Link: http://whistlecorps.com/blog/

Trisha Fells is a scam-artist, a fraud, a troll. A general, all-around lying sack of potatoes – with the critical distinction being that the average sack of potatoes may be julienned, fried and salted into a delicious state. Trisha Fells, if fried in oil, will not serve well to family and friends, as the Dead Sea’s-worth of NaCl will fail to season her rotten soul into palatability.

Looking for a job in America? Beware, because Trisha Fells (festering ass-boil) is looking for you.

I’m looking for a job in America, too. Having a small business is a lifesaver, for sure – but most small business owners are like me, and need a second (reliable) income stream to stay afloat. We don’t need much, but we need something. So, I’m out there searching for something.

For the most part, I use the Virginia Workforce Connection site. It’s a pretty good bet that, when you read a job description on VA Workforce, those words correspond to an actual job opening sitting out there somewhere on some HR person’s actual desk.

Whether there are jobs available within a workable commuting distance of your home, well, that’s another thing entirely.

Which brings me to Craig’s List.

I check the Charlottesville Craig’s List job postings every day for the local opportunities that sometimes slip through the VA Workforce net. And yes, many of these Craig’s List opportunities involve the words “escort”, “click here” and “make thousands working part time”. Dumb, I may be – in denial, I am not.

That’s why, when I tripped over a boring-enough-to-be-real ad for a court clerk and saw that a real person – Trisha Fells (plop of fetid water loitering in the u-bend) – was soliciting resumes from qualified individuals …

I fell for it.

Guess I am dumb. Within five minutes, I got a response from Ms. Fells (lumpy coagulate puckering the underbelly of American society) asking me to complete the online application. Link attached.

No doubt about it, I am stupid. I thought, since this was advertised as a city job, that it was reasonable to follow a link and fill out an official application. It took me 45-minutes to complete the process.

That was 45-minutes when I was (1) not tending to my child (home sick from school), (2) not keeping up with household chores, (3) not logging billable hours and (4) not applying for a legitimate job opportunity.

It ain’t easy for me to wrestle 45-stinking minutes from my day, let me tell you.

The Career Center Online. That’s where Trisha Fells (excrement-munching parasite) sent me. I’m not including the URL because I don’t want you to go there. I like you.

Less than one minute after I submitted my application, an email (containing links) went out to each of the professional references I submitted with the application. My professional references. Spammed.

Since I completed that application, we’ve all received various other solicitations courtesy Trisha Fells and The Career Center Online. Here are a few:

notification@facebookmail.com – Maria from Russia apparently remembers me from a dating forum I never heard of.

Cheryl Smith (postmaster@career-network.com) – Hopes I’ll be stupid again and click another link to confirm my interest in a fake job.

Samuel Brown (postmaster@career-network.com) – Hopes so, too.

Various individuals – Know where I can get Percocet.

Careers@jobenhancement.com – Bets with the odds that I am a complete idiot and will click another link for yet another fake job.

Cheryl Smith really, really wants to speak with me about her aforementioned fake job.

And some other guy from Korea knows how to enlarge an average penis.


There are others, I won’t go into it but, you get the idea.

About 30-seconds too late, I Googled “Trisha Fells” and “trishafells@gail.com” and found lots of similar job postings on local Craig’s List sites throughout the country.

I hate Trisha f*cking Fells. Somewhere at the end of that anonymous spam chain, there is an actual person sitting at an actual desk in their actual mother’s basement ... and that person – Trisha Fells in sweatpants and the flesh – is preying on those of us who need a job. Those of us who check the stupid Craig’s List multiple times each day, hoping to find SOMETHING.

First, do yourself a favor: Google the name and email address before you apply. It saves time and keeps your virus scanner under thumb: bored and unsatisfied.

Second, if you ever, ever in life, trip across Trisha Fells (fungus peel on the heel of a sweating, unconscious drunkard), tell her for me … tell her … tell Trisha Fells that I hope she comes to understand the value of the time and hope she stole from people.

And if she comes to that understanding whilst reclining tra-la-la under the wheel of a great big bus, well, then, so much the better.

I wrote yesterday that layoffs are a reality of modern working life. They are. And if you work for a company, be it multinational telecommunications giant or small business, there is nothing you can do about it. The layoff is coming. You can be a superstar, or slacker; short-timer or veteran. There is a pink slip with your name on it.

Smacks of defeatism, I know. But, here’s why I think it’s not: first, this is our reality. Workers are laid off to satisfy budgets-of-the-moment, shareholders, or general economic conditions. These are macro-factors you cannot affect, armed as you may be with all the skills and corporate rah-rah in the worker bee arsenal. Face it: reality has nothing to do with you.

That’s a truth we accepted six years ago, when Mike took the job with said telecomm giant. Layoffs, like sewage backups in the basement, happen; and placing it in the category of “Inevitable” early on led us to two conclusions:

1. There is no personal component to the layoff process. You’re cut because of numbers, not performance; and severance is determined by the same. Cold, perhaps, but, you know what? That understanding removes the debilitating guilt and humiliation that may have once hampered our ability to move on.
2. Work ethic is a purely self-interested pursuit. People used to view the corporation as a parent-entity, remember that? There was an interest in working for the collective good, for something greater than one’s self. And that’s not an old-fashioned notion, or something I pulled from Japanese corporate culture: that was the ethic we lived by as late as the early 2000’s, working for a postproduction house in Washington, D.C. The murder of that code was recent, and perpetrated by whatever cultural and economic forces you’d like to name: call it the Bernie Enron Street Gang, for all I care.

So, there you are: violent economic change is a bankable reality, and work is an entirely self-interested endeavor.

Again, you might think I’m walking a dark and powerless path here … I’m still not. You see, what our working lives boil down to – if the fires beneath us are macroeconomics, health care crises, technology and global communications – are the personal relationships we build. Person-to-person. And isn’t that, after all, the most human we’ve been since the day after Al Gore invented the Internet?

Mike spent every minute at that company working his hardest, achieving more, doing more than was expected, precisely because we knew those minutes were numbered, and, consequently, his highest priority was to reinforce his human safety net: the individuals he met and impressed would deliver him to the next employment opportunity (where the layoff clock is reset).

Human relationships. How 1897 of us. They’re more critical now than they were even five, seven years ago, when a job-seeker could still hope to find and be seen on a site like Monster.com. Technology itself, including better user-interfaces, proliferation of high-speed Internet connections and our general improved aptitudes have brought the masses (job-seekers and shady folks with “work-at-home, make $20k a month” schemes) to those arenas and basically choked the effectiveness right out of them. Mike’s next job won’t come from a cold online contact; it will come from someone he knows.

And that is why we feel optimistic: the basic, non-technological humanity that wakes us early and keeps us up late to work hard and do our best every day. That is how we’ve wrested power away from the Bernie Enron Street Gang.

That is also one of the primary reasons why we own a small business. We haven’t hired anyone to work for us yet – we’ll probably add a salesperson at the end of July, when Mike’s severance begins – but, when we do, I’ll have a good understanding of what motivates that person, too. And I’ll look for ways to create incentives (monetary and not) that will support his or her personal quest for stability through connections.