Existential Questions and the Hiring Process

I’m doing some consulting work that has required me to look over some academic materials regarding hiring procedures. This has gone a long way towards reminding me of my personal distaste for formulaic assessment of human worth. Is this symptomatic of the computer age? Are we subjugating even character judgments to algorithms and statistical analysis, in lieu of personal judgment?

In the past, when I’ve taken personality tests and questionnaires as part of the process of applying for run-of-the-mill jobs, I’ve bristled at the notion that my answers to a series of seemingly disconnected questions was trusted as a means of gauging my work ethic, attitude, or personal character. Such experiences also constituted some of the first instances of my feeling cheated by my own ethics, as I worried that interviews and positions tended to go to people who were willing to lie favorably about themselves. I even asked an employer once if their assessments took this into account. Her somewhat sympathetic response was to tell me that the entire thing was handled by an outside company – a fact which I think makes my point even more clearly. Not only are hiring decisions often not made face-to-face, they’re often not made in the same building or within the same professional framework as the prospective job.

The research I’ve lately done on the topic vindicates my concerns at least slightly. Written tests that seek to gauge professional virtue do include a scatter of questions that are designed to judge the honesty of the applicants by encouraging brownnosers to select unreasonably optimistic answers. Still, I think these sorts of tricks are sufficiently obvious that if you’re both dishonest and a careful reader you’ll have no problem exploiting the system despite being a seriously flawed applicant.

My problem with these kinds of practices is that they evidently try to generate a rather nuanced understanding of another person, of the sort that would usually be derived from days or months of interaction with him. And they try to do it at a significant remove, in perhaps as little as a half an hour. Perhaps the best example of this hubris from the materials I’ve been reading is the biographical information blank. As a hiring technique it is apparently almost a century old, though I am not personally familiar with it. It strives to correlate information about the potential employee’s background with indicators of his potential success with the company.

If I were to face the questions associated with this hiring practice, I would feel even more immediately and egregiously misrepresented than I have already felt in the presence of “honesty and integrity tests” or “personality and interest inventories.” I may be unique in this, but I find myself uncomfortable with practically any answer I can give to such quizzes, because there is at least some degree of vagueness behind most questions. Anything that asks me to rank my response to a statement on a scale of one to five prompts a lot of hand-wringing as I try to determine whether to round up or down or how to interpret what would really characterize neutrality on an issue.

One would think this wouldn’t be an issue with a biographical questionnaire, which asks for straightforward short-answer responses to direct questions. But some of the examples that I’ve encountered suggest that my overly analytical nature would make even this distressingly complicated. When it’s printed on paper and I have no opportunity to discuss interpretation with the asker, a question such as “at what age did you leave home?” prompts me to silently wonder what is meant by leaving home. Does going to college count if you remained a dependent of your parents? If a person stayed for several months with a nearby friend and then returned to his family, would that count as having left home? And additionally I wonder, what correlation is such information supposed to have with job performance? But at least that curiosity doesn’t affect how an individual would answer the question.

However, in the case of the question, “How large was the town/city in which you lived as a child?” I feel as though there should be an established standard for how to answer the question if the responses of different people are being judged against one another. It’s easy to answer that question, but it’s pretty likely that different people are going to have different concepts of comparative size. What confuses me about these methods of analysis is the question of how much exposition is needed. I feel like reviewers would want these things to be brief and easily digestible, but I also feel like if they’re supposed to genuinely represent a person’s background they can’t be.

But maybe I’m just insane. I can’t imagine that a lot of other people look at questions like “did you ever build a model airplane that flew?” and think to themselves, what constitutes flying? How much distance does it have to cover relative to its size for it to be considered a successful flight? Also, if it was assembled from a kit, does that count as building it? Is there any way to weight the two scenarios against each other?

I imagine answering to “were sports a big part of your childhood?” and I say, define “big.” Also, define “sports.” And “childhood.” The question doesn’t use the word “playing,” so if a person watched a lot of sports on television, would he get to answer in the affirmative? Is miniature golf as much a sport as football? For the purposes of the question, is late adolescence childhood? If I was heavily involved in martial arts training between the ages of eight and nine, and then again between thirteen and seventeen, does that count?

“Do you play any musical instruments?” Well, how much practice does an applicant have to say yes to this one? What if it’s just the kazoo? Is playing a musical instrument indicative of suitability for the job? It seems to me that even in the case of biographical information an applicant can manipulate the evaluation in his favor by bending the truth to make himself look more impressive than he is. That, however, would never be my impulse. When I face things like this, I need to make myself look as much like myself as possible.

Certainly, I need to reach a personal breaking point after which I’ll be able to let go of some measure of my obsessive need for precision. (I’m not sure precisely what measure of that need I need to get rid of.) But at the same time, I think my neurosis has something worthwhile to say about these types of evaluations, and the powerful elements of society need to reach a breaking point after which they no longer arrogantly think that a person’s background or overall character can be determined from a series of multiple choice questions and short answers. No matter how sophisticated our business literature or computer algorithms, they can’t reproduce acquaintanceship, interpretation, or understanding.

Only Taxing the Rich is Bad, Says O'Driscoll

The Yahoo! Finance web series the Daily Ticker today consisted of an interview with Gerald O’Driscoll, former Vice President and economic advisor at the Dallas Federal Reserve, and a senior fellow at Cato Institute. He was asked whether there was anything that either the Fed or Washington could do to spur job creation, and naturally O’Driscoll quickly turned to criticizing President Obama’s tax policies, describing the raising of marginal tax rates on millionaires and billionaires as economically destructive.

The interviewer reminded O’Driscoll of the counter-arguments that would come from the presidential administration and its supporters, then asked: “Do you make a distinction between taxes whether they’re aimed at individuals or corporations, or is it – bottom line – raising taxes on anybody is bad for the economy?”

I think that question presented O’Driscoll with a pretty clear choice: is the problem simply taxation in general within a weak economy, or is it taxation of businesses? Yet O’Driscoll appears to have avoided that simple choice and opted to advance an entirely different perspective.

He began, “Well I would say that raising taxes on the…” and then paused at length, searching for the right synonym for “wealthiest Americans.” I found that pause very telling. He knew about whom he was talking, but he needed to phrase it in a way that served his ends. Using the phrase “the rich” is perfectly clear to every viewer, but using the phrase “the source of savings and investment” obfuscates what we’re talking about and makes it harder to attach an image to the subject, but easier to affix it to a concept. So that was the phrase that O’Driscoll settled on, saying that raising taxes on the source of savings and investment is bad for the economy.

Now, did you notice how that avoids the simple one-or-the-other choice that he was given with the question? For simplicity, let’s drop the more pleasant synonym and just acknowledge that he’s talking about the rich. So when he’s asked whether it’s bad, in a weak economy, to raise taxes full-stop, O’Driscoll’s answer is really no, it’s bad to raise taxes on the rich in particular. Theoretically, his point of view leaves open the possibility of raising taxes on the poorest American’s without expectation of consequence. Of course, this is something that several Republicans have actually advocated, but it’s quite amazing to see that such callous initiatives have a theoretical underpinning.

O’Driscoll continues by rebuking the president for ostensibly failing to understand that most business are not C Corporations and thus are not taxed separately from their owners, “So when you raise taxes on individuals, you’re raising taxes on the business, and hence… you’re inhibiting job creation.”

I almost admire how the language of this quotation allows O’Driscoll to exclusively designate millionaire business owners as “individuals.” Raising taxes on lower or middle class workers doesn’t raise taxes on business. Even raising taxes on millionaires who primarily earn their income from things like investments in businesses they don’t own is not equivalent to raising taxes on businesses. Do neither of these groups count towards the discussion? That seems suspiciously convenient for O’Driscoll’s argument.

Essentially, that argument seems to be that it’s destructive to raise taxes on extremely wealthy individuals, because they might use some of their own wealth to invest in the businesses they own or from which they profit. Meanwhile, by this line of thinking, there is no particular problem with raising taxes on people who will definitely use a portion of their slight income to purchase things like food, clothing, and gas.

I admit that my understanding of economics is rather rudimentary, but it seems to me that a sure-fire way to create jobs is by raising demands for goods and services, thus increasing the size of the workforce required to supply that demand. Unless I’m wrong about that, it’s pretty asinine to suggest that allowing the wealthy to hoard their money while thinking nothing of depriving the poor of theirs is the best way to stimulate the economy. Sure, business owners need personal wealth to invest in their industries. But why on Earth would they do so if demand for what they’re offering remains flat.

By contrast, if a wealthy American is legitimately interested in earning the highest margins from his business, he would be a fool not to make investments to match growing demand, unless of course his wealth has been taxed out of existence. But I hardly think anybody’s proposing that, and I certainly don’t think that paying a thirty-five percent marginal rate would cripple a billionaire’s investment capabilities.

My Lengthy Rant Against Verizon

I don’t expect anybody to really read this. It’s just my petty effort to make a record of all the myriad frustrations I had with Verizon during the years I was a customer of theirs. It’s nothing important, except in the sense that it’s meant to discourage anyone from doing business with this horror of a company. That’s all I really need to say, here: Never give your money to Verizon. But if you’re skeptical and need good evidence against them, feel free to read my lengthy narrative diatribe. Presently, I will return to blogging about things that matter to more than just me.

I got new internet service hooked up yesterday after having been offline for several days. That put me behind with work, but I’m not nearly as bothered by that as I am about having permanently lost my office telephone number. The silver lining in both of those setbacks is that I will never again have to deal with the Verizon company. I would sooner run lengths of fishing line to coffee cans in the homes and offices of the people with whom I have to communicate than I would ever trust Verizon to provide me with any type of service.

There is a bit of history behind the reason for the severed internet and telephone connections. When I moved into the home out of which I currently work, I was living with an ex-girlfriend. I had signed up for internet elsewhere, and when we wanted to move the DSL to the current address, she called to have phone service installed as well. Somehow, merging the two services into one caused my name to be wiped clean from Verizon’s records. So far as billing was concerned, my both services belonged exclusively to my cohabitant.

It remained that way after she left me to move in with a new man, and it remained that way as I continued paying the bill, with my name above the return address, for two entire years. Not long after she left, I called the company to try to update the account information, but as it turns out that is impossible to do. On one attempt, I was told that they could attempt contacting the former account holder at the number listed on the account. I wasn’t okay with Verizon calling my ex, and I didn’t even know if she would be reachable at that number or at whatever time I happened to be on the phone with the company. Deciding that I couldn’t make the update myself, I sent an e-mail to my ex at some point, asking her to take care of one of the loose ends she had left behind. She never saw fit to do anything about it until, with no occasion or warning, she e-mailed me to say that she would finally make the change.

In the meantime, I had frequent problems with the service that was not in my name. My internet service blinked out of existence for a week out of each of two months. Getting it fixed was a horrible struggle. First, it involved calling their automated telephone directory. When I was able to navigate through it, I was connected to call center representatives in South Asia, who sometimes identified themselves by names like Carl or Cindy while speaking through heavy, obfuscating accents.

These workers were apparently trained to follow a series of prompts without the option to bypass or modify them. Each time I lost internet service, I was made to reset the modem, no matter how many times I had done this on my own before calling. I was always interested in minimizing my exposure to their technical support, so I confirmed ahead of time that the problem was not on my end. Toward the end of tediously confirming this, they then ran a line test, controlled from India on lines that ran about three miles from my home.

This, however, was the process only if and when I got through on the phone. On one notable occasion, the recorded voice asked me over and over again to enter the phone number about which I was calling. Each time I did this, it reported hearing nothing, and the messages started to berate me about refusing to provide needed information. On several occasions I got past that first step and followed the prompts all the way to the point where it told me to press 4 for high speed internet tech support or 5 for dial-up internet tech support, at which point I pressed 4 and was connected with dial-up internet tech support. This happened without fail over the course of about half a dozen consecutive calls, proving that it was far more than a momentary glitch.

It’s problems like that that make me wonder whether Verizon is aware of the fact that it is a telecommunications company. If the proper maintenance of phone lines is the entirety of its business, and it can’t even handle the structure of its own internal communications, or even respond to problems with that structure in a timely fashion, it has no business providing such a service outside the walls of its own offices. Let me be an analogy. I am a writer and editor. If I was incapable of e-mailing my clients without multiple misspellings and grammatically vague run-on sentences, it would be crazy of me to think that I could help other people develop their communications. If that was the case, it would be time for me to find a new line of work.

But despite all of this, I stuck with Verizon mostly because my service wasn’t in my name, I had put my home number on all of my business cards, and I wouldn’t have been able to keep that number if I had changed service. Also, the price was reasonable if I pretended that there was never noise on my phone line and that I was receiving consistent internet speeds. I wasn’t, though.

After one technician’s visit restored my connection, I found that my speeds were literally less than one-tenth of what I was supposed to be receiving on DSL. That began a new series of struggles to get a customer service issue resolved. One Verizon operator to whom I spoke actually downplayed the problem of waiting for simple web pages to load on a DSL connection by telling me that the speeds associated with my service were quoted as being “up to one Meg,” and that that maximum wasn’t guaranteed. She did not, however, agree that by that same logic I could agree to pay the company “up to eighty-five dollars” for internet and phone, and then pay whatever the hell I wanted.

When I was finally returned to reasonable – though not at all good – service, it was immediately time for a new conflict over billing. Verizon offered me no reduction whatsoever to my bill on its own accord. They did, however, agree fairly readily to a discount of ten dollars, in exchange for having been without service for two weeks, having had drastically reduced service for another week or two, and for overall inconvenience. Because I’m unreasonable, I didn’t think that was good enough, and I committed three hours to arguing with various operators before they discounted my outstanding bill by twenty-five percent. It required waiting until I was connected to that one Verizon operator in twenty who knows the definition of the phrase “customer service.”

Make no mistake, there are some good employees at the company. Visits from their technicians are generally quite pleasant, in no small measure because they freely admit that they work for a terrible, terrible company. One of them pointed out that if he has a full schedule of repairs to do in a day and an order for new service comes in, he is always told to do the installation first. It is seemingly no secret that Verizon, which has local media plastered with advertisements but never improves its local infrastructure, is committed to getting customers in the door, but has not an ounce of care as to whether it provides decent service once a person is on the hook. That is not just a former customer’s assessment, but an employee’s. I know other technicians have reported that they won’t sign up for their own company’s service, opting to have a spouse sign up for a competitor under her name, instead. Having a different name on the bill might be a problem if they were Verizon customers, though.

The only problems I’ve had with technicians were really problems with their dispatchers. When I was trying to get my service speed raised above 0.1 Megabits, the technician simply never arrived. No one called to make a new appointment, and as near as I could tell, the company had decided to ignore my problem and hope it went away. It took another trip through the labyrinthine phone system to get someone to acknowledge the missed appointment.

The operator got in touch with the technician and said that he claimed I never answered his phone call. But I was home the entire day, and my phone never rang. So that couldn’t be true unless they were referring to my cell phone, but I can’t figure out why they would call my secondary contact number if I was meeting the man at my home. And if his primary attempt to contact me via my secondary number failed, why would he not secondarily attempt to contact me on my primary number? Do Verizon employees just not trust Verizon telephone lines, and avoid them at all costs?

This is another point at which I think it bears repeating that Verizon is a telecommunications company. What hope could there be for providing a customer with that service if they can’t even be trusted to contact a customer through it? It couldn’t be simpler: If Verizon doesn’t know how to use phones it can’t possibly provide service for them.

The other issue that I had with a tech visit was when I sat on the phone scheduling an appointment for later in the day while I was looking at a Verizon technician out my window. That fellow had somehow managed to cut my phone line at the source while he was doing some work on the school across the street from me. I noticed that my internet went out, and then saw the Verizon truck parked on my street and the man in a hard hat standing on a ladder. I picked up my phone and confirmed that there was no dial tone, and then watched the truck pull away before I could run outside and kindly ask the driver to reconnect my service.

So I called Verizon’s technical support line and explained the situation. After asking me to check all of my phone’s connections, they let me know that they’d get somebody out there to look at it a few hours later. In the meantime, the first technician drove back onto my street, and because I was still naïve, I figured the company had done the right thing and sent him back to immediately fix the problem he’d caused. Instead, he went back to work on the school. I walked outside to speak to him and see if he realized what he had done. He had not. I asked him if he could plug my service back in while he had his ladder out. He informed me that he could not, as it wasn’t on his schedule of repairs. Another technician came out later that afternoon. I still wonder how much ground there was between his previous appointment and my home, but I’ll bet it was more than two hundred yards.

Maybe it was because it was silently agreed that my service could be cut off without warning, at any time, for no reason that I sometimes received sales calls at my residence from Verizon while I was a Verizon customer. This would come from India and they would inform me that the representative could sign me up for phone, internet, and television service. I would tell them that I already had two of these through Verizon and didn’t need the third. They would then say, “Oh, you’re a Verizon FIOS customer?” And I would have to tell these people – these people who worked at Verizon – that no, I was not a FIOS customer, because I had long ago been informed that FIOS was not available in my area.

The first of these sales representatives responded, “Oh, it’s probably available. Verizon works hard to get the new networks installed in all of its service areas.” He then asked me to hold the line, which I did despite the fact that I knew he was talking bullshit, because other former Verizon customers had told me that when the company told them that the new infrastructure wasn’t available in their area, they added that the customer could sign up for it anyway, and once they had enough subscriptions in the neighborhood, they would actually install it.

A minute after putting me on hold, the first sales representative came back to the line sounding crestfallen and said, “We don’t have it. Sorry.” It’s probably not a good sign when one’s customers know more about his operations than his employees do. As a telecommunications company, you’d really think that Verizon would be able to manage its call directories. If it’s to be regarded as an expert in communicating information, it damn well better be capable of keeping abreast of internal changes as to who is and isn’t a customer, or who is and isn’t accessible to some of its services.

Another sales representative who called me with the exact same offer put me on hold for the same reason, and rather than sheepishly acknowledging that I knew what I was talking about, she disconnected the call. Or maybe the call was just disconnected. It happened to me when I was fighting to get back my phone number just the other day. I managed to reach one of the rare helpful employees, and when I explained why I had lost the number after my ex saw fit to finally disconnect service, she asked “Well why don’t we just put your name on the old account?”

I was stunned, because I’d been told many times over the course of two years that that could not be done, and my ex had been told the same thing before she went ahead and had me cut off altogether. This particular operator asked me for a contact number for my ex, and then put me on hold while she tried to call her. After a moment, the line went silent and was disconnected. Dropped customer service calls are hardly the hallmark of a good telecommunications company.

My chances of reaching the same operator again were slim to begin with, but dropped to nil when the automated directory gave me a different set of options from what it had given ten minutes earlier. The next operator was rather less helpful. Amazingly, she agreed that a change could be made, but she insisted that the only way she could do it was to try to reach the contact number that they had on file for the person whose name was on the account. I figured that would be fine if the number was correct, so I asked what it was. She said she couldn’t give me that information. I told her what the current contact number was and asked her if the one she had matched it. She said she couldn’t give me that information. I asked her what she would do if the number was wrong. She said nothing.

It bears repeating just one more time: Verizon is a freaking telecommunications company. Also, it’s the twenty-first century. We have home phones and phones that we carry around with us, physical mail and electronic mail, SMS text messaging, call waiting, voicemail. Surely in this environment a telecommunications company can come up with more than one method for trying to confirm information between two parties. It would have been a simple thing for me to call my ex and ask her to call Verizon to release my number. Or they could have checked her IP address via e-mail to confirm that she doesn’t live in my area anymore and doesn’t need a local number, and thus Verizon could elect not to hold the number for her for eighty days. But as it is, they can’t elect not to do anything, because the computers are in charge and policies can’t be overridden in favor of common sense.

I called one more time, and received an operator who offered yet a different set of information. Though she thought that adding my name might have been possible before my ex cancelled the service, she insisted that it absolutely could not be done now. Despite being unhelpful, she strove to sound sympathetic, repeating that she understood my frustrations. So I trust she understood my decision to never come near her company again.

My contact number is gone, turning my current business cards into unique bookmarks, but at least I’m free of the egregious service that Verizon had subjected me to. I’ve got internet through Time Warner now, and it is already infinitely better. I’m a little afraid I’ll never have a problem and thus never be able to compare their customer service. I’ll probably get my new office phone number through the Magic Jack. I don’t know what to expect from it, but Verizon has set the bar for my satisfaction very low.

So in case it hasn’t be said clearly enough with the preceding 2,900 words: Stay the hell away from Verizon!

Now I AM Mad at Netflix

You know, I actually defended Netflix when it originally announced its price increase. Admittedly, part of the reason was that I have an emotional attachment to physical media, and although I recognized that separating the pricing was a move toward discouraging the DVDs by mail service, I determined that it wouldn’t harm that side of the business artificially. I figured that people with the money would hang onto both services and demonstrate the continued relevance of both media that you can hold in your hand and the United States Post Office. I also supposed that certain people like me would cast a vote in favor of those things by keeping only that service. I think Netflix discovered, to their evident chagrin, that I was right.

And in a move that will become a prominent case study in future business textbooks, the solution that they decided upon in response to unexpectedly negative customer feedback was to issue an arrogant non-apology while pushing the original idea to a further and more alienating extreme. Instead of simply retaining two price structures for different services and letting customers demonstrate their demand within the existing business model, Netflix will now be separating the two services into two completely separate businesses, with separate billings, separate websites, separate ratings information, even separate brand names, and ultimately completely separate customers.

In a replay of the July chorus, the response from customers and persons with common sense about how a business should operate has been overwhelmingly derisive. The perfectly obvious complaint is that the company is making it impossibly difficult for customers to utilize the dual service that they have already had access to. The Oatmeal quickly responded with this cartoon: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/netflix. One of the thousands of commenters on the Netflix blog post compared this move to separating phone service into a company devoted to talking and one devoted to listening. References to New Coke abound. People are predicting still more declines in the stock value of the company.

In his post, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings explained, no doubt disingenuously, that the complete severance of the DVDs by mail portion of the business is aimed at allowing management teams for each business to focus completely on their own needs, thereby helping the DVD portion to survive for longer. Now, I have no formal education in business management, but I’m pretty sure that it’s possible for a company and a subsidiary company to be managed separately, but share billings and retain user interface that is already well in place. Even if the creation of a separate site was deemed necessary for clarity’s sake or simply for the sake of a symbolic fresh start, I find it impossible to believe that Netflix couldn't have designed two separate sites that share ratings and reviews from customers who have accounts with both.

I call absolute bullshit on Hastings’ claim that he wants the DVDs by mail service to be around for as long as possible. Completely and unnecessarily divorcing the two services forces customers to choose one or the other. They are trying to deliberately, perhaps artificially, reduce demand for the portion of their business model that involves an investment of physical resources. And if that fact isn’t evident simply from the effort to sequester the older service away from the newer, they’ve even given it an awful, awful new name. The red envelope will now bear the name “Qwikster,” a name which I can only imagine was artfully designed to imply obsolescence.

The new brand remains true to the original by having two syllables and in no other way. Those two syllables combine two assaults on the durability and desirability of the business into one absurdly shitty name. To start with the more obvious act of sabotage, I would say that Netflix’s marketing department attached the suffix “-ster” to the new brand explicitly to place it in the company of businesses that are already defunct and to make it feel at home there. “-ster” was commonly attached to web business names about a decade ago, and has never been used with anything new that had a shot at being successful since then. Napster and Friendster still exist, as far as I know, but nobody cares, nobody really uses them, and the prospects for them growing in the future are slim to nil. By making the older half of their business of a piece with these oldsters, Netflix is transparently broadcasting the fact that it perceives Qwikster to already be in the same position of neglect, or that they want it to be.

More likely the latter given the other half of the brand. “Qwik,” Mr. Hastings helpfully informs us, is supposed to refer to the quick delivery offered to customers. So in order to promote the longevity of their premier service, they’ve chosen to emphasize the one feature by which it pales in comparison to the company’s other brand, which is now being put forth as a competitor. I’ll say a lot in praise of the DVDs by mail service, but by modern standards, quick it is not. The Netflix marketing team seems to be banking on the idea that every time they read the name on that little red envelope, the word “quick” will be on their minds and they’ll think, “Gee, I wouldn’t have had to wait a day for my entertainment if I had just chosen another title that’s available to stream online and watched that instead.”

Despite the strengths that they could have emphasized, they instead chose to create a new brand identity based on the one modest weakness that will repel all the shortsighted customers who can be trained to value convenience over quality. They could have called it PickFlix, or ClearFlix, or Doesn’t-rebuffer-or-increase-strain-on-your-ISP-Flix. Or they could have just called it Netflix Mail. But they went with Qwikster. They may as well have just called it Waitster and made the logo a cartoon of a guy looking at his watch while getting older. This goes beyond bad branding. It was never intended to be good branding. Reed Hastings wasn’t caught off guard by the blowback he received today; he was counting on it. As far as I can tell, his attitude is that anyone who still wants his company to mail them any of their 100,000 DVD titles can fuck right off. Go check some other dead and decaying websites, then put on a big band LP and type a letter to the editor on your Smith-Corona, you dinosaurs. Reed Hastings is too plugged in to the rapid changes of the modern market to stop and give a shit about whether you still want what he was offering you back when his company’s stock was more valuable and you were paying less.

I suppose that given the theme of this blog, I should give Hastings my respect. He’s trying to force a breaking point. But it’s a decidedly negative breaking point for most people concerned. If we accept the shitty deal he’s giving to his loyal customers, we demonstrate that decreased quality and selection is okay as long as we get our poor, limited goods quickly. On the other hand, we could spin this breaking point in our favor. I’ll be curious to see how many more subscribers they’ve lost after another month. I’m not sure how I’m going to respond yet. Netflix has been my only reliable source of entertainment for some time. The price hike hasn’t taken effect for me yet. I was planning on just keeping the DVD side, but now I’m not sure whether to support Qwikster despite the fact that it’s designed to dissuade support and is owned by someone who’s happy to treat his customers like gullible fools, or to try to find something else.

I actually didn’t know that Blockbuster had changed to a monthly subscription model. When did that happen and why wasn’t it four years ago? There’s also apparently something called Green Cine, which doesn’t have much of a site but seems well-priced and is uniquely focused on independent and classic titles. There might also still be one privately owned DVD rental store in my area. That could be neat in light of my nostalgia for physical media. I don’t think I’ve gone inside a building to rent a film since I was a kid.

It's Personal

I feel somehow very detached from myself right now. I can't seem to make myself take an interest in politics, or foreign affairs, or pop culture. It's as if I trend towards self-obsession as a way of overcompensating for the feeling of uprooted identity. I specifically didn't want this blog to be of a personal nature, but I do want to keep to a habit of updating it daily. It can be hard to reconcile those two things.

I feel that the groundwork for whatever is respectable in my intellect is my tendency to take myself quite seriously. I am constantly thinking, in large part because there isn't much that I let pass casually. I am a good essayist because I like to draw out the deeper significance of my ordinary life. At least, I like to do so when my life is less than painfully ordinary. Even the central idea of this blog grew out of looking at one way that I engage with my own life and applying it to social, cultural, and political issues.

But if I lose sight of the idea of personal breaking points, I will lose sight of the broader application of the same. So sometimes I have to take a moment with nothing else to do but comment on myself.

I need to change my habits. It's appalling how much time I waste when I don't have the imposed rigor of numerous deadlines. Some of it is just me being idle or blowing off steam because of the stress of my own insecurities. But I'd say that the lion's share of wasted time actually goes to me trying to do the right thing, the responsible thing.

I don't know how many times I have to acknowledge the fact that the better means of freelancing is to promote myself broadly and let clients come to me, before I begin to steadfastly heed my own advice and stop casting out vastly many very narrow nets. I get so caught up with the immediate goals that I spend entire days trying to win over a sequence of individuals when I could be building a better personal brand.

The bitter irony of it is that in the effort to be successful at my work in the short term, I limit my long-term marketing potential at the same time that I pull myself away from the awareness of why I'm doing this for a living in the first place. All this time spent looking for new clients could be better put to creative use. There's so many stories in my mind that crave expression, and so many puzzles that need to unraveled with good language.

And that brings to mind the other irony of this situation: That I have poor practices when it comes to marketing myself, but would make none of the same errors of excessive caution or shortsightedness in dealing with marketing for someone else. It's one of the strangest things about the human condition - the impossible need to see yourself from the outside.

I've got to hit a breaking point very soon. It could be the improvement of my self-promotion, or just a wholesale casting off of all the needless things that devour the time that could be put to better professional or creative use. Or it could be any of numerous other breaking points that seem to be looming on the horizons of a multitude of possible worlds. I just know that my current way of doing things can't sustain itself for much longer. God, just give me some time. Give me some time for the untapped energy of all these wasted hours to build up pressure and burst out of me like fireworks in my mind. I'm pretty good, and I can be better. Adaptation for me is not the process of transforming, but the process of reaching the moment in which I am transformed.