long tail keywords either and hope for the best. Rather, it’s keywording that targets the best phrases for the website you want to rank — and with us knowing exactly how many competitors we need to clobber to reach the top.

Of course, I’m flabbergasted at how easy it is — most of the time, anyway. A few clicks here, some copypasting there, and I can pull up the keywords website owners would fight tooth and nail for. The task gets difficult when you’re working on a grossly saturated niche like dating. In fact, Wett spent a full 30 minutes today scouring for 6 dating-related keywords! He was frustrated, naturally, and made lots of faces while at it. But we both ended up laughing because some of the keywords Google spits out are just too hilarious for words.
(more…)

Posted in Busy-ness, From the workdesk | 1 Comment »

There’s a new trend in the U.S’ layoff-beleaguered economy, and it’s one that’s keeping plastic surgeons happy.

In the old days, people had cosmetics surgery to improve their looks, correct physical defects, or steal someone else’s identity and go on a thieving or bombing spree somewhere in Lithuania. Today, they’ve added one more to this eclectic string of reasons.

The new argument for revisional rhinoplasty and other means of going under the knife? Career advancement. The staunchest prophet of this new gospel? Donald Trump.

His Hairness argues that the average worker ant has an innate desire not just to be near good-looking people but to please them as well. For this reason, they work harder to please beautiful bosses and jump at the opportunity to impress. This is why football teams with handsome quarterbacks generally have more success than those that don’t. This also explains why better-looking people command higher entry rates and tend to be promoted faster than their average-looking counterparts.

You would think that in this day and age, The Donald’s arguments would get laughed out of cubicles everywhere. But no, worker ants are sitting up and taking notes. One U.S News and World Report write-up notes that better-looking bosses are more persuasive and are generally perceived as more credible. In his article, Looks: Why They Matter More Than You Ever Imagined, Gordon Patzer suggests several means for prolonging your workplace effectiveness: teeth whitening, eyelid surgery, hair transplant, Botox, and yes, revisional rhinoplasty.

Clearly, it’s not just the fashion industry that’s obsessed with beauty. The workplace is, too. And even though His Hairness ends his post with some conciliatory line about average-looking people also doing as good a job as ‘em good-looking ones, some people now look onto a nose job as the best way to fast-track their climb up the ladder.

Believe it or not, today, workplace go-getters buff up their appearance along with their resume. Ridiculous, is what it is, and you can bet your next paycheck we’re not putting “must be conventionally good-looking” on our hiring ads. Not this year, and not in this lifetime.

Posted in From the workdesk, Strangeness she writes, While on baby leave | Comments Off

Vet talked me into signing up for an online HR community months back. No, it did not turn me into a walking, breathing repository of HR information. What it did is route at least 30 emails a day into my inbox. And because I seldom check my emails, thanks to Globelines’ horrendously slow connection, I get stuck with manual inbox clean-up which involves sifting through chunks and hunks of mail – 598 at one time – to delete the ones that don’t matter and sort the ones that do.

My mail habits are the stuff jokes are made of — to the husband, anyway. He tells me it’s good I don’t check my mail regularly; otherwise, inbox clean-up would turn into a full-time job.

Today, I had another go at those posts. And what do you know? I got 600+ in three weeks! One mail made me laugh, however. It discussed the funniest ways people unwittingly sabotage their own job applications and resumes. The list includes:

1) writing down “occasionally” in the part where applicants must indicate their Sex
2) actually putting this line in the cover letter: I’m 16, pregnant, and can do anything.
3) adding “bi-lingual in three languages” as a skill
4) printing out your resume in colored paper, with cute or wacky fonts
5) providing an email address that is just, well, too odd for comfort (and just so you know, I’m guilty of this, too. My email address is literally, um, odd.)

All these bloopers considered, what does a fail-safe, professional resume look like? The mail provides this sample from one Dan Neumeister. It’s dry, it’s concise, and it’s focused.

But just so we’re clear on this, I’d probably take one look at professionally done resumes like his and feel drowsy two paragraphs after. There’s no accounting for taste. I really, truly prefer the applications that go: You should hire me because I bring doughnuts to the office on Wednesdays.

Posted in From the workdesk, While on baby leave | 3 Comments »