Things that bother us.

I want that job :(

It was like 80 degrees here today. Fuck that. It's December. Act yo' season!

I'll take the 80 degrees.

I want to live in a place where it's 67 degrees 365 days a year.

Really guys? The weather? What are we...strangers on an elevator?

I can feel the sexual tension in elevators.. love it.

You really hate me now, don't you?

A c-character? I can't believe I listened to Billy Ocean for you.

Pillars1999 said:

A few weeks ago, I talked to a recruiter from a food processing company and set up an interview for what I thought was a finance-related position.

So yesterday, I drove 45 minutes into the middle of nowhere during the worst snowstorm of the year and almost slid off the road a few times. When I got to the interview, they explained to me that if I wanted a financial position with the company that I would have to work on the assembly line as a team leader for at least three to five years first. They then proceeded to show me a tour of the facilities. I got to see the entire process of a raw potato turning into a frozen french fry.


A comment, then a question.

Comment: Although I think the company went about it the wrong way, I can agree with their intentions. In the automotive component business I was in, we had far too many managers making decisions who had no concrete idea of what our products were or how they were made (that included me), which often led to attempting to do the impossible and charging far too little (or too much) to get it done.

When I thoroughly pissed off my president & VP, they sent me to the plant in order to turn around some troubled product lines for key customers. I worked, ate & lived with the line workers for 3 months (not that this was my first taste of factory life--during my 20s I supported myself with several long-term manufacturing/assembly jobs) and gained a much better understanding of the business than most of my peers, resulting in a series of huge promotions despite the fact that the president & I still hated each other.

That said, there is no productive reason to start a finance (or any other "white collar" if we still use that word) specialist as a team leader. Take it a step further--you were right to question their ethics in insisting on that formula. So let's presume that your financial analysis skills are of a caliber that you want to be doing that instead of supervising a potato gun line. So their hires are going to be people with lower finance skills who believe that this path will lock them in to something good. The potential for turnover is high, the potential for alienation in the line workers is high (unless they also have the opportunity to move up to finance/management through skills gained on the line). The only time this scenario makes good sense is when the children of a family owned company who will one day run it are hired on. To help them understand the business qua business and employees as people as opposed to feeling entitled to use the company as a personal asset, being grounded in all aspects of the company provides invaluable training. But to insist that college recruit hires start there is asinine. They should instead offer some sort of rotation where you begin your finance job, but at some point before serious promotion, make it optional to take an in-plant internship. Those with intentions to further their food-industry or materials processing careers will understand the opportunity and take it.

Now the question--was it one of those processors that use the potato guns to fire out perfectly formed fries out of their insanely huge GMO potatoes? I'd love to see that!

We need LJ cuts.

Random annoyance...

How some people have two last names, separated by a hyphen. Just pick one or the other, damnit!

My AP Euro Class, who for some reason don't think Napoleon was the baddest most awesome motherfucker who ever set foot on the earth, and think hes an evil tyrant DICKS!