Emotions and TV shows

Do you know what I hate? No, I guess you  don’t. If you did you would have said, “Sure Do, Mr. Ohh!” or something like that, and went back to watching MASH reruns. Now, that’s something I really hate. With all the channels available on all those many broadcast TV, cable, or satellite stations, the TV show MASH can be seen almost twenty-four hours a day. I’m not talking streaming. I know you can stream anything anytime, and that’s cool. But if you only have TV on your TV, you need only to flick the remote a few times before you’ll come across an episode of MASH. Why is that? Sure, it was a good show but there were other good shows. What made MASH the supreme show? I hate that.

Oh wait, skip that. That’s not what I hate. I mean I do hate it, so I’m not lying to you, but when I started all this, I had a specific hate in mind, and I shouldn’t get too distracted. Seriously, I also hate crappy-tasting, over-priced coffee. I’ve mentioned this before. In truth I could give you all a long list of things I hate, but it would only confuse the issue and dilute the actual points I’m trying to make. So, I guess, starting the way I did may not have been the best decision I ever made. Boy, I hate making bad decisions. CRAP! I did it again.

A slight pause

Okay, Mr. Ohh! take a deep cleansing breath. EEEEE Fwuuuuuuu Ah, that’s better. Those deep cleansing breaths are really great. Also, somehow, they ended up in public domain. I mean some yogi or other in Nepal must have invented them. Then they just put them out on the internet for everyone to enjoy. Can you imagine if he would have patented them? Maybe we’d all have to pay three cents for each cleansing breath we took. That yogi would be raking in a ton of money right now. That’s very generous of him. Then again perhaps deep breaths were copyrighted, and are so old now, all patents have expired. Wow, international law is so complicated. Well, either way, interlude over, on to the point.

And back to it

Here’s my issue and it may take a bit of explaining, so bear with me. I know you all know me to be highly concise and never wordy, but this may take a couple seconds. You see, I consider myself a humorist, storyteller, extremely good looking, and a great example of a human being. I defy any of you to find any of those words in any job description anywhere. There are things that come close, but in today’s high-tech society the exact word is ultimately important. Everything you submit everywhere is scanned by a computer to see if certain words match before a human ever sees it. Therefore, if the keywords don’t match, the submission gets thrown out before it’s even had a chance. It may be efficient, but it eliminates anything that is slightly different, like Mr. Ohh! for example. Now I can say it. THIS is the thing I hate.

Beware it could happen to you

I don’t know about you all, but this has caused me no end of issues. Several years back I responded to a job inquiry stating the position needed “Light Hearted Writing Skills”. I thought, “Mr. Ohh! that’s you.” Boy was that a disaster. I showed up with my Portfolio, ready to wow them with my brilliance. First of all, the place looked strange like one of those offices where there’s a receptionist and nobody else. Sort of a front for illegal activity, a secret society, or maybe a spy ring. That was cool. I’ll be a spy. You know, dashing suits, gadget weapons, beautiful women falling at my feet, but I’m not eating caviar, or raw octopus. That stuff sucks!

Anyway, I sat in the office for almost an hour, and the reception area never turned into a secret elevator, dropping me a mile below the surface of the earth to a secret high-tech facility owned by talking alien cats who came to this planet a thousand years ago to keep the humans subjugated with mews and purring. Hey, what can I say? My mind wanders when I sit in a small office for a long time. Eventually a bleary-eyed man came out telling me the guy I was supposed to see called in sick. It seems they had a celebration the night before and every employee was hungover. This was getting to be quite a company.

Of course, that’s when the bad news hit. The writing they wanted was legal contracts, and the light part was business to business sales. Where the hearted part came in, I have no idea. Unless it was supposed to be heartless and was misspelled, and corrected wrong. I blame spell-checker for that one. This was not for me. I thanked the man, and got up to leave. Of course, I did, perhaps accidently, hit my portfolio on the desk, with an ear-splitting SMACK, just to stimulate his headache, in gratitude for his wasting half my day. I’m just nice like that.

It happened to them

You see as computers take over the world, corporations seem to think machines can do everything, and all executives have to do is sit at a desk, and collect millions. The thing is, I and many of my creative friends don’t fit in a mold. We are great at what we do, but the machines will never find us. My favorite story about what I hate is… Is that even possible? Can you have a favorite hate? Well anyway, this really happened to the cooperate giant Amazon.

It seems they wanted to be inclusive and completely unbiased in their hiring. They created a computer that would sort people for interviewing without seeing race, gender, ethnicity, political affiliation, cat or dog lover, or even if they liked to watch MASH twenty-four-hours-a-day. They took all the qualities they liked in their top successful employees and loaded those qualities in the computer. Then they added a million resumes to get the perfect, and truly unbiased hires. The thing was all the successful folks they looked at just happened to be white men. The computer concluded that to be successful you had to be a white man. I am not making this up folks. You can look it up. It is a matter of public record. It was the truest case of bad data in and bad data out. Happily, the project was scrapped before it was actually used, but still computers are not the be all end all.

And my friends agree

I have a friend who is a corporate recruiter. This means she sits at a desk and cruits over and over again. I’m not sure what cruiting is but she is very good at it and makes a lot of money. She hates that stupid computer more than I do. She gets results for chemical engineers and most are bakers. Engineers mix chemicals and need doe, bakers mix ingredients and kneed dough. As far as the computer’s concerned it’s the same. It’s putting machines above people. I hate that.

Crap I did it again!