Never. Ever. Deal with non-local recruiters. They have an ice cube’s chance in hell of placing you anywhere.

Is totally cathartic. We live in an unincorporated area of the county, which means that we have to contract individually with trash haulers. We use Waste Management, and they’re pretty good. The unfortunate part is that they won’t pick up any big stuff. Like the three toilets I took out of our house. So, I had to haul them to the dump myself. Not a big deal, and really cool. Very cathartic to heave a toilet bowl from 6 feet up in the air onto a concrete slab and watch it explode into tiny fragments. I’d even come get people’s toilets for a chance to do it again.

Jesus. I’m having a tough time figuring out how so many recruiters are non-local. I mean, they can’t seriously have direct relationships with local Atlanta companies, can they? By non-local, I mean New Jersey, Minnesota, and California. It looks like AT&T is looking for a SharePoint trainer type. It sounds like a good gig, but I’ve gotten 6 e-mails about the same job in an hour. None of them are local to Atlanta. To add to it, they’re all so blessed relentless. One company called me 6-8 times a day after I told them I wasn’t interested, trying to get me to let them submit me on a position.  Ugh.

So - sausage is done, and we’re labeling our bags ‘o’ meat with the sharpie. I asked Chuck to label it all ‘Super Tuesday Sausage’. He then related the story of how he and Kate used to help his grandmother, Meme, put up vegetables in the summer when they’d stay with her and their grandfather in the summer. Apparently, Pop and Meme ate a lot of ‘Kate is dumb, Charles is the greatest - corn’. Freezer graffiti.

What a worn, yet entirely appropriate metaphor for our democracy at work. So, I’m liveblogging Chuck’s sausage making AND the SuperTuesday results as they roll in. Right now, Chuck has just finished mixing together spices for the world’s best breakfast sausage (I mean that very seriously) which smells incredible - sage, thyme, rosemary, cayenne, red pepper flakes, salt and pepper. And Chris Matthews won’t shut up about evangelicals in Georgia. As if I don’t hear enough about that at work. And Chris Matthews is the Dick Vitale of political reporting. Regardless, this is just another regular night at the Balog household - Chuck is so uninterested in the political significance of February 5th that he’s making his own sausage like it’s 1895, and I’m so interested that I’m yelling at the TV about every 30 seconds and talking to myself. We’re made for each other, obviously.

OK, so there’s a recruiting group here in town that has been relentless about getting me to apply for a position at ACS doing development and implementation on a pharmacy POS system. The position is extremely light on details. By light, I mean 1 sentence and a few fragments. It also requires a project test that consists of a MPP and a spreadsheet with essay questions. Ridiculous. Also ridiculous in that it’s clearly a project plan that they’ve used very recently for business activities. I don’t feel that I can disclose the questions, because they don’t belong to me. Suffice it to say, I believe it’s really more of a consulting exercise. In my estimation, it would take a couple of hours to answer the questions and take the “test”. I don’t think I want to do that. Not unless they want to pay me for the analysis. They’re getting something for nothing out of the deal - an external assessment of a project plan that is either live or recently used. That’s called consulting, not a test.

I understand the need for an objective measure of ability. However, a lot of project management isn’t objective. How you control a project is subjective and depends on the climate of the organization. Maybe their “test” is to determine if candidates fit the environment, I don’t know. It was presented as a “Project Test” by the recruiters. Maybe I’m too worked up about it, I don’t know. Something about it is just really offensive.

It’s obscene to me the amount of red tape and false authority that HIPAA has created. Especially among medical records managers. The biggest problem is that HIPAA allows for providers to charge cost recovery for sending medical records to patients. There’s been no legal challenge on the matter of what the cost should actually be.

Case in point is my doc in Virginia. I called and asked for my records to be sent to my new doc here in Georgia. They were total PITAs about the whole thing. First, they wanted to charge me $.50 per page for the records. When I reminded them that they needed to be sent directly to my Dr.’s office, they balked and said they would need a release form (which is optional under HIPAA). They were just doing it to be difficult assholes. So, I called the GA Dr. and asked them to interdict on my behalf. Same BS about a release. So, I FAX’ed them a stupid BS release authorizing the release of my records to the GA doc on the same day. They took it upon themselves to send the records to me, instead of my doc and try to charge me $14 (including an elevated amount for postage which is currently illegal). The postage as marked was $1.81, and the amount charged was $3, which is mail fraud in and of itself. So, I wrote them a kind letter explaining that I never asked for my records and that they can stick the fee.

Anyway, just a rant on that. Kelsey Seybold in Houston couldn’t have an easier process. Download the form, fill it out, and fax it to them. They fax your materials to the provider you specify with no problems.

I’m not advocating a central store of medical records like Google and MS propose, but it sure would be nice to be able to get everything from one place and have it be under my control.

Well, the little one had her first fall at school yesterday. Frightening for all parties involved, but she’s OK. The school called and said that she was standing up on a chair and then fell backwards into a book case (that didn’t have a nook gase in it). I was a bit rude to the lady who called me. It was all in the presentation. She started out by telling me that my little one had a head injury and the details of the fall. That was followed by, “she’s fine, though. Please don’t be concerned - You don’t have to come down. We just wanted to call and let you know because it was her head.” My response was a very cold, “You can’t call me and tell me my daughter has had a head injury and expect me to remain calm and not come down. I’ll be there in a minute. Click.” So, I called SJ and we both headed down there. When I got there, she was sitting with her teacher and eating gummy fruits. She had stopped crying, and seemed relatively happy. I had taken a little pocket flashlight on my way past my workshop, so I checked that her pupils were responsive. She hadn’t lost balance and very much seemed herself. The staff at her school were very good about the whole thing, and handled it very well. It’s just one of those things, and she’s been prone to standing in chairs lately, anyway. SJ arrived, and we sat with the little one for a few minutes before we took her home. She seemed a bit more confused as to why we were both there early, and I took that as a good sign. So, we took off and decided to run her by the pediatrician’s office. He gave her a clean bill of health, and asked us to wake her up every three hours or so overnight to make sure that she was OK. We did, and she was fine all night. She’s been right as rain all day today.

So, I’m sure that this will be the first in many things like this as she grows up. I think we all handled it pretty well, and none are worse for wear.

Just talked to another recruiter that picked up on “asp.net” in my resume. I have managed several asp.net initiatives, but couldn’t write a lick of the stuff if I had to. Doesn’t stop the Cold Calling Recruiters from wasting my time or their time. You would think that they would add a few more keywords to filter the noise from the signal, but I guess not.

Well, I’ve been looking for work since we’ve landed here in Atlanta. It’s going pretty well, as I seem to be getting plenty of calls and emails every day. The only problem that I have with it is that many of the recruiters that send me e-mails haven’t bothered to really read my resume. Usually the ones who call have read my resume and have a very good idea of what they’re looking for. It ’s good to talk to these folks, and really haven’t run across any unprofessional ones yet.

However, I have spoken with one or two that seem to pick up one or maybe two keywords in my resume and then try to give me a hard sell on submitting me for a position that I know little or nothing about. I wonder how these folks feed themselves every month, as they can’t be that successful at what they do.

There are also some VERY bad apples in the recruiting bunch. For example, one woman who contacted me and then stated that in order for me to find out any details about the position that I needed to sign a NDA that gave them the exclusive right to represent me to the company for a period of 2 years. Something tells me that they make more money off enforcing the NDA than they do placing candidates.

Anyway, there are a few irons in the fire, and I’ll post something when something solid comes through.