In Other Words...

Hi Ho, High Hoe, It's Off to Work I Go...

Glory be to God in the highest, in excelius dei-oh and all other assorted falsetto rejoicings.

My work authorization permit came in this past Friday. Move over Happy, there's an 8th dwarf in town. All 5 foot 8 of me.

Now for the 64K question. What the hell to do with it?

I have been doing some serious soul searching on this work business, given that I have been a work-from-home freak for a decade and pretty much unemployed by choice this past year and half. I suspect the best way for me to return to a mid-mgt job and salary and still juggle the kids' busy after school schedule is to try to carve out a virtual office sales position, much as I what I have been accustomed to doing these past 10 or so years.

I applied for one such position with a Canadian dotcom headhunting firm but I haven't heard anything. Which might mean they think my resume sucks. To be perfectly honest, my resume is pretty decent. The only problem is, I now have a hole in it the size of two years, something I've never had to worry about before. So this concerns me. As does the fact that I now boast two decades of work experience. There was a day and age where I might have envied such career longevity - back in the days when I was trying to stretch out my knowledge and expertise - ie. I have 2 years, 10 months, 3 weeks and 4 days of work experience. Whereas now I know that this does not betray my expertise so much as my long-in-the-tooth-ness. That's problemo numero uno.

Problem two is that here in Seattle, unless you have dotcom experience, a Masters or PhD, and/or are a third-generation, pedigree'd PNWester, you probably don't stand a hope in hell of getting a job interview for any corporate position remotely snazzy. So I think I'm in need of a serious Connie Corporate makeover. I left the traditional workforce when e-mail was just coming of age. And black power suits were still in. And when it was OK to have a portable hard-copy daytimer.

Now there seems to a pastel sweater-set (gag) and dress pants office dress code pervasive in industry, and I'm not quite savvy to this dress-down nuance. And forgive me, Donald Trump for I have sinned, but I have managed to survive this past decade without owning a Blackberry and horror of all horrors, I have still never sent a text message to anyone. Shhh, don't tell anyone.

So what's a dinosaur to do except to maybe don a purple suit and pander to the children instead? I know that most of the HR types I will now be pandering to will be children. And thus, they won't necessarily get that while my resume seems to have a couple of gaps, it is not for lack of skill acquisition these past years spent raising exhuberant youngsters. Said skills, I might add, are entirely transferrable to the workplace ~ they're just not easily showcased on a resume.

Event planner, mediator, facilitor, peacemaker, coach, chief, cook, bottlewasher, driver, recreation coordinator, lecturer, travel agent, and just today, graveyard cupcake maker....mothers are all these things and more. But because it isn't kosher to list the position of Mother with Both of My Children as the employer and these past 10 years and counting together with the above-noted skill set on my resume, it looks like I may have forgotten what it means to manage my time and or a project.

Big fat sigh.

I'll come up with something. When there's a will there's a way.

Eye vs. Spy

Along those lines, we had our biometrics appointment on Wednesday at the Dept. of Droneland Insecurity as part of our green card application. Not only do they ensure that legal immigrants pay dearly through the nose and up the yin yang yangtze to get said green card, but they also insist on charging each visitor to the building $5.00 for parking. Multiple that by - oh, several dozen vehicles coming in at 1/2 hour intervals and you have there a tidy sum of money to pay the oodles of DDI employees. Right? Wrong.

Upon arrival and admittance through the checkpoint Charlie security check that would put LAX to shame (Holy Daughter said, "Jeesh! This is worse than an airport!"), we were then admitted into the cattle barn to pick a number and wait our turn behind hundreds of other immigrants, aliens and the like. Which wouldn't be so bad if everyone one of the 20 or so wickets were open but alas, as it turned out, there was only one person handling the line-up. Of course. So we waited. And waited.

As luck would have it though, we got in and out and no one got hurt. And contrary to hubby's story that he told a co-worker who asked him how it went, he did not have to succumb to a rectal examination without vaseline. I honestly feel sorry for his co-workers, at times. They have to put up with his graphic tales for hours on end whereas I only have a couple of hours each evening and by then he's mellowed. But only somewhat.

We did, however, have to get our fingerprints done and pictures taken. So that's done. Now comes the FBI investigation. At which point all my Noam Chomsky reading and dissident blogging will soon be intensely scrutinized.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when I wouldn't have believed in Big Brother theory stuff. But then came 9/11 and had it not been for the manner in which the feds turned insular, tribal and paranoid, which in turn sent the general public to react in kind, I don't think I would be inclined to even have given any of it a second thought. Loose Change made its rounds, and even has Final Cut due out for release on 11/11/07. And now we have the Screw Loose Change bunch who set out to debunk the conspiracy theory claims of the those who insist 9/11 was an inside job.

All I know is that all international eyes have been on the US, the world's great and soon to be late superpower, for many decades now. And as a foreigner on the fringes of the inside looking further inward, I have to admit - I kinda wish they would take their biometrics screening one step further for all us ex-pats who have a sort of double vision. They should, in fact, scan our eyeballs, if only to see the US and its relationship with the world as we, the Canadians, the Brazilians, the Peruvians and the Turkish, et al, see it.

If they scanned our eyes, they would see that this US (America) and Them (subordinate others ie. non-American) paradigm is no longer a workable one for the 21st century. Not that it ever was. The shift of late from win-lose games to lose-win economic games (have you taken a look at the US dollar in relation to every other dollar, Canada's included?), means the world is starting to believe the American bully rumours in the global playground, and new power structures are emerging.

I'm talking about the bully that always seems to have enough money for guns ($2.4 trillion but who's counting?) yet falls embarrassingly short on butter. Yes, more's the pity, the pockets never seem to be deep enough to buy all the kids lunch and an updated immunization shot every now and again. In fact the CDI chart (commitment to development index) in that last link shows the US isn't even in the top 10 of rich countries. Little wonder the kids have formed other friendships and/or taken their toys and gone home to make more ~ a full 3/4 of the world's toys more, in fact. All they need do is add a bit of lead paint for embellishment, and sell them for a huge profit to all the kids.

The tides are changing and I'm not talking global warming here. Which is why I find it disheartening to learn my husband will be sitting alone is a few short months while the rest of his officemates move up a couple of floors. That equates to the entire group in charge of this particular component of customer support except for him. This may well be great news for those who had to sit near him and endure vaseline tales and all other manner of witticisms and jokes all day, but somehow I feel there's a larger fear at work.

Here's the great irony though...well over half these customers alluded to in their division name are of the overseas variety. They hail from some 145 countries. So it will soon be Office Space: Extreme Homeland Security edition. Holy Hub will not be permitted to attend meetings on this 'upper' floor. Coupled with increased restrictions from a computer info access standpoint, he now faces enormous red tape to do his job. So in the interests of so-called security, they've made his work process much more inefficient because it now takes him way longer to do his job and in fact, there are things he is no longer able to do. For them.

So yeah, if they scanned our eyes, it would be an eye-opening experience. Perhaps it's a good thing they leave it at fingerprinting, punch their clocks and call it a day.

Long story short, I'm definitely not buttering my toast with Imperial margarine today, if you catch my slant - with profuse apologies to the powers that be and any others whom I might inadvertently have offended with my tribal diatribe.

We'll make hay while the sun shines. Another day, another .96 cents US shy of one Cdn dollar. How's that for loonie?

Having a green card will definitely make things easier from a healthcare and residency perspective - we would no longer have to leave the country within 30 days if he suddenly lost his job. But having to wear an employee badge that denotes "other," sit two floors below your team in "subordination" and have to miss out on important e-mails and meetings critical to your work - these are things that would weigh on me, too. All because we bought into the grand dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness south of the 49th parallel.

Little wonder he faces north and bows to the totem poles in Stanley Park in his quietest moments, whilst rueing the day I ever covertly applied for a job in Seattle in his name, and with his resume attached.