More shock

Even more shocking than yesterday's announcement that our rapist of a (former) president plea bargained his way out of two rape charges and several sexual assault charges in return for an admission of a "friendly kiss", was the incredible discovery of paper recycling bins under each and every building on Weitzman street in Tel Aviv. WOO!

Shock

I am in complete and utter shock this morning.

The absolute worst

I mentioned yesterday that the venture capital fund from hell warranted its own entry, so here goes:

I interviewed for the job with the bitch of an investment manager (Let's call her Michelle). I don't think she smiled once during the entire interview, and I don't much recall the interview itself. After speaking with me she took me in to speak with the CEO, and again I don't recall much of what was said, but my impression of him was that he was tough and demanding, but fair. BZZZZZT. At any rate, before I had even managed to get back to my office (the interview was early in the morning and I still had a full day of work at the software start-up to go), she called me to offer me the job, foregoing a reference check. I arrived at my office, gave my two weeks' notice, and continued merrily with my life.

Two weeks later I arrived for my first day. I was introduced to everyone, including the CEO's secretary, who had only started working there about two months before (we'll name her "Kay"). I didn't know this at the time, but the girl who was training me was asked to leave, pending the hiring of a replacement. In retrospect, the reason for her dismissal became all too clear. My full week of training with her consisted of a lot of sitting around, watching her lean her chin on her hand while staring blankly into space. Kay remained relatively silent during this week, excluding explanations regarding the CEO's preferences.

When the chick I replaced finally departed, Kay and I had about two days to work together and to get the real training started, before she became sick and stayed home for a week. Thus began my week of Initiation by Fire, and my first inkling that not all was well with this place.

I was never a secretary before, so I'm not sure if this is common in North America, but in Israel, managers don't dial their own phone. "Get me so-and-so" is a fairly standard request, with the process being me calling so-and-so's secretary, and both of us transfering the call. It sounds fairly simple, but alas, the whole exercise stems from Israel's military system, where military secretaries connect between officers, and thus, rank plays a function.
For example, if I were an officer of X rank, and needed to speak to an officer at the rank above me, my secretary would call his secretary to see that he was free, and if so, my secretary would transfer me to his secretary, who would then transfer me to her officer. Conversely, if I needed to speak to a lower rank, the lower rank would be tranferred to me. Stupid, but given Israel's militaristic society, the practice was bound to permeate corporate ranks.

Allow me to regress a bit before describing the incident. CEO had his special phone line - known in militaristic terms as the "Red Phone" - that had to be answered ahead of all other things. Office on fire? Answer the red phone if it rings. Seven lines going at the same time? Answer the red phone if it rings.

During that week, CEO asked me to get him someone. Being new to the secretarial scene and utterly unaware of this whole ranking game, I got the person's secretary on the line, who'd said she'd tranfer her boss, so I transfered the call to CEO and got off the line. Almost immediately I saw that the call light was no longer lit and simultaneously, the red phone rang. I picked it up and asked "Did the call get disconnected?" to which CEO replied "I don't speak with secretaries", hanging up immediately thereafter. I stared at the phone in utter disbelief, rather uncertain of what had just transpired. It hadn't even occurred to me to point out that *I* was a secretary. I rang the person's office again, this time got the person that CEO wanted to speak with on the line, and transferred him to CEO myself.

That little scene pretty much defined my entire working relationship with CEO, who turned out to be an arrogant asshole of magnificent proportions. Luckily Kay was his secretary and I only ever acted as back-up.

I mentioned that Michelle seemed rather a humourless witch. I wasn't entirely correct, as she did have a cynical sense of humour. Ok, that's not true. I'm cynical - she was plain mean. For the most part, however, we got along.

The other investment manager wasn't too bad, but as I'd mentioned, he had some sort of speech impediment that made him impossible to understand, and rather than ask the same questions over and over, and receive the same unintelligible answers, I preferred to guess what it was that he wanted for me. It worked most of the time, but there were a few resultant skirmishes - though none tragic enough for me to really worry about. He was also fairly self-sufficient, often-times dialling his own phone, so I didn't really need to do that much for him. Ironically, he was much higher ranked than CEO in the military, but lacked any of the arrogant-asshole mannerisms.

The accountant, whom we'll refer to as Tanya, was very capable professionally, but not quite right in the head otherwise. She seemed to derive pleasure out of treating people like shit, and particularly yelling at them at the top of her lungs. I, for the most part, was spared her wrath, but it had more to do with the fact that I tried to avoid irritating her as much as possible, anticipating the outcome. The woman essentially spent 90% of her time screaming at someone - her mother, her brother, the bookkeeper, suppliers, portfolio company CEOs, etc. I particularly remember the day she yelled at the people who installed a toilet in her house, since there was a board meeting taking place in the conference room, and none other than our CEO got up to close the door so as to block the screeching out.

Around the time I started working there, the company had hired an in-house counsel. This was a guy with little corporate law experience, but he did have two law degrees plus a masters in mathematics. In short - the guy wasn't low of IQ. However, on his first day there, he hadn't instinctively realized that the acronym BOD signified "Board Meeting" and asked Tanya what it meant. BIG MISTAKE. Tanya, being a bitter sow, resentful of the guy's higher salary (um, hello? He has FOUR DEGREES, bitch!) decided right then and there that the guy was a complete moron, and from that point forward made every attempt to trip him up. Since he was to take over many of the functions she had taken on in the absence of a lawyer (she was the most well-versed person there in all of the investment contracts), he should have made her life a bit easier, but her raging jealousy and hatred prevented her from seeing straight and instead of off-loading the info, she would not cooperate with him, leaving him to spend hours reading contracts. It took him months to catch up, all the while suffering abuse from her. The guy, who was nice enough, though not someone I became particularly friendly with (he was so tired of her that he mostly sat in his office with the door closed, so we didn't get to speak with him much, either) realized fairly quickly that he had met a dead end and wasn't going to get anywhere, so he decided to use his time with the company to study for the NY Bar exam, which the company was financing - in fact, it was written into his contract that they couldn't let him go for a year and were obligated to pay. Good for him, I say. As soon as he passed the bar, he was let go, but not before Tanya convinced the CEO to try and swindle the guy out of some compensation he had owing. Luckily, her blind range and lack of formal legal training meant that she had no ground to stand on and the guy got every last penny. It was awesome to see him get the better of her at the end.

I won't get too much into describing my interaction with Kay. It wasn't easy and there were many irritants, but eventually she and I became good friends, which made the irritants seem more like quirks. We've fallen out of touch, but I still admire her for staying in that hell-hole as long as she did - four years of working for that cast is less than a treat.

Now that I've described the cast of character, I'll describe my work and some of the incidents that are etched in my mind.

During my first week of training, the fired girl showed me where to get the mail. There were several envelopes that came from a particular investment company, which contained analysis reports. The girl told me that when they came in I was to put them in a particular cupboard (unopened). There were piles of them there. Not knowing what they were, I didn't really question the practice, and furthermore, no one ever asked me about them, so I continued chucking them in the closet.

Kay and I sat side by side behind a desk that had a raised counter - the kind you'd lean your arms on if you were standing up. Between the desk and the counter was a pile of filing that had to be tended to. Little did I know that this was the tip of a filing iceberg, and that the analyst reports above were only a small part of it! As soon as the girl had departed, Michelle and Tanya told me that we had to start putting things in order. They opened the various filing cabinets and showed me all the PILES AND PILES of paper. Apparently, the filing system up to this point was to pile things up between the desk and the counter, and once the pile reached counter height, it was dumped inside one of the cabinets. Really.

Tanya and I devised a filing system. Each portfolio company got a binder (or however many were necessary to accomodate the related paper-work), which were divided into the same sub-sections. From that point on, Kay and I spent about four months getting all the paper work in order. Luckily this was at the tail end of the internet bubble of 2000-2001, so we had plenty of free time to tend to it. Did I mention how much I detest filing? Yeah, anyway. As for the analyst reports, when I pointed them out to Michelle, she was shocked. She didn't even know we were getting them, and what's worse, we were paying to be on the mailing list. Since they hadn't really been in use, we ended up just cancelling the subscription. I weep for all the forests.

At the same time that we implemented this filing system for printed matter, we did the same in our computer directories, with the same set of main folders and sub-folders. There were about 6000 documents saved in our directories. I'm not exaggerating when I say that there were probably about 5000 file folders in them, too. The idiot who worked there before, and her sister, who had been the full-time secretary before her, were not particularly bright, and whenever they were asked to file something, they opened a new folder for it. We spent several months putting all that crap in order, too.

Once that was mostly finished, Kay and I pretty much sat and twiddled our thumbs all day. There was only so much filing you could do in a day without wanting to slit your wrists, but on the flip side, there was no work, either. It got to the point that I brought translation work to the office and did it there. Nobody gave a shit. Kay and I weren't the only bored ones. Though Tanya would never admit it, we could totally hear from her angry, aggressive mouse clicks that she was playing mine-sweeper in whatever part of the day she had free of yelling at someone.

One day Kay got a call from one of the secretaries in the head office (the fund was a subsidiary of a huge high-tech company), asking bizarre questions about tranferring Michelle's phone line and email to their office/server. Kay was mystified, and it wasn't until that day that we discovered - quite accidentally, as it were - that Michelle was leaving to go work in another division - the following day! We didn't actually say anything to her, waiting to see if she'd say anything as she was leaving for the day. She did not. She walked out at the end of the day and never even bothered to say goodbye to us, or tell us what she'd be doing. I don't know about you, but that doesn't strike me as something that a sane person would do. Whatever, one bitch down.

One day our insurance agent came to the office unannounced. Well - she didn't arrange an appointment, she called a few minutes before arriving, saying that she wanted to meet with the CEO. I told him she was on her way and he snootily asked "Do I have an appointment with her?", to which I replied in the negative. He went into his office and closed the door. A few minutes later I let the insurance agent in, and she asked to see him. I looked down on the phone to call him to let him know she was there, and noticed his call light was on. I told her he was on the phone and in the meanwhile she went to speak with Tanya. At this point I turned to Kay and asked her if she'd transferred a call to CEO. She looked at the phone light, looked at me, and said "No". We were perplexed. As I'd already mentioned, the man NEVER dialled his own phone. The agent kept poking her head out to see if he was free, but the call light stayed on. She eventually left, at which point Kay decided to investigate. She knocked on his door and he called her in. She told him the agent was gone, at which point he picked up the phone receiver, which had been sitting off the hook, on his desk, and hung up the phone. When Kay came out and told me this, after I finished scraping my jaw off the floor, we both laughed for a good half-hour about how utterly ridiculous the man was. And it wasn't that he didn't need to speak with her - it was that she dared show up without his advance permission. Ass.

Another equally flabbergasting incident occurred not long before I left the company. CEO went out to lunch with the company (parent company) accountant (Tanya was the accountant for our subsidiary only), a man who is very well known in the finance industry, and a senior partner in one of the biggest accounting firms in the country. He also happened to be CEO's personal accountant. Unlike CEO, this man was lovely - sweet, affable, and generally a good guy. He had no problem dialling his own phone, either. We got a phone call from him after they had finished their lunch meeting, and he told us that they needed to schedule a follow up meeting. Given who this was (he was one of the few people who could call up CEO and be put through right away rather than being told he'd get a call back), we went ahead and scheduled the appointment. CEO came back to the office a few minutes later, and saw that we had scheduled the meeting through Outlook. He came out and asked us "What's this meeting?". Kay replied that Accountant had called to set it up. CEO then asked "Do you work for him or for me?", to which Kay tried to reply that she thought it was something they'd agreed upon during their lunch. She only got as far as "We thought that..." when he cut her off and said "I don't pay you to think. Cancel the meeting". He turned back to his office while Kay and I just stared at each other in silence for a few moments. "He sure pays us a lot not to think," I said, but we were both too shocked to actually laugh at the absurdity of the situation.

It wasn't long after that that I decided I'd had enough, and resigned. It wasn't this specific incident that made me quit - just general boredom with the job, coupled with utter desolation about the situation in Israel. There were suicide bombers going off left, right and centre. I didn't feel like the Prime Minister (Sharon) was leading the country anywhere but down, and there seemed to be no light at the end of the local tunnel.

One thing I can say with certainty is that this was a wasted year in my life, both professionally and personally. On a personal level, I was at the office 10 hours a day, plus a 1-2 hour commute daily, so I wasn't really doing a whole lot socially, and the company was too small and, well - NARSTY - for me to improve my social life. On a professional level, the only thing I took away was the affirmation of how much I detested filing, and that was hardly something new.

Funnily enough, a few months after I left, Kay told me that Tanya decided that the computer filing wasn't to her liking (even though there was a big mess before, she knew where everything was - she preferred to work by memory, rather than logic, evidently), and she made Kay put everything back to the way it was. Kay didn't argue, knowing it would get her nowhere, and just did as she was told.

Even though I did close to nothing there for many months, it hadn't occured to anyone that it wasn't necessary to replace me, and in my wake followed several replacements, none of whom were able to tolerate the place or deal with the lovely personalities in question. Had I not left, I could have still been working there today, I'm sure. Kay stayed on for a couple more years, the poor soul.

I'm sure people can top that, though it's a tall order. What was your worst experience?

The worst

Sherry asked me the other day which of the jobs I held was the worst. I told her that such a question isn't easy so answer on the spot, and promised I'd do a post detailing all my jobs, to help me decide. Here goes:

1. As a kid I was supposed to help on the family farm. My siblings and cousins (who had been brought down as reinforcements during the heavy season) will attest that I spent most of the time with my nose planted inside a book.
2. When I was around 12 years old, I worked as a cleaner at the pool on our moshav. I had to clean the change rooms and hose down the walkways and poolside. I remember that the key to open the front gate would often stick and that the hose was really heavy. In addition to my paltry wage, I was also allowed to swim laps in the morning, when the pool was only open for the local female adults.
3. Shortly after we moved to Toronto, when I was 14, my mom suggested that I apply for a job at the local library. I worked as a page (shelving books) for a year. Mindless work, but I used to sneak out books without signing them out, and TOTALLY raided the office supplies and swank announcement paper.
4. After a year, a Longo's grocery store opened up near our house so I worked there for a year, as a cashier. At one stage they promoted me to cash supervisor. I was a HORRIBLE manager and was demoted rather quickly. After a year I'd had enough and left.
5. The next summer I worked for one day at a window treatment company. It took me about 5 hours to thread one blind. The owner, who was the husband of my mom's schoolmate, suggested I'd be better off watching his daughters while his wife worked in the business.

6. I babysat them for an entire summer, including a two week trip to Vancouver with them, when their grandfather was dying. Vancouver was pretty. I must have watched the Little Mermaid and Jungle Book about a thousand times each that summer. I continued to babysit them once a week during the following school year.
   
7. Then I got a job at CIBC. It started as a co-op for school credit, and lasted nearly 8 years.
   
8. My first job there, which lasted for 3 years, was as a teller. Easy work and I really enjoyed it for the most part, but after 3 years I decided I wanted to start working full-time and was looking for something slightly more challenging.
   
9. Next I worked at a downtown branch, in the basement back office. All I did all day long was process Guaranteed Investment certificates (CDs) and look up copies of cheques for customers who had problems with their accounts. Then my colleague on the investments desk went on maternity leave and I took over for her as well.
   
10. In addition to the GICs, I now booked T-Bills, Bankers' Acceptances and Commercial Papers. I had to call the trading desk to do this and loved it. I got quite friendly with most of the traders and even went down there for a visit a couple of times. They used to get beers at their desks on Friday afternoons. The direct line to one of the traders, or variations thereof, has been my online password since then.
    
11. Next I became an assistant to an Account Manager. She was the most successful Account Manager at the branch, and quite possibly in the district. I really liked her and we became great friends. I learned a ton from her. Then a black cat passed between us, and after a very tense period, I decided to move on. She stayed on at the bank for a couple more years and then ended up having a bunch of babies and moving up north.
    
12. My next job was as a Sales and Service Representative, or in other words, a call centre slave. I hated the job with an intense passion, and quite irritatingly, I was fantastic at it. I consistently had one of the highest call quality averages in the call centre, and my sales were really good. The only thing I didn't do well on was call quantity. I was supposed to take 13 calls an hour but almost consistently took 10 or 11.
    
13. My reward for the awesome call quality scores was to become a call quality monitor. For six months I listened in on calls, grading agents on their calls. LOVED. IT. Today when I call service numbers though, and have to listen to their recitations of scripts, in my head I give them a high score, but in my gut I want to throw up. It's all so fake and insincere.
    
14. After the six months were up, I went back on the phones and hated every single second. All my monitor colleagues were getting other jobs, or were being called to help with the monitoring, and for some reason I kept getting turned down for jobs in the centre and was never asked to back up the monitors. This was a black, black period for me. I was lead to understand that I'd pissed someone in management off, and was left with little option but to leave.
    
15. I applied for a job as a Personal Banker at another downtown branch. They ended up hiring someone else, but liked me enough that they decided to create a position for me in the district office.
    
16. I got to the district office the first day, and about 5 minutes later everyone (including me) cleared out to the coffee shop downstairs for a cigarette break (I don't smoke). We sat there for a good 45 minutes (with the District Manager). We went back upstairs and he explained to me that he wanted me to call up clients who had opened bank accounts and to survey their satisfaction with the process and the bank. Me. COLD CALLING PEOPLE. Who mostly didn't speak any English. Well, after about half an hour of this pure hell, it was time for another group cigarette break. Forty five minutes later we were back at our desks, gathered our wallets and went out to get lunch. This took about 25 minutes. We came back and all sat down to eat in the conference room. An hour later we went down for the post lunch cigarette break. Forty five minutes later we went upstairs, made a few calls, filed a little, and went down for our last cigarette break. After that all that was left was to come back up tidy our desks and leave for the day. This went on for about 4 months. Not a word is a lie.
    
17. One of the district branches needed a Personal Banker at this stage, so I was sent down to take on the position. It was fairly harmless and the staff (for the most part) was nice. The manager was a cringe-worthy, creepy wimp. In addition to being a Personal Banker (and I made very little effort to be particularly good) I also opened and closed the branch sometimes, which meant messing around with safe combinations and stuff. Not fun. I could never get the safes to open.
    
18. That branch closed after a few months (but not before I got a nice, totally undeserved raise) and merged with a branch down the street, so off I went to be a Personal Banker there. For the most part, I really enjoyed it – not so much the job, but the staff was great, the manager was extremely supportive. However, I had been going on for nearly 8 years with the bank and the last time I had learned something new had been about three years prior. I finally reached my breaking point, over something fairly asinine. I had made an appointment with a client, who was running late. My manager made me take a walk-in client, which pissed me off as I didn't want my client to have to wait when she arrived. Immediately after the walk-in walked out, I typed up my letter of resignation and handed it in. My client never showed up. I left the bank two weeks later. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I just joined a class-action suit against the bank for unpaid overtime :).
    
19. At this point, I had very little direction or idea of what I wanted to do. I had very little money in the bank, and not three days after I submitted my resignation, my roommate announced that she was leaving three weeks hence. Thanks for the advance notice, babe! Helpful! I muddled through for a couple of months on temp jobs, then moved back home, having decided to move to Israel. One of the temp jobs was at Bank of Montreal. I worked in their bond trading back office for a couple of months. For about three weeks, I watched the person whom I was replacing perform some sort of wizardry in Excel (which at the time I had no knowledge of), with many, many forays into Visual Basic. He had written the program they were using and it was FULL of bugs. He was sick one day, and it turned out that in spite of sitting there glassy-eyed and seemingly not following him in the least, I totally knew what to do. I managed to do the job for a while, but my travel date was coming up, so I quickly trained a replacement and was on my way. This job sucked a lot, but I mention it because my tuition was learning Excel, and being able to tell you that my replacement had been out of the job market for over a year. Because she had been run over by a garbage truck. REALLY. She was also crazy, but I have no way of knowing if that preceded the garbage truck or not.
    
20. I arrived in Israel, speaking very little Hebrew. I learned to type Hebrew in two days, on the promise of a job at a friend's that didn't materialize (I type Hebrew at around 60-70 wpm now). My sister was working for the mayor of Tel Aviv at the time, and was able to get me a job with a friend in the special events department. I worked there for about two months and LOVED IT. We were in charge of planning all of the official events for the mayor. Street namings, park openings, special ceremonies, etc. For the first month, I was paid directly by the municipality. The second month was a problem, as their regulations only allowed them to employ someone temporarily for a month. The friend made some sort of arrangement whereby a security company that they did business with would pay me as though I had worked for them. I went off to Toronto for a month to tie up loose ends and upon returning, found out that the company was refusing to pay me, until the city paid them in advance. Since the city tends to pay anywhere between 90 days and a year from the date of invoice, I ended up with no money. I eventually got paid, but only after going over the friend's head, which pissed her off. Whatever. I have little tolerance these days for toxic friends and she turned out to be nothing but. It took me ages to dump her.
    
21. Regardless of all this, the municipality actually offered me a job, but since it was for the whopping sum of about $700 a month, I told them where to shove their offer.
    
22. My next job was arranged through my cousin. A friend of his was running a software outsourcing start-up and needed a secretary. The guy didn't really interview me, but he took me to his investor, who questioned me about everything other than my professional skills (Married? Kids? Boyfriend? Blahblah). Immediately after the rather invasive "interview" he said: "I don't want you for the job, but [CEO] apparently owes your cousin a favour so I guess the job is yours. There wasn't much of an office – we rented a room in one of the investor's other offices. I mostly did nothing all day, and got paid peanuts. I met someone who for a while became a very good friend there, so there was some merit to the job. The CEO ended up leaving a couple of months later, and seeing the writing on the wall, I moved on as well, but not before getting to hear the asshole investor mention that I was an asset to the company (because I had suggested blocking the CEO's email account upon his rather shady departure).
    
23. I was hired by a venture capital fund as a secretary. The salary was very high, and the benefits were pretty awesome. The job was hell. The company had a CEO (BIG, BIG ASSHOLE) and two investment managers. One was a royal bitch, though I got along with her for the most part, and the other was ok, but he could be a big ass too, and he had some sort of speech impediment (I think his tongue was too big) and I barely understood half of what he said. There was also an accountant, who may have been the craziest, meanest person I'd ever met, and a lawyer. The lawyer started around the same time as I did, and when the accountant (who did the payroll) found out he was making more money than her, she and the bitch investment manager decided to make his life miserable. He ended up quitting about 9 months later. He was no prize, but he didn't deserve to be ganged up on like he had been. To his credit, he had negotiated a contract that said they couldn't fire him for the first year and would have to finance his writing of the NY Bar. The other secretary could also be a nasty piece of work, but after a while I got used to her and we became good friends. We're no longer in contact, but she was ok. I joined the company near the conclusion of the high-tech bubble of 2000-2001. After two or three busy months, everything died. No one was investing in anything, there was no work to do (other than filing) and I was climbing the wall. Add to that being treated like crap, and the raging suicide bombs of the Intifadah that had reared its head a few months after I arrived in Israel, and I decided I'd had enough. I quit and moved back to Toronto. My description does no justice to how horrible this place was. I'll write up another post to detail examples of it, but the true highlight of the job was the day the CEO told me and his secretary that he didn't pay us to think.
    
24. I returned to Toronto about a month after I quit and did some temping. My mom saw an ad for a temporary secretarial job at a Jewish school, covering a three month maternity leave. Given that maternity leave in Canada is a year long, I was surprised that someone would only take three months off, but knowing what I know today about BDI, nothing surprises me. (Read back the archives from 2003-2004 for BDI shenanigans) The job itself was awesome. Three months later when BDI came back, instead of letting me go they created a position for me that I loved. In addition to secretarial work, I was also in charge of the production of 4 textbooks, so essentially I was also a desktop publisher. I got along famously with my boss, tolerated BDI (ok, that's a lie. Couldn't tolerate her at all. Hey, did I mention BDI was fired? For threatening a girl that ended up replacing me eventually?), made great friends, but after a couple of years there, I had a yen to go back to Israel.
    
25. I returned to Israel towards the end of 2004. For six months I did a bit of translating (very little) and mostly squandered my savings at the neighbourhood cafe. In February 2005 I did a translation job for someone, who in turn ended up offering me a full-time job. I hadn't really been looking for a job and the pay and benefits weren't exactly where I figured they should be, but I decided to take it on. It was better than no job at all, and it wasn't like I had been looking, anyway.
    
26. I had no idea what the job would be. I was working for a small company, sub-contracted to a huge, government-owned aviation concern, working in their UAV division. The first three months were hell. I was supposed to coordinate the preparation of a bid document in response to a tender. The timeline was impossible, people were not giving me the materials that I needed, I didn't understand any of it anyway, and my MS-Word skills, as it turned out, left MUCH to be desired. But then the deadline was extended, and people took that to mean they were in no rush to give me work, and I ended up going to work every day, sitting in front of a computer and doing nothing. There was no internet, and I could hardly show up and read a book. I suffered for a few months and then told my boss that I'd had enough and that as soon as I found another job, I'd be leaving.
    
27. Within two weeks he transferred me to another project, which was the exact opposite of where I'd been. There were a ton of people, most of whom were pretty awesome, and there was more work to do than hours in the day. I often worked 12 hour days, if not more. It was a really exciting project and I was mostly along for the ride for a huge milestone, which was fantastic. However, I was covering for someone's maternity leave (seriously – she made BDI look good), and when she returned I was transferred to another part of the project, which was yet another hell.
    
28. Although I used a rather advanced database, as far as I was concerned, all I did for six months was file. I hated every single moment of it. Oh, except for the part where I met my boyfriend! Hi baby! After the six months were up, and that part of the project ended, I ended up working here and there on various bids. Though I enjoy putting together documents, and messing around with MS-WORD, I was bored and I was tired of the "human factor" that seemed to repeatedly star in my work. As of a month ago, I no longer work there. Though this job had lots of ups and downs, I learned so much there, that I consider it to be one of my best jobs ever. Truly. I also made some fantastic friends there, which is always a bonus.
    
29. Somewhere in the middle of the last job, I started translating more seriously, when a television channel that was putting on a new local production of a very well known children's television show contracted my services. They needed all of the scripts translated into English, so that the program's owner could approve them. I did (and still do) a lot of work for them, and enjoy just about every minute of it. In general, my translating work has picked up a lot in the past year, and though I haven't actually done much to look for work, if I made just the smallest effort, I could probably live on it rather comfortably.
    
30. What's next for me? Time will tell.
    

So - which was my worst job? It's a toss up, but I'd say that the Venture Capital job was it. I spent a year there, taking nothing but abuse and I came out of it having learned not a single thing. With most of my other crappy jobs, there was at least something positive or amusing to take away, somewhat offsetting the misery but not so in that job.

So there you have it. What was your worst job?

The Man 2 : Rappy *sigh*

Rappy: I'd like a large capuccino. I've brought my mug.
Salad bar owner: No.
Rappy: Why not?
Salad bar owner: We only make coffee in our own take-away cups. If you want you can pour it into your mug outside.
Rappy: But I brought my own mug so you wouldn't use a take-away cup, to be friendly to the environment.
Salad bar (incidentally, called GREEN) owner: You can only have it in the take-away cup.
Rappy: I guess that means no coffee for me then.

Rappy: I'd like a large capuccino. Here, I've brought a mug.
Cafe cashier: *Stares in confusion, stammers...* I can put it into a take-away mug and you can pour it in.
Rappy: Well, no. The reason I brought the mug is to save the use of a non-reusable cup.
Cafe cashier: That's all I can do.
Rappy: I guess that means no coffee for me then.
Cafe cashier: Wait. I'll check what I can do. Let me have the mug so I can measure what size coffee it fits.
Rappy: Ok. Thanks.
Cafe cashier: *Fills mug with water, ascertains it is a medium, pours it down drain [The sigh here is implied. There was an actual volume measurement MARKED on the mug], leaves with barrista* That'll be a medium capuccino. 13 Shekels please.
Rappy: Here you go. Thank you.
Cafe cashier: You're welcome.
Rappy: *Happily awaits capuccino in own mug*
Barrista: *Prepares coffee, pours it into take-away mug, then pours it into mug.*
Rappy: *SIGH*

Yesterday, my brother and I attended a hands-on "workshop" on composting at Kerem Maharal, a moshav south of Haifa.

The event was held by Eretz Carmel, a non-profit organization whose goal is to "promote models of sustainable growth and revival of the environment, while at the same time preserving quality of life and building for a better future", and led by its founder, Amiad Lapidot.

We arrived at around 9:00, and under the shade of an olive tree, we sat and listened to Amiad describe the perfect composting cycle, and the composting project he implemented on the moshav (where household garbage is separated by residents at the source into organic and inorganic waste). Afterwards, we went down to the composting site (where we had originally congregated) for a more hands-on explanation and demonstration.

The site is an old greenhouse (an uncovered greenhouse - just a metal frame), probably 20 meters deep. Amiad begins constructing the compost piles at the far end (there are currently five piles) and works from the back to the front of the plot, adding new waste as it is collected. Currenlty there are 5 heaps , each at a different stage of decomposition. The piles aren't particularly high - the newest heap is approximately half a meter tall, and as the materials decompose, the piles get lower and lower.

Once a week, after Amiad collects all of the organic waste thrown out by residents, he brings it to the site, along with tree/garden trimmings that he either collects or buys. He sets down a bed of the trimmings, tops it with the organic waste he collected, and covers it with more trimmings. The pile gets longer and longer with each passing week and once it reaches the front of the plot, he can start constructing a new one. Once he covers the newest addition with trimmings, he wets down the pile, in order to maintain a proper level of moisture. The moisture is necessary in order to keep the red worms he employs in the process alive.

Materials can decompose with or without red worms, but they certainly make things go much faster - six months vs. a year. The breakdown of materials is accomplished through heat (and the worms). The piles heat up to extremely high temperatures. We stuck our hands in two of them, and the temperatures were in the 50-70 degrees celsius range. Amiad gave us an explanation regarding each heap (ranging in age from brand new to 4 months), showed us the worms at work, and showed us the breakdown progress over time.

Next we built an improvised back-yard composter (almost identical, in fact, to what my parents have had in their back yard for years) and began filling it with farming waste that had been dropped off that morning.

Next we went to the oldest pile, approximately 6-7 months old, which was completely decomposed and ready for use. Amiad showed us some of the methods he uses at this stage to separate the fine compost powder (the type generally sold in nurseries) from the remaining compost (which breaks down in bigger chunks, good for ground cover between trees and plants), beginning with a simple window frame shaken by two people (almost like sifting flour), a bigger netting he rigged, and finally a mechanical spinning drum that his father and a friend engineered out of an old barrel, netting, and an old washing machine engine (see video below).

I would imagine that many people would be wary of living next to a compost site, or of having a composter inside their home (if they are city dwellers like me), but I have to point out that the site does not smell at all. As my family will attest (and my florist, too, since I once had to toss out a beautiful new bouquet he sent ), I have an ultra-sensitive sense of smell. The only thing in the entire site that smelled at all, was the pile of broccomini that had been delivered by a resident farmer that morning for composting, part of which we used to fill the improvised composter. Fresh refuse draws flies and rots in the elemetns, leading to the familiar rotting smell that we find so repelling. However, once it is covered up with trimmings and the flies' access is blocked - the smell is gone! I have a friend who lives on Kerem Hamaharal, right next door to Amiad's compost site. In addition to his house, 50 meters away, are two residential units that he rents out. His tenants' windows are 20 meters away from the plot. There is NO SMELL at either of these units.

When we left, Amiad gave each of us a small bag of compost (I gave mine to my brother, since he's a budding gardener (heh - I'm so punny sometimes) and I also bought a 2L bottle of ecological-organic olive oil from him (home-made), which smells awesome.

Pictures and a film follow. A more detailed explanation of the pictures appears in the flickr set.

Cats at Rest

Eeeenteresting...

This story has apparently taken Canada by storm over the past couple of days. A class action suit is being launched against CIBC, one of Canada's largest banks, for unpaid overtime.

I worked at CIBC from 1992 to 2000 and often-times worked close to 10 hours of overtime per week. Now that I think back, I totally remember how in my first month there, after I filled in my time sheets with the actual time worked, I was taken aside and told that the time sheets can only reflect the hours I was scheduled for, i.e., if I was scheduled to work 10-4 and worked 9:30 - 5, I could still only record and get paid 10 - 4.

Awesome.

On Organization

As I sit in my apartment, surrounded by piles of paper everywhere and a mess nearly indescribable, it occurred to me that the cleaning lady might be coming tomorrow. Yikes. She's been away so I'm not sure when she'll return, but she generally comes every other week and it's been two already. I'll have to do some major tidying in case she does come. Unlike most Israelis, I don't *clean* before the cleaning lady comes, but I do tidy.

This mess is all rather ironic, given what I've been doing for the past two weeks. A couple of weeks ago at the Soup Salon, noorster asked me to come over and help her get her apartment in order. So I did and after some resistence, she realized that she would have to get rid of the table and chairs because she had just too much furniture in her wee little apartment. Fast forward to the following Friday's soup salon, and noorster can't stop talking about the wonders I performed in her apartment (all I did was throw out some suggestions - she did the rest). I went over later and indeed - the place looks awesome. She tossed, rearranged, cleaned and generally made the place a lot less cramped. Savta Dotty, hostess of the weekly salon came over later that evening and was duly impressed, and asked me to come work my miracles at chez dotty. So I did. There's still lots left to do, but we threw out a ton of stuff (the fine paper non-recycling from yesterday's entry, for starters). The momentum was only stopped due to savta dotty's impending travels. In return for whipping my leash, I was rewarded with savta dotty's lovely company (she's the awesome) and with two fabulous meals - lunch at Orna & Ella (a favourite restaurant) on Sunday and a lovely dinner at Orca yesterday. Yum!

Following savta dotty's enthusiastic gushing about the progress we had made after the first day Nominally Challenged called me and asked to hire my services. Help people get organized while getting paid for it? There's a concept! I went over this past Friday after soup and we worked for a couple of hours - mostly just rearranging the configuration of the living room/office to create some more space and make it more welcoming. We have a bit more to do, but I think it'll turn out perfect.

It's bizarre, but I love doing this kind of stuff (less so for myself, obviously). And with that, I'm off to do some filing :). (Not really.)

The Man 2 : Rappy 1

Phone call placed to the person at the Ministry of the Environment responsible for recycling in Tel Aviv:

rappy: Hello, I was told you were in charge of recycling for Tel Aviv.
woman: Well, sort of. How can I help you?
rappy: I have large quantities of fine paper for recycling. Where can I recycle it?
woman: You can't.
rappy: I can't? Why not?
woman: There isn't any paper recycling in Tel Aviv.
rappy: Why not?
woman: Well, it isn't really my responsibility. The sanitation department is in charge of it, but paper recycling is only being rolled out right now.
rappy: Ok, rolled out where?
woman: In the north part of the city. It's only available in a few buildings that have their own garbage disposal room. You'd have to know which buildings have them and then you'd have to go into their garbage room, which is private property. Which neighborhood do you live in?
rappy: Sheinkin.
woman: Yeah, it isn't available there.
rappy: Are you aware that we're in the year 2007? The technology exists. Why isn't it available?
woman: It just isn't.
rappy: So I have to throw all these papers in the garbage?
woman: Yes.
rappy: *Sigh.*

While standing at bus terminal for 15 minutes, a bus driver pulls up and leaves his (double-parked) bus idling for a full 10 minutes. Another driver opens the door to this driver's bus but doesn't get on. I ask him to turn off the ignition because it's bad for the environment, but he says it isn't his bus, so he can't. Turns out he's the driver of the line for which I was waiting. Our exchange:

Driver: It's a hot day, he needs to leave it on for the air-conditioning.
rappy: I don't really care. It's horrible for the environment and he should turn it off.
Driver: Don't you worry about that kind of stuff. Worry about your own problems.
rappy: The environment is my problem. It's yours, too.
Driver: Nonsense. No one ever died from an idling bus.
rappy: Actually, 600 people died last year from pollution-related illnesses.
Driver: That's a load of crap.
rappy: No, it really isn't.
Driver: Well, what difference does it make if he turns off the engine? It's only one bus.
rappy: Right, and if all the buses didn't idle for ridiculous lengths of time, we'd all be better off.
Driver: You need to stop worrying about other people. This is a country of assholes. Only assholes get ahead here, not the people who care.
rappy: Perhaps if everyone in this country didn't operate on that assumption, we'd get somewhere.
Driver: Forget it, we're all assholes and that's that.
rappy: That's a refreshing position to take. I happen to not be an asshole.
Driver: You're full of crap, and it's a good thing you commented about the engine to me and not to the other driver, he would have kicked your ass.
rappy: *Sigh.*

Call placed to Dan Bus Company:

woman: Dan Bus Company, how may I help?
rappy: Hello, have I reached the customer complaint line?
woman: Yes you have.
rappy: I'd like to find out if drivers are required to turn off their engines if they leave their bus.
woman: Of course they are.
rappy: Well then I'd like to file a complaint.
woman: Can you give me the details?
rappy: Bus number XX at station YY was idling for at least 10 minutes while the driver was busy having a coffee in the office.
woman: Ok, I've recorded the details.
rappy: And what happens next?
woman: The driver will be brought in front of a disciplinary committee.
rappy: Thank you very much!
woman: Have a nice day.
rappy: *Kick my ass, did he say? Mwahahahaha!*