The Dead Pool

I find that I like writing movie reviews, so I am writing one.  I remember a writing assignment from 37 years ago, when I was at Berkeley, to write a movie review.  I hated it, had no idea what to do.  Things change.

The Dead Pool is a Dirty Harry movie, made in 1988.  My guess is that this movie represents the end of the franchise, or maybe it brought about the end of the franchise.

The quick summation of the movie is that it's not much, about the equivalent of an hour-and-a-half version of Mannix.  Actually, I don't remember Mannix all that well, but choose some old police/detective TV show, and you have the idea.

The good parts:  Liam Neeson is in it, and Clint Eastwood blows away several bad guys.  You have to suspend your disbelif a bit, because he seems to have an easy time dispatching bad guys with automatice weapons, while he just has the world's biggest hand gun, but that's what Dirty Harry does.

Speaking of suspended disbelief, there is this one scene.  Okay, some times you just have to go along with the movie -- how did the lights stay on on Titanic with all that water; could Saruman really make that many Uruk-hai; that Death Star doesn't look fully operational -- but there is one scene in this movie that makes it really tough.  Harry and his partner get chased through San Francisco by a bomb-laden toy car, about a foot long or so.  The chase goes on a long ways, at freeway speeds, with Harry's car and the toy car flying over San Francisco's famous hills, and the toy car keeps up, never flipping over or lagging behind.  And who is controlling this car?  A guy is driving behind it, also keeping up, and somehow managing to control his car and the amazing toy car.  The toy car even catches up and blows up Harry's car, but Harry survives (Dirty Harry doesn't die in his films.)

Speaking of suspended disbelief, again, Patricia Clarkson is in this movie, and I think at one point she said something about being Miss Colorado runner-up one year, maybe.  No offense, but pickings must have been pretty slim in Colorado that year.  Okay, that was obviously offensive, and I'm not even sure she said that, but, umm...

Adding insult to injury, as I was watching this boring thriller, I was thinking that at least I get to hear that famous Dirty Harry line, "Go ahead, make my day" before it's over.  That would be a high point at least.  Oops, wrong movie.  Maybe that was Magnum Force.  Kind of a letdown.

Employment Chronicles, Day 1: Day 1

Today was my first day at the new temporary job.  It took them a few days to get ready for me, and then they weren't ready for me anyway, but I have been on the other side of that situation, so I understand.  I had to borrow someone's password, and the password had a deeply religious theme, which made me smile.  I also got invited to devotional and some other spiritual gathering each week, although I would not get paid for that time.  I thanked them and passed.  As a group, the World Vision people seem as serious about their religion as any church congregation.

I get to ease into this role; tomorrow my new co-workers are having an offsite meeting all afternoon, and Thursday another one all day.  I will not work at those times, so my first week is 3.5 days.

On a practical note, I went into the Robert Half timecard system and logged my first 8 hours today, so that was fun.  It made me feel like a contractor, logging my hours.  I haven't actually been paid by the hour in forever.

Getting up and going to work was easier than I thought it would be.  Four and a half months off didn't throw me off my schedule.  I guess I have been doing this for so long that I can just go right back to it.

It has been fun writng the Unemployment Chronicles, and again, thanks  to everyone who read them.  However, this is it.  After today, I will still write on occasion, about whatever I want, not necessarily about being unemployed.  And there is only so much you can say about being employed; it's really not OK to say everything you think about your work, out on the Internet where anyone can see it, which means you really can't write honestly about it, which pretty much kills the whole idea.  I still have at least one rant about corporations to write, but I won't write about my experiences at World Vision.  Today was fine, and the people were nice.  I'll go that far.

Maybe I will go back to political rants.  A half day tomorrow -- time off already.  Woo hoo!

Unemployment Chronicles, Day 8: Another Day of Freedom

World Vision is still getting ready for me, so at least through tomorrow, I am still home waiting.  And I'm realizing that I really like having all this time off, and I sort of regret that I have to go back to work.

Related to that, there are a couple of good things about doing contract work.  One is that there will be natural breaks when one contract ends and the next one hasn't started.  The other is that contracts end, so I won't be going back to the same job forever.  Going from one job to the next won't feel the same as always working in one place.

For a long time, I talked about the possibility that I could retire one day and then continue working, just not with the same level of pay and responsibility, hopefully not full-time hours.  And I am slowly realizing that this is exactly what I have done.  I am, in fact, retired, my pay is lower, I will probably have breaks without work, and I suspect the work will be easier, or maybe just more interesting.

I checked out some of the benefits of working with Robert Half.  They include six (6!) paid holidays each year, but you only get those after you have worked 1,100 hours.  Through New Year's Day, they will just be upaid for me.  After 1,880 hours, you get a one week bonus, so I guess that's your paid vacation.  Medical insurance is expensive enough that we are sticking with COBRA for now.  You really are more like an independent contractor than an employee, even though technically you are an employee.  On the good side, if I work overtime, I'll get paid extra, so there's that.

Maybe Friday, maybe Monday.

Unemployment Chronicles, Day 3: World Vision

As a side note, we left a window open downstairs last night, and when I got up this morning it was 63 degrees in the house.  This is what we in the Pacific Northwest call "summer."  By the end of this month, "summer" will be over and it will start to rain again.

The contract I was hired for is with World Vision, a big Christian charity that fights hunger around the world by encouraging people to sponsor a child via monthly payments.  It's a good cause, and based on a quick browse through the Internet, I don't see much controversy related to the group.

The project is to build a single set of financial statements for World Vision International, which is a separate entity from the US organization World Vison.  World Vision International is a sort of federation of different organizations in different countries, with separate financials, and they have never tried to create a single set of financials before.  So we have no blueprint, financial statements in different languages that may have been assembled using different rules, and people to contact all over the world.  Shoud be fun.  This is actually a great project for my abilities.

One thing this project is NOT, it is not an opportunity to work my way into fulltime employment.  If you look at careers on the World Vision website, you will quickly see that that they are looking for committed Christians.  As a condition of employment, you have to agree to their statement of faith, or to the Apostles' Creed.  I think even some Christians might have a problem with the statement of faith, the part about the Bible being the infallible, authoritative word of God.  The Apostles' Creed is more benign, one of those things I remember repeating often in church.

I won't be agreeing to either of those things.  But for a couple of months, it's a good opportunity.

Unemployment Chronicles, Day 1 (Again): This is the Beginning

So here's the funny thing -- the really pretty amazing thing:

For the last four and a half months, I have been looking for work.  I polished up my resume, got my Linked-In profile up to speed, attended outplacement classes and worked with a coach, talked to recruiters, networked to the extent that I could, applied for jobs, interviewed a few times.  I wrote 48 posts about being unemployed and had nearly 4,000 pageviews during those four-plus months.

But as I wrote in my last post, I was still technically employed.  If you call Farmers and ask about my employment there, they will tell you that my last day was yesterday.  My first day of actual unemployment was today.

And way down here, finally, is that funny thing:  Today I got a job.  I spent part of one day unemployed.

The contract is only for about two months, so it's not necessarily the cure-all that will lead us back to prosperity.  Then again, we were never at prosperity, at least I wouldn't say we were.  Anyway, what it is is a foot in the contracting door, money coming in, benefits, the chance to show someone that I know what I am doing.  All good stuff.

I won't start the job for at least another week, so I will probably keep writing until then, maybe about the joys of not working but knowing that you will have a job soon.