[Last week I ran Monday Morning, Tuesday Evening, Thursday Evening, Saturday morning. This week those same days also. I have actually been running a bit more than usual.]
Today was my last day at John Deere. My Deere supervisor told me that people were shaking their heads that the company would let me go. It is nice to be appreciated. I had a 30-ish lady in India tell me a week or two ago that she was moving on to another job and she always found it cute that I would have my camera on during Teams meetings. Again it was reiterated that the back-to-office element was the main motivation and enhanced by some general budget squeezing which it had been understood was at least partly a result of the tariff hoorah earlier this year. (p.s. my co-remote-worker who left at the end of April has taken up the job again and is moving back to Dubuque so he can be in the office.)
So today I got my stuff done and had my exit interviews and then boxed up laptop and all of the junk I have accumulated and went to the UPS Store in town and shipped it off. I need to clean my desk and throw away my 3×5 cards and random bits of paper with notes on both sides.
Yesterday I got a call for an in-person appointment with a place about 2 hours south of here in Mississippi. I had a nice phone interview with them maybe 10 days ago? Anyway, I will be down there Monday afternoon for a face to face.
I had previously done a face to face about a position at Mississippi State which didn’t work out. So this is my second. I’m hoping it works out but I’m already encouraged.
Earlier this week I had a phone interview about a gig in Huntsville, AL.
So.. moving is back on the possibilities list. It seems daunting. But we know how to do it when necessary.
I also went and took the ACT WorkKeys test at the local community college last week. The factories around here want people to do that if they want a factory job. I had good results. That was kind of encouraging. I may be slipping but I think I haven’t fallen completely out of the tree. But I now have a paper that indicates I’m still employable.
I remember leading up to my job change in 2019 I had at least three in-person interviews. I did one in Ames, one in Cedar Rapids and the one in Dubuque. I had a phone interview at Mississippi State in that round too and they were pretty excited about me but I wanted more money they they were allowed to offer. In Ames I was a token candidate. Cedar Rapids was that debacle where I asked to be considered as a junior candidate but they wouldn’t or couldn’t do that. Also I had a torn contact lens in my eye during that interview and was twitching like Professor Dryfuss in the Pink Panther movies.
If nothing else, interviewing can be entertaining.
I’m still doing my morning YouTube live podcasty thing most days. This morning we talked about idolatry and teen idols as an example. I remembered that my sister had a poster of Darby Hinton on the wall when we were kids. I looked him up, he’s still kicking. He may have peaked a bit early. We also watched a bit of an interview with David Cassidy of the Partridge Family about his experience as a teen idol and how it was intoxicating and guilt producing.
We also touched on Burning Man and other examples of building large effigies and burning them. And the western cultural fondness for protest and rebellion in general. It makes for bit of an automatic reset mechanism when things get overly conforming or tipping toward fascistic.
I’m a conformist mostly. During the colonial revolution I probably would have shuffled off to Canada just for the peace and quiet. But there is a point when things get too much like mindless sheep or robots and the rebellion gene kicks in and puts a stop to that.
Speaking of robots…. the other day on one of these morning talks I was going on about AI and things… and mentioned that if I can’t tell if something is a robot it is probably best policy for my soul to just assume they are a person and extend the normal kindnesses. The desire not to be “fooled” is strong, but maybe I shouldn’t really care. If there is a robot-driven or self-driving car on my country lane, maybe I should wave to it like I do to everyone else out here.
So, one of the creative people made a kind of commercial using video snippets of robots waving with my voice on there talking about waving to robots.
I’m thinking now maybe I should start selling T-shirts “I wave to robots”. If AI is an echo of what we feed it, maybe we should give it a more wholesome diet.