The Next Dark Age
We're in it Now
At the Refuge – Adventures with Zachary
After work, I stopped by the Refuge to close up. Check on the birds, give the evening meds, cover up the cages and turn off lights and music.
While doing a look through, I saw there was blood on Zachary’s feathers. Zachary is a female Goffin’s cockatoo and a feather picker. I took her upstairs to the bathroom with a towel and some supplies to look more closely.
When a bird breaks a blood feather, it is important to remove the entire feather shaft. They can be painful, cause more damage to the skin and even get infected if they aren’t removed. The blood on Zachary’s feathers wasn’t dripping, but it was fresh. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Some on one wing, some on the other and some on her butt. I called our director, Rich. He is a cop and was on duty at the time. He suggested that I bring her to him at the police station. With a towel. And the fancy surgical tweezers (hemostat?).
Zachary went into the carrier like it was all a big adventure. She was dancing in the car. Dancing. This bird clearly has no fear.
There were five broken feathers so small that I couldn’t even see them. Rich removed them all, with kisses and cuddles for the bird the entire time. How does he do that?
I’m not good at this part.
Anyway. Zachary must have bumped her butt on the way back because she started bleeding again. I stuck around to make sure it was clotted before putting her to bed and going home. You can read more about Zachary here.
Cover Letters
MSN had an article discussing whether or not a cover letter is important for job applicants. You can read it here. Do HR people really read them?
My best answer is that most of us will..sort of. But if you don’t submit one, we will definitely think less of you. Here is my take:
Will I read a cover letter all the way through before looking at a résumé? Probably not. But I will read it if something on the résumé strikes me as odd. Like if you had a break in employment – a cover letter is a great tool to explain where you’re coming from. Like:
“For the last three years, I have been out of the country with my family while my wife was working an overseas assignment. While unemployed, I spent the time by….and kept up with the industry by…” Can you find a way to make that experience sell you as a better employee?
Or if you are changing fields and are willing to consider a “lower level” position in order to begin a new career. Use the cover letter to explain.
My favorite point from the article:
“The more personal the letter is to our business, the better. You wouldn’t believe how many times we’ve seen letters that are glaringly obvious canned messages,” Renzi muses. “Sometimes candidates even leave in other companies’ names or positions.” “
Or the title of the position is incorrect. Or the source of the referral is incorrect. Spend the time on each cover letter.
Recently, I read a cover letter where the applicant listed all of the requirements I placed in the posting, in bulleted form, and wrote a sentence on how she met the requirements. I had never seen that before and it won points with me.
So how important is it to win points with HR? Depends on the company, depends on the HR professional. In my company, it depends on whether the hiring manager cares what I think. Some really want my guidance and some want to handle it all themselves. In some companies, if HR doesn’t like it, the résumé goes no further. And yes, there are HR people that will not let one pass if a word is misspelled.
It doesn’t require very much time to take the process seriously. So take it seriously. And no phone calls, please.
Now it is Winter
I have tons and tons of blankets, quilts and comforters in my house. King sized things are really easy to find on sale, but hard to get washed and dried effectively. The dog actually has a bed in the back of my SUV because I never managed to bring my black comforter to a laundromat. My point is that I don’t have “Summer” or “Winter” stuff for my bed. I have three or four sets of “Summer” and “Winter” stuff for my bed. More if I mix and match with my mother, which explains why I am using a blood red quilt.
It is time for the flannel sheets. Topped with the comforter covered by a flannel duvet. Topped by the aforementioned red quilt. The purpose of the quilt is to have something light weight and easily washable at the surface to soak up all of the cat fur.
Winter is also when Spooky the Cat goes from wanting a fresh towel on his Pillow Bed (every three days) to wanting a fresh blanket on his bed (every three days):
I flashed a camera in his face and he didn’t even blink. Seriously – do cats hibernate?
Rites of Passage
I was sitting at Noodles, reading a book and minding my own business when a lady and a little girl sat at the next table. There had to be ten other tables available, but I tried not to roll my eyes at them.
Girl was whining, lady was ignoring her and looking at her phone. I think they had just come from one of those Building a Teddy Bear stores.
Suddenly, the girls says, “It came out!!”
I look at her. She is holding a bloody napkin. She had just lost a tooth.
There was a time when I would have been really grossed out. But then she is saying that she has lost “four on top and four on the bottom”. And I am trying to gauge how old she is, and how long before my nephew starts losing teeth. And what is the Tooth Fairy’s going rate these days?
Then she says, “It feels very awkward in my mouth.” And I wonder how old I was when I started using words like “awkward” – because I am pretty sure it was high school.
My brother and sister in law are expecting their daughter in a few weeks and I think I have a pretty good handle on the aunt thing. I’m still not sure I can bring myself to build teddy bears.
Public Service Announcement – Doctors
A genetic resistance to Novocain and a couple of dismissive dentists made me one of those crazy fearful people. I knew it was irrational, I knew my teeth would only get worse. But those of us that have been there know there are few things more horrible than sitting helplessly in that chair while ones teeth are being drilled and it hurts and the dentist thinks you are just an “anxious patient”.
I was in my early 20’s when, in a moment of brilliance, my father said this:
“You are an adult. You are the client. The dentist cannot touch you without your consent. If you are uncomfortable with your treatment, you get up out of the chair and walk out the door.”
Is that allowed? I thought.
Of course it is allowed. Easier said than done, though. In the end, I found a dentist about my own age (so as to avoid any subconscious subservience to the patriarchy) who was very patient in explaining exactly what we were doing, how long it would take and never starting work until I was absolutely ready. He specifically said that a second shot of Novocain was a perfectly reasonable request. Sometimes I need it and sometimes I don’t.
Yesterday, I was talking with a co-worker – say in her mid-20s. She has bronchitis and was literally coughing up blood before she went to the doctor. She said that she has asthma and hadn’t been taking the preventative treatment her doctor prescribed because it made her feel worse. Then she said that she told her doctor she was taking it.
“Dude.” I said, using my stern HR voice. “Lying to your doctor is not cool.”
She hesitated for a minute. I think it was my tone of voice which wasn’t my most pleasant. She said that she knew it, but the doctor didn’t listen when she told him she didn’t like the drug. He and the nurse both said she had to give it more time. Maybe they were right, but it didn’t feel right to her.
After the call, I decided that I had just made it worse. Poor girl is feeling sick, and I understand asthma to be a pretty damn scary disease anyway. My point hadn’t been about the treatment, it had been about lying to the doctor. So I called her back and gave her my dad’s speech. Then I said, “And if you still feel uncomfortable, you call me back and I will help you find a new doctor.”
I hope she felt better. I hope she feels empowered to take control of her own health. Because seriously, people. It is an important, and expensive service that doctors provide. Don’t stay with one that doesn’t listen to you, doesn’t hear you, and doesn’t include you in making decisions about your health. And for the love of all that’s Holy, do not stay with one that makes you feel worse.
You are the client. And there are plenty of doctors out there (assuming you have the insurance, but that is a different rant).
During the Bears Game
Before the Game started, I made myself a sandwich and steamed some frozen vegetables for Daisy. Kiwi never eats her vegetables. So what happened? Daisy took a chunk of my sandwich and flew away. Kiwi went to check out the vegetables. Shadow just didn’t know what to do:
Then. Kiwi decided she likes carrots. And green beans.
And Daisy took a bath in her water dish:
And because I was having a hard time looking at the screen and not having a heart attack, I finished these:
And then the Bears won.
Pleasant Surprise
I live with a dog, a cat, an African Grey parrot, and lately am fostering a Goffin’s Cockatoo. No, I will not be able to get them all in one picture. I buy most of my pet supplies online from Drs. Foster and Smith. Their prices are generally competitive, their selection is good and they are located in Wisconsin. Which means no sales tax, but delivery is still overnight to me in Illinois.
Upromise, the company that makes contributions to your college savings for shopping with preferred vendors, has Foster and Smith on its list. These vendors sometimes have special deals for Upromise customers. The one I used the other day was $10 off a $100 order. It makes me happy because there is no free shipping from this place. I am a total sucker for free shipping. The order went through and the promotion code was reflected in my confirmation.
When I received the box today, the invoice had a note saying that because I had previously used that promotion code, it was not applied to this order. I was pretty ticked.
I hit reply on the order confirmation and wrote a very civilized letter “respectfully requesting a credit of $10” to my credit card.
Two hours later, at 7pm on a Friday night, I received a reply. They gave me the $10 (a “one-time exception”) and an apology that the promotion was not more clear.
I will take that.
Dixon, Illinois
I took a short road trip for work that involved spending a night in Dixon, Illinois. Famous for being “the boyhood home of President Ronald Reagan”. This is one of those places too far away to randomly visit, but close enough that I am embarrased to have never been there before.
Anyway. I remembered to throw the camera in my suitcase. Here is the view from my hotel room window. I think I will call it “48 Hours Before the Harvest or Something”. I took the same picture again at dawn, but it didn’t turn out.
The Spirit of the Season
My friend, utter_scoundrel, is a great nerd and got into the spirit of the season by watching all of the Friday the 13th films. (I just had to pause and ask myself if the word “film” is the appropriate word to describe them.) Personally, I am a Nightmare on Elm Street girl, but I appreciate the effort.
He wrote a funny series of blog posts about them, carefully recording the body count. And at the end, he charted it. Check this out (I stole this from his page, but whatever, he didn’t copyright it.):
I have not checked his math. If he has messed up something, please contact him directly. I am sure he would appreciate it.
You can read the entire series here.
Checking Out the Competition
This past weekend, two area libraries were doing Book Sales. I love Book Sales anyway, and I had the Research excuse. Forgive me, but I am using my blog for recording my check of the “competition”:
On Saturday, the Glencoe Library sale started at 9am and I arrived at 9:27. There was a sign pointing around the side of the building, down a staircase. I never saw the inside of this library.
There was a line of people going up the staircase. Did I have the time wrong? No. Fire code. There were only letting one person in at a time, and only as people left. This was really annoying because:
a. It was cold
b. I was standing behind a family of five
Then there was the inevitable jerk a few people back that said, “I only need to go in for a minute, can I please go in front of you?!”
No.
Once I was finally inside, I saw the need for the wait. The aisles were tiny and the books were on shelves. Kneeling down to see the bottom shelves was a problem. I couldn’t even get to the end of the hardcover fiction section because it was backed up against the children’s book space. This was no place for children.
The prices were the same as our Used Book Store’s regular prices. The volunteers were all very pleasant, but I was rather miffed that there were so many of them standing around drinking coffee when there was a line of people outside in the cold because of the Fire Code.
The take: I bought four books for $4.00.
The sale in Arlington Heights is famous. They have four sales each year and I once read that they net $80,000 a year running them. I arrived a few minutes after they opened – at noon on Sunday.
This library is huge, and they were set up inside a large room on the second floor. The books were on tables, with the overflow lined up neatly on the floor, the way we do it.
The tables were neatly labeled, but I couldn’t find the Fiction. I saw Science Fiction going in and I realized that Romance and Mystery novels were on the other side, near the other door. Fiction was scattered on the shelves outside the main room. That was tough.
The volunteers were hard at work, many carrying boxes of paperbacks to try to jam them onto the tables as space cleared throughout the day. There were a ton of CDs and books on tape, but I didn’t really look at the selection.
Like Glencoe, the prices resembled our store’s regular prices. After my first walkthrough I only had two books in my hands, so I did a second lap. I didn’t see any of what one might call “Literature”. The classics section was puny and I didn’t see any Philip Roth or Ian McEwan or Margaret Atwood-like titles.
Then I remembered that it was Sunday and the serious people would have been there the day before. I also just remembered the Scavengers – the people with little scanner guns that buy up stuff to sell it online. I saw them in Glencoe the day before. Although, now that I think about it, Arlington Heights may have banned them. I should go look that up.
At Glenview’s Used Book Store, we say the primary goal is to raise funds, but we are also there to provide a public service. The question of selling to the Scavengers has come up more than once. Anyone is welcome to buy, but do we welcome them to scan each of our books to find what we have undervalued for their benefit? Eh, maybe.
Anyway, Arlington Heights runs a fine operation even if my take was only two books for $2.00. Six dollars on the weekend. I will have to be sure to at least double that in our own shop this December.
The Next Dark Age 