* Jeff Miller
* Allison Krause
* William Schroeder
* Sandy Scheuer

Also in our thoughts: Joe Lewis, John Cleary, Tom Grace, Alan Canfora, Dean Kahler, Doug Wrentmore, Jim Russell, Bob Stamps, Don MacKenzie.

Wondering About OBL

I've always wondered if Osama Bin Laden was really the force behind the 9/11 attacks. They came up with his name so quickly, and there never has been any real explanation as to how they came up with his name. He was a former CIA employee, GHW Bush having formerly run the CIA, and a member of the Bin Laden family, who celebrated holidays with Dubya, calling him "Uncle George." The security contract on the World Trade Center expired the day before the attacks, and the company that lost the contract was Neil Bush's.

That doesn't mean OBL wasn't the bad guy he was made out to be. It simply means that nobody ever bothered to present the evidence against him, and so the possibility exists that he was just a scapegoat.

And now, we'll never know. There's a British newspaper that claims that OBL was killed years ago, and this operation was intended to put paid to the legend of OBL. Or maybe the stories are right, and we gunned down an unarmed man.

A Skeptic, Not A Denier

The official version of events may well be correct, but the principle of Occam's Razor - that the simplest explanation is the best - doesn't favor it over the conspiracy theory, and it should.

Oh, well.

It wasn't the fact that the government was stupid on May 4. Governments always do stupid things; all large organizations do. And small organizations, too, although they are less obvious to the general public.

Unintended Consequences

They ended student deferments, and went to a lottery system. A number of students with low lottery numbers opted to join the National Guard. They'd barely had any training at all when they were ordered to campus. Some say that an officer ordered his men to fire; others say that his hand motions were misinterpreted. In any case, kids emerging from buildings, not demonstrators, but simply kids rushing from one class to another, were shot, with four of them dying and another nine wounded.

Handing live ammunition to a rabble of untrained soldiers and expecting them to behave appropriately is stupid. They should have had shields and billy clubs. You can kill someone with a billy, but you're less likely to do so. More important, you're only likely to kill someone you're actually trying to attack. The four that died were hit by accident. They were in the background when the troops shot at someone else and missed.

They Deserved It

What shocked me was that nobody had compassion for the families of these victims. They shouldn't have been there, was the most common response I heard. Yeah? College costs a bundle. It costs as much to sit in a classroom as to have a mechanic work on your car. You don't want to skip your classes.

But the average person thought that when the National Guard hit town to protect them, that students should have abandoned their studies, forfeiting a semester's tuition, losing a year of their life instead of expecting that the government troops were there to protect well-behaved students.

I Didn't Know

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming; we're finally on our own. This summer, I hear the drumming....

I didn't know any of the dead students. I didn't know any of the wounded students. I knew a couple of the students who had joined the Guard. Bought them a beer. When you're in a group that kills multiple innocent and responsible kids, it takes a lot of beer to wash off the blood. Last time I talked to one of them, he said there were still blood stains on his soul.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Allison Krause - CIA - conspiracy - Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young - Dubya - GHW Bush - Jeff Miller - National Guard - Occam's Razor - Osama Bin Laden - Sandy Scheuer - student protests - William Schroeder - World Trade Center

England and America, George Bernard Shaw (and Winston Churchill and various others) once said, are two countries divided by a common language. You don't need to cross the ocean to observe this phenomenon, however. All you have to do is to order a pizza.

When I was growing up, everybody knew that pizza in actually an American food, that it was imported to Italy and Sicily from the New World, and that it originated in Chicago. I've seen claims on Food Network, though, which is headquartered in New York, that pizza originated in New York.

You Can Always Tell Someone From New York

I think they have a case of Trump Syndrome. To someone from New York, being piled upon each other like rats in a warren seems to be a sign of superiority in some way. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, they claim, although the rest of the country wonders why anyone would want to make it in New York. Wouldn't anyone with any sense live where it's a lot nicer to live?

New Yorkers, you see, view New York as a place with a surplus of people. People living in civilization, however, view New York as a place with inadequate elbow room. Manhattan has about the same population as Hawaii, but Hawaii has nice beaches, while Manhattan has subways that reek of urine.

But You Can't Tell Them Much

It's possible, of course, that pizza originated somewhere else. Shakey's Pizza was the first one to use the phrase "pizza parlor", with pizzeria being the preferred term before that; they started in California. It is one of the doctrines of this church, however, that pizza originated in Chicago; live with it.

If you recognize that pizza actually is three entirely different foods, however, it's possible to conclude that it has three different birthplaces. St. Louis style pizza has a thin crust made with a baking-powder dough, much like a cracker. Chicago style pizza is a casserole on a dense bread-dough crust that is of necessity thick in order to support the weight of all those toppings. New York style pizza is all about the dough, hot, chewy, and greasy, and if you want it to be hot, chewy and greasy, you can't have a lot of toppings.

I'm Fond Of Chewy

I have to say that since moving to Lancaster, I've become fond of the New York style pizza. For a long time, Metro Express had two large one-topping pizzas for $10, pick-up only, and it worked out well for Blondie and myself; I'd eat several pieces, she'd eat several pieces, and our dog Isaac would scarf down the rest.

I noticed tonight, though, that Papa John was talking about his favorite pizza being sausage, pepperoni, and six cheeses. That got me thinking about what my favorite pizza topping is.

Pepperoni is a good topping, in some regards, but on the other hand, it's not really my favorite meat. Do you know anyone who ever makes himself a pepperoni sandwich? The spices are all wrong.

Sausage Doesn't Cut It, Either

I really like the flavor of sausage, but the problem there is that when it cooks, you end up with a pool of oil on the pizza.

A plain cheese pizza is good, but it's kinda bland. Hamburger is too bland, too.

Corrugated Cardboard

Blondie likes to buy frozen pizza at Amelia's, and other "used grocery" outlets, and add her own toppings. You end up with a midwestern pizza that way, a casserole. The crust is crushed under the weight of the toppings and can't rise properly, so it ends up resembling a sheet of corrugated cardboard. What's more, many of the toppings she adds are vegetables, and by the time they're baked hot, they've steamed the crust, which really isn't what you want.

I guess what I usually order is a sausage pizza, made with sweet italian sausage, although if I was making it myself, I'd probably make it with Polksa Keilbasa.

My DEEP Dish Pizza

I used to make a pizza that was extremely popular at parties - I took a loaf of frozen bread dough and thawed it, then flattened it out to fill the bottom of a 9x13x2 cake pan. I'd add an entire jar of the 69c Kroger-brand spaghetti sauce, which wasn't great on spaghetti but had exactly the right seasonings for pizza. I'd fry up a pound of Tennessee Pride sausage, and add that scrabble to the pan, chop up a huge (about 4" diameter) onion, and three large green peppers, and add those as well. I stirred in about 2 ounces of caraway seeds - yeah, it seems odd, but it really added something - to the sauce, and added an entire can, the 14-ounce size, of sliced black olives. Then I'd add 2 pounds of shredded pizza cheese, and stick it in the oven for about 90 minutes.

Just the appearance of this deep-dish pizza would boggle party-goers, and they get themselves a small piece, then come back and get another piece, a bigger one. Within a few weeks, I was getting invited to parties by strangers, and they'd ask me to bring along my pizza and volunteer to pay for the ingredients.

Sudden Popularity

And all sorts of people would come up to me, and say that they had something caught in their teeth, that they weren't complaining, that they really liked it, but they were curious as to what it was. I had originally run across it because Tennessee Pride had included it in their sausage, and I added more of it to the sauce, and I've never run across anyone else who included it in their pizza.

One of my housemates, a jewish psychology student from the east coast, preferred the St. Louis style pizza, although none of us called it that. We called it Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, because that's what you ended up with when you made a pizza using their boxed pizza mix. They were interesting and good - but not good enough to make them on my own once we were past that "alternating cook nights" experiment. The experiment didn't last long, because the housemate from Uganda liked to make a dish of burned rice, plantain, peanut butter, and curry that was only borderline edible in a pinch, although he seemed to love scarfing it down.

Thinking Of Favorite Pizzerias

In scouring my brain for perfect pizza, I remember Village Inn (who had great silent movies), Noble Romans (who threw their dough into the air), East of Chicago Pizza Company (friendly buxom waitresses and fairly good pizza), Cassano's Pizza (who made a nice peanut and pineapple chunk pizza), and Marco's Pizza (who has a great white pizza, and a wonderful vegetarian pizza with feta cheese and tomato slices). None of them strike me as being the perfect pizza, and I'm sorry, Papa John, but I swore off buying pizza from you years ago; I'm a married man, and I don't need to deal with your company to be treated that rudely.

But I think I've figured out the perfect pizza toppings, something that will allow a chewy crust to be baked, yet providing a nice snappy tang to the taste. I guess my favorite would be a cinnamon and brown sugar pizza. That wouldn't go too well with beer, though, so it's never going to make it for Monday Night Football parties.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Amelia's - caraway seeds - Cassano - Chef Boy-Ar-Dee - Chicago Style - curry - Domino - Donald Trump - East of Chicago Pizza - George Bernard Shaw - Hawaii - Kroger - Marco Pizza - Metro Express - Monday Night Football - New York Style - Papa John - peanut butter - pizza - Pizza Hut - plantain - rice - St. Louis Style - Tennessee Pride - Village Inn

Contrary to most people's opinions, writing is hard work. Physically hard work.

The original Harl Delos had a brother, Reed, who had damage to his heart while still a toddler, from rheumatic fever. He'd never be able to work for a living, the family decided, so from a very early age, it was determined that they'd send him to college.

Of course, it is that side of the family that has all the literary sorts. At one point a couple of decades ago, about 50% of that side of the family was a writer. reporter, editor, or photographer.

Easier Than Working

We all teased each other that it was easier than working for a living - but in fact, cardiologists say that occupation is one of the top twelve for heart attacks. I was concerned a couple of decades ago, because when I'd be in the middle of a writing session, the sweat would pour off my brow and back, and I'd need to stop and go take a shower because I would develop the worst body odor.

The cardiologist laughed when I said I wasn't doing anything when this occurred; I was only writing. He told me that the brain was the #1 consumer on the body's energy budget, and that I was, indeed, working heavily indeed, and that's why so many writers are skinny.

I don't ever apologize for not blogging. I assume you'll figure when I have something to say, I'll say it, and when I don't, it's better that I not post. This is more of a whine; I'm feeling sorry for myself, and yeah, self-pity is somewhat unattractive, but if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, right?

I Earned It

I used to have a sign above my desk saying, "As soon as this rush is over, I'm going to have a nervous breakdown. I've worked for it, I've earned it, and I'm damned well gonna enjoy it." And at one point, I had a regular cycle, where I would get an issue of the paper out, then collapse in a heap for 24 to 48 hours, then work increasingly hard until I wouldn't get to bed at all the last 24 hours before the next issue came out.

In case you're daft, that's not a good idea. Slow and steady wins the race. Feast-and-famine stresses you, aging you prematurely. On the other hand, I wasn't choosing to do that. I pushed myself to get out that issue, and I was physically sick afterwards, complete with wheezing, sneezing, diarrhea, fever, and other symptoms.

It was like I was a habitual customer of a Payday Loan shop, only a shop that dealt in gumption and health instead of cash. The loans look so inviting, but the interest rates they charge are pure hell.

Lupus Is A Chronic Illness

Lupus is a chronic disease, they say, but in practice, it comes and goes. Em would get better and worse, influences by events of the calendar, and of community and family life. Em would push herself to cook a great meal and bake a fabulous decorated cake and decorate to celebrate Jasper's birthday, and the stress would result in her lupus flaring immediately after his birthday party.

She'd demand that I help her with the party, and I had to, because the more I helped, the lighter her flare, except that the more I did, the more Em decided to take on, so it really didn't help. And when she collapsed afterwards, the load on me increased even more, and I dare not fail to be up to the task. But about the time her lupus flare was easing up, it was my turn to collapse in a heap.

I felt so ashamed, for years, of not being up to the task, and after Em had become a memory, I spent a lot of time with a therapist learning to accept my limitations. I learned to put limits on myself, instead of trying to be superman, and things went a lot better for me.

Chinese Finger Traps

You know those "chinese finger traps" that are made of thin strips of bamboo? They are woven like a basket, in the shape of a tube, and you insert the index fingers from your two hands in the opposite ends. The harder you pull, the tighter the bamboo grasps your fingers.

My therapist told me that the conventional solution to the chinese finger trap is to relax, allowing one to remove one's fingers - but that I seem to have perfected a second solution. If you pull really, really, hard, you can tear the bamboo to shreds. It completely destroys the chinese finger trap, and it is pretty rough on your fingers, but if you're determined enough to do it, it can be done.

It's just that it's pretty stupid to do things that way, he explained, and he kept advising me, session after session, that I was fighting a chinese finger trap.

Blondie's Cabin Fever

When the doctor recently ordered Blondie to stop driving - she has vascular dementia - it landed pretty hard on her. She was already missing the social contact of a job, and now she was pretty much locked in the house, having to rely on me to take her out.

Meanwhile, I have agoraphobia, which means I don't go out often or easily. It'd be grossly unfair to accommodate my disability and ignore her needs, so I've been going out a lot more than I want to.

My gut knows that the outside world is dangerous. I end up clenching up, and that leads to constipation - and the constipation makes me even more constipated, and I start accumulating matter in my gut. I end up developing edema in my legs, and when I sit up, I shut off circulation to my legs making the edema even worse.

That's Not All

Add to that, the fact that my hip isn't right. I try to move my right leg from gas pedal to brake pedal and back and forth, and suddenly, the inside of my upper thigh wants to cramp. At that point, I can pull over and walk around for five minutes to ease the cramping, but the trip is basically over; I need to head home and lie down for the rest of the day, because the cramping will only get worse, and soon get to the point where I can't drive at all.

All of which, as you might expect, is hard on Blondie as well. She expects me to drive her to get her meds, or to the store, and I'm not supposed to say "No."

I used to use health insurance to talk to a therapist. These days, I blog instead. It helps, sometimes, when I can blog. I bought extension cords for my keyboard and mouse, and put a monitor on my nightstand, so I can lie flat on my back, balancing my keyboard on my belly. Learning to touch-type this way was a challenge.

Flat-backing It

And I did this entire post while flat on my back, but I'm now soaked in sweat, I can smell my own stink, and my head is pounding with a nasty headache. Even when it's an extremely personal blog, writing is hard work.

I woke up in the middle of the night last night, soaked in sweat, awakened by a nightmare. Years ago, nobody had air conditioning. On the farm, we had a lot of trees surrounding the house, and if you opened the windows on opposite sides of the house, there was pretty good cross ventilation, especially if you supplemented it with a roaring box fan.

In this dream, though, I'm in the city, in a third-floor apartment. The temperature is well into the nineties, even in the middle of the night, and the humidity is about that high as well. And I don't have a fan.

Sleeping In Salt Water

I go to sleep, and wake up drowning in sweat. The bed is soaked. I take a quick shower, but the cold water is fairly warm. I flip the mattress upside down, put on new sheets, and go to sleep. Another 45 minutes later, I wake up, and once again, the bed is soaked. Another quick shower. I've gotta get some sleep. I grab a blanket out of the closet, fold it on the balcony, and since there's no dry pillow, wad up a winter coat for under my head.

There is nobody on the balcony to the left or the right, and nobody on a higher floor; I'm not worried about getting in trouble for being nude. I lie there, but sleep doesn't come. There is some noise from downstairs. A girl in the apartment below me is arguing with her fellow. I look through the spaces in floor boards; she comes out and fixes a pallet like mine on her balcony, and when a guy comes out to join her, she tells him to go on home, and she doesn't want to see him. Ever. Again. Ever.

Tempers Are Short

It's hot. Tempers are short. I suspect that come morning, they may reconcile. I just lie there silently, wishing for sleep. There's noise from below me. I wonder what it is. She's lying on her back, wearing nothing, and she's masturbating. She's not pretty at all; she has a unattractive face, badly-styled short hair, a flat chest, a boring body.

I think about how nice it would be to have her for a girlfriend; I'm tired of being alone. I don't think tonight is the right night to introduce myself, though. And I think about masturbating, but it's just too friggin' hot. I can't put forth that much energy. I just want to sleep.

The light of parking lots shines skyward and illuminates clouds. It's dead still at my level, but higher up, the clouds are moving, and they're getting thicker. In another hour or two, maybe they will get thick enough to rain. The forecast on the radio says we'll have rain.

I lie there thinking about turkeys. Domestic turkeys have been bred for breast meat, not brains. If they are outdoors when it starts raining, they will look up to see where the rain is coming from. Some of them will have their mouths open. Some of them will choke on the rain, and will drown.

I'm Miserable

I feel awful. No sleep. I feel weak and washed out, from electrolyte imbalance, from having sweated so much. I have a fatigue headache. In a few hours, I'm going to have to get up and go work 8 hours in a hot brake-lining factory, and my nose is already full of the stench of hot asbestos, wax, resin and body odor. I'm hungry, I'm lonely, but mostly, I just want to sleep, damn it.

Maybe if I lie here with my mouth open, it'll get cooler as it gets ready to rain, and I'll fall asleep, and when the rain comes, I can drown. Nah, I think. Somebody luckier, but not me.

Then I wake up and realize that it was all a dream. It's kinda strange, to have a dream about having insomnia, wouldn't you say?

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
agoraphobia - air conditioning - balcony - blogging - cabin fever - chinese finger trap - cramps - edema - hard work - lupus - night sweats - rain - rheumatic fever - self-pity - sweat - turkeys - writing

The Donald

Seth Meyers Saturday night, at White House Correspondents Dinner: “Donald Trump often talks about running as a Republican, which is surprising. I just assumed he was running as a joke.”

Donald Trump Sunday at Fox, on Seth Meyers: "I thought Seth Meyers, frankly his delivery was not good, he’s a stutterer and he really was having a hard time."

The Birth Certificate

Katie Jacobs Stanton (@KatieS) on Twitter Friday "Tomorrow’s goal: bring a copy of @barackobama‘s birth certificate and have the Donald autograph it. #nerdprom"

According to her, Trump didn’t hear a word she said as she asked him to sign the President’s Birth Certificate - but he did. Guess he can't now say he hasn't seen it.

Sorry For Trump

I got a resume yesterday in email. I've been retired for 17 years, so it's been a while since I was doing any hiring, and it took me by surprise.

It came from a "friend" of mine. I don't put friend in quotes because we're unfriendly, but because it's an online friend. To me, a friend is someone, if you're not at home, they know it's OK to let themselves in, and wait for you in the living room, watching the TV and drinking a beer from the fridge. I wouldn't have any real problems with Bryan actually doing that, but I'd be surprised if he knew it was OK.

But an acquaintance is someone you met once at a PTA meeting in 1973, and there doesn't seem to be a good word for a guy who's more than just an acquaintance, but not quite someone you've established mutual sponging relations with.

Relationships We Don't Have Words For

There are a lot of relationships we don't have words for. I was eating lunch with a family, a few years ago, and Jimmy asked his mom if I was her boyfriend. In fact, I'd spent the night about three times in the prior two weeks, although I'd been careful to be gone before the kids arrived home from visitation with their dad. His mom said, "Don't be silly. Harl's too old to be a boyfriend." Jimmy then asked his mom what I was, and his mom said, "Just you hush, and eat your lunch." I leaned over and told Jimmy, "Your mom and I knew each other centuries ago when we were in school, and we like each other a lot, but we haven't scheduled a wedding in the near future or anything like that. Does that answer your question?" Jimmy beamed happily and nodded.

But back to the resume. Bryan, like many people in this depression, is looking for a new job. Most people are embarassed to be without a job, but Bryan has the courage to do what the "experts" in the newspaper suggest, and he's networking. In this case, I have put experts in quote marks because I am casting aspersions. Newspapers are not in the news business; they're in the advertising business, and articles in the paper exist primarily to keep the ads spaced apart. It's easy to get a newspaper reporter to call you an expert, because he rarely can be bothered to investigate whether anybody wants to say you're not an expert.

Networking is good advice, but sending out your resume willy-nilly is not, and that's something the "experts" never say, and rarely even know. It just happens that one of the businesses I started once was a resume service, and after I got it up and going, I did some research into the hiring process in order to figure out if there was a way I could "juice up" the resumes I was preparing for my clients. That's how I learned that resumes are viewed differently by people looking for a job and by people looking for a worker.

It Was Too Long

Bryan's resume was about a page and a quarter long, and it was full of all sorts of juicy phrases. Except for the length (too long), it's pretty much what you'd expect a reader of "What Color Is Your Parachute" to come up with. So why is that a bad resume?

Well, you have to look at things from the hiring process. I've talked to about 50 people, and it seems to be almost always the same, even though I've never heard of anyone teaching people how to do this. They determine that they need someone, and they publicize the fact. In a big company, that means telling HR about the job opening. HR will take look at the "qualifications" established for the job, and decide that you need to have a degree and seven years experience for a job at this pay grade.

It gets funny at times. Shortly after IBM brought out their AS/400 minicomputer, companies were advertising for programmers with 5 years experience with the RPG/400 programming language. Since the language itself was only 1-2 years old, the most anyone could possibly have is 1-2 years experience with RPG/400. What they should have been looking for was someone with experience in RPG programming on an S/38 or S/36 computer, and possibly exposure to RPG/400.

You Have To Lie - But You Dare Not

Consequently, you have to lie in order to get HR to pass your resume on to the guy making the hiring decision - and he's faced with resumes that are obviously lies. It's a little easier in companies that are small enough to not have HR departments, but they face a lot of resumes full of lies as well.

That's one reason why networking makes sense. If someone hears of you before they realize they are going to hire, they try to avoid the selection hassle by glomming onto you. What's more, if you're not exactly what they had in mind, they may decide to change the job to suit you, rather than find someone who fits the job better.

But going back to the hiring process, if a guy puts forth any effort at all to fill a job, he's probably going to have a stack of 100 or more resumes to go through. Some guys will go through all of them; some will just look at the top 100 or so, and ignore the rest.

A Hundred Interviews

There's no way you want to do a hundred interviews. You go through the resumes, and put them in three piles - interesting, maybe, and "no way in hell". Typically, there will be 70 or 80 in the "maybe" pile, with the remaining 20-30 divided equally in the other two piles. Ending up in the
"no way" pile is obviously bad, but ending up in the "maybe" pile is just as bad.

Think about doing Google searchs. Do you ever see page 10 of the results? Most of the time, you don't even make it to the bottom of the first page. If you didn't select your search terms very well, you may have to look at 3-4 pages, but that's not frequent.

And flipping through another page of Google results is a lot less hassle than interviewing candidates. If you aren't in the "interesting" pile, you aren't in the running. And what gets you into the maybe pile, instead of the interesting pile?

Most People Are Qualified

It's not that you aren't qualified to do the job. The unqualified - and some that are qualified - end up in the "no way, Jay" pile. No, it'll be something that raises a question on the resume.

And while everybody talks about hiring "the best person" for the job, the unspoken secret is that for most jobs, most applicants can handle the job quite adequately; the difference is whether he'll fit in with the organization. The work day is too long, and life is too short, to be working with a jerk.

For instance, Bryan worked as a tax preparer for Jackson-Hewitt nearly 15 years ago. That isn't likely to work strongly in Bryan's favor. On the other hand, if potential boss once was in a fender-bender with a tax preparer, or his girl friend ran off with the manager of the Jackson-Hewitt office, or his cousin sells carbon paper to H&R Block, it might get him demoted to the "maybe" pile.

Be Less Than You Can Be

Job-seekers, you see, look at resumes as advertisements for all the ways in which they're great employees. People seeking applicants, on the other hand, are scouring resumes for reasons to weed out applicants.

There are no hard-and-fast rules. If someone is looking for a job as a computer programmer, they need to list every computer language, every library, every protocol, etc., that they've ever worked with. That's because even if they're hiring a Java programmer, they also have some old code that's written in COBOL that they worry about because nobody in their shop does COBOL. Given two equally-good Java programmers, the one that knows COBOL code gets the nod, just in case they need to maintain that code someday.

For the most part, though, resumes really work against the job applicant. They exist only as bait on the hook, to land an interview. Furthermore, they represent a danger to the applicant as long as he has the job. If they decide someday to get rid of an employee, one of the first things they do is pull his resume out of the file, and search for things that the guy has lied about. Lies on your resume are almost essential to get hired, and yet are grounds for dismissal.

Short, Sketchy, And Hard To Get

Consequently, your resume should be as short as you can make it with as few details as possible, and you should try to avoid distributing it when you can. Instead, you want to work on your elevator pitch.

That's Big City term. Elevator doesn't refer to the place where farmers sell their wagon of corn or wheat, but rather to the box in a skyscraper that hoists people to the upper levels. An elevator pitch is a unique selling proposition that can be stated in just a few seconds. Bryan's a direct marketing whiz. Upped sales 375% in 18 months. Increased retention rate from 5 months to 18 months. Been running a staff of 60 people. Local guy, went to MT.

The Elevator Pitch

If Gene needs someone in marketing, that's enough to get an interview for Bryan, don't you suppose? And if he's not, Gene is still going to be carrying around that elevator pitch in the back of his head for a couple of days. He hears it on Tuesday, and on Thursday, he runs into Bill while on a sales call. "Hey, didn't you say you were unhappy with your marketing program? I just ran across a dynamite guy, doesn't sound like he's gonna be on the loose for long." And Bill says, yeah, I'd like to talk to him. I'll have my secretary phone your secretary for a contact number.

Oh, Lord, it's rough out there looking for a job, when times are good, and in this depression, I'd really hate to be looking. And with so many desperate people out there, I'd hate to be trying to find an employee.

Oh, and by the way? Bryan does exist, and that's a valid elevator pitch for him. It doesn't sound like he's gonna be on the loose for long, so if he sounds like someone you could use, let me know, and I'll pass along his telephone number to you.

But his resume? No. You deserve better, and so does he.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
acquaintance - advertisements - boyfriend - COBOL - elevator pitch - friend - Google searches - hiring - HR department - Jackson-Hewett - Java - job-hunting - marketing - networking - programmer - PTA - quote marks - relationships - resume - RPG/400 - the best person