Even that article is talking about it like it’s some weird new idea that’s “gaining traction” (reading between the lines means that this is an idea that doesn’t have traction.)

It’s also written by some LinkedIn “editor,” so basically some chud whose job is to produce blog spam about the job market.

And the only two examples he could offer are some non profit in Toronto, and another based in the UK that I don’t think even exists anymore as of a year later.

And his poll reports 5% of 3000-some responses saying this is a thing, that’s gonna have some major biases because the only people who are even gonna see this poll are the kinds of weirdos who give a shit what this LinkedIn idiot says, and that sample live reflects a miniscule fraction of a percent that really can’t be interpreted as a all representative of the millions of people who have had job interviews. I can’t see the actual wording of how he phrased it’s because I’m not gonna install the LinkedIn app, but he could also have skewed the question in a way that would include stuff like getting compensated for travel expenses to attend an interview, which is something you might reasonably expect in some cases.

Besides that and a few people like you around the internet, I really can’t see anywhere saying that this is even remotely a thing, it’s something that a handful of employers might do but they’re a statistical anomaly.

Or they’re a pyramid scheme offering you a $50 gift card to show up and “interview” to sell steak knives.

I’m sure that’s probably the case, but that’s kind of my point.

Even if I landed another, better, job between my initial interview and my job shadow, I probably would have still shown up for the shadow because when else are you going to get a chance to peek behind the curtain like that?

I may not have pursued it any further from that, but to me being able to just show up and listen to 911 calls being handled for a bit would be too cool of an opportunity to pass up. I’m pretty sure I would have jumped at the opportunity to do that even if I wasn’t trying to get hired.

But again, I’m biased, I work here and like my job so of course I think it’s kind of neat.

I don’t know what sort of fantasy land you live in, but I’ve never heard of anywhere paying someone for a job interview.

It is sitting there listening to and watching someone do the job.

They’re not answering calls, they’re not entering anything into the computer, they’re not doing paperwork, the most they’re going to be asked to do is “hey can you move your chair a bit, I need to get into that drawer”

In fact, if they tried to do any of those things they’d be kicked right the fuck out, that would be a whole mess of liability issues since they don’t have any of the necessary training or certifications.

They’re observing to see what the job entails. They’re (hopefully) asking questions to see if it’s a good fit for them, and we’re seeing how they react to what they’re hearing and what their attitude is like to see if they’re going to be a good fit.

When I have a job shadow with me, nothing changes about how I do my job except I scoot my chair a little further to the left to make room for them, and between calls I’m chatting mostly with them instead of my coworkers or reading, and once they’re done I have a short questionnaire to fill out about whether I think they’re a good candidate.

They sit there quietly watching and listening to me handle calls, and in between we just chit chat. They usually ask some questions about the calls they heard me take or the job in general (they all seem to ask what the craziest call I ever took was) I usually ask a few of my own to get a feel for them. I tell them stories about the job, crack some jokes, I point out a couple things that I think are neat (like the document we have with information about what we’re supposed to do if we get a call about a loose emu- it happens more often than you’d think)

Then after they leave I have a short questionnaire to fill out about if I think they’re a good candidate or not.

They sit with a call-taker for about 30-45 minutes listening to 911 calls coming in, then go sit with a dispatcher for about the same amount of time to listen to calls being given out over the radio the the field units, then there’s a short, pretty informal interview with the on-duty supervisors and/or someone from our training department.

They’re not getting trained, they’re not expected to retain any of the information or understand everything, and they’re certainly not expected to be able to do the job after sitting with me. It’s pretty much all about vibes. Do they like the vibe of the workplace, and do we like their vibe as a potential coworker.

new job

For a new job, sure, you should be getting paid. This is part of the hiring process, you don’t have the job yet.

I’ve known a lot of people who’ve gotten jobs that have had a half dozen or so rounds of interviews, how many hours does that add up to? Every other interview I’ve ever done was at least 30-45 minutes, so after 3 rounds or so of interviews at another job you’ve pretty much broken even on that.

And with other jobs that’s often spread over multiple days or weeks that you’d probably need to take time off from your current job for. I’d gladly take this hour or two on a night or weekend over that.

A lot of things vary from one agency to another, but where I work I don’t think most people would consider this a last resort job. Most of us are here either because this is what we want to do or because it’s a good career builder towards other public safety/law enforcement type jobs.

For my part, if I have to work, I think this is about as good as it gets for me. I like the hours, the pay isn’t amazing but it’s livable, benefits are solid, and it’s interesting and satisfying work.

It’s also not the quickest hiring process since they usually wait until they have a few people to run a training class, it’s been a few years now but I believe I did my aptitude test and interview in mid August (same day because they were doing a hiring event, sometimes they have to get scheduled separately) did my job shadow a week or two later with another short interview, got my conditional offer around mid September, had to do a drug, hearing, and vision test and a psych eval, and class started in about mid-late October, so about 2 months start to finish.

I have a friend who tested at the same time as me and got picked up for the next class they ran, so it was a couple extra months for him.

And some other agencies have extra steps in the process. More rounds of interviews, really in-depth background checks with interviews with the sheriff and a polygraph test and such (thankfully the agency I work for isn’t like that since polygraphs are bullshit)

No not ideal for someone who really needs a job ASAP.

Do you expect people to get paid for showing up to a job interview? Because that’s, in essence, what it is- a second round of interviews, albeit a pretty informal one.

And since we’re obviously a 24/7 operation, there’s a lot of flexibility on when we can schedule it, not like most interviews where you probably have to take time off of work for it, we do a lot of them on weekends and evenings.

It’s also a really good chance to see what the workplace culture and actual day-to-day reality of the job is like and to talk to people who are actually doing the job instead of just taking some suit from HR’s word for it.

No more than for any other sort of job interview. They’re not answering calls, they’re sitting there listening.

And honestly I thought it was a great experience when I got hired, it gave me a real inside look to what the workplace culture was before I started here, and a chance to talk to and ask questions to people who are actually doing the job I was applying for instead of some HR/supervisor/deputy director type.

And since we obviously work 24/7/365 we can pretty much make any time work for these applicants, so they don’t need to take off from work or anything to come in and do it. We get a lot of them on nights and weekends.

It’s also pretty necessary to make sure people can handle it. It can get really intense at times, and seeing an incident unfold in real time is a very different experience than listening to a recording of a call after the fact. Class space to train new dispatchers is limited, and almost every dispatch center is constantly short-staffed, so we really need to make our hires count, and we lose plenty enough throughout the training process as it is, we don’t want to spend a couple months training someone only to get them out on the floor to realize that they can’t emotionally handle listening to, let alone actually handling 911 calls.

Only very tangentially related to this

I work in 911 dispatch. Part of our hiring process is after the initial interview and aptitude test, they have applicants come in to do a job shadow with us for an hour or two. Basically just sit with us while we’re answering and dispatching calls, see what the work we do is actually like, gives them a chance ask us questions, and we can kind of feel them out to see if they’d be a good fit.

And a shocking amount of people make it to that stage and then don’t show up for their job shadow.

I’m admittedly biased, since I work here, but I feel like even if I didn’t actually have any interest in the job, that would be an interesting peek behind the curtain that I’d still want to see regardless.

The only thing that surprises me about this is that it didn’t happen earlier.

I’m way out of the dating game at this point, and also a man, so it’s very likely that I’m just out of the loop

But I hadn’t heard anything about this app until a couple weeks ago when I saw an article or two about it

Then about a week later this happened

So I kind of feel like maybe most of the assholes who did this were similarly unaware of it until it got some exposure and then it was on their radar.

I would certainly imagine that most women using this app probably weren’t telling the angry misogynists in their lives about this app.

There’s a small part of me that has kind of wished that this kind of pseudo age verification was a thing for a while (even though there’s a much bigger part that doesn’t want any corporation to know a damn thing about me.)

I remember swinging through Walmart once to pick up a couple things.

My cart had, IIRC, some deodorant (old spice classic,) masking tape, a can of spray paint, some plumbing parts, a few fishing lures, socks, and a couple of snacks.

I had one of those “I’ve become my dad” moments looking at my cart. I feel like that shopping list is practically a distillation of every suburban dad who’s ever existed.

But of course, I rang up the spray paint, and an employee had to come over to confirm that I was in fact some boring suburban white dude and not a teenager who was going to use it for mischief or huff it to get high.

Maybe I’m giving the juvenile delinquents of today too little credit, or maybe my fellow grown-ups too much, but I feel like the venn diagram of people buying fishing lures, a new toilet flapper, and socks, has basically no overlap with vandals and paint-sniffers.

So I kind of felt like maybe the almighty algorithm could have picked up on that and let me skip having the underpaid giving me a quick looking-at before punching his code into the self-checkout.

We’re at or reaching a tipping point where I’m not sure that’s true anymore.

Most people with kids now are (roughly) in their 20s-40s. At the older end of that range, you have some gen-xers who might have missed the boat on computer literacy, but by and large we’re talking about millennials and older gen-z at this point. Kids who grew up with the internet, probably very clearly remember their family getting their first computer if they didn’t already have one when they were born, had computer classes in school, etc.

And we’re running into an issue where younger Gen z and alpha in many cases are less computer literate in many ways. A lot of them aren’t really learning to use a computer so much as they are smartphones and tablets, and I’m not knocking how useful those devices can be, I do damn-near everything I need to do on my phone, but they are limited compared to a PC and don’t really offer as much of an opportunity to learn how computers work.

There’s a ton of exceptions to that of course, some of my millennial friends are still clueless about how to do basic things on a computer, and some children today are of course learning how to do anything and everything on a computer or even on a phone.

But overall, I don’t think there’s as much disparity in technological literacy between the children and parents of today as there was in previous generations, and in some ways that trend may have even reversed.

Before I was born, my grandfather dropped dead of a heart attack

Common enough story, except

They were visiting family in Poland, we’re American

And this was the 1980s

So the problem was how to get a corpse back to the US.

Embalming was not common in Poland at the time, not sure what the current situation is there, but in this case it was kind of needed. Shipping something the size of a casket across the atlantic on short notice is kind of a lot to figure out for normal people in the best of times, but especially tricky for a bereaved family, in a foreign country, where they barely speak the language, and a whole host of Cold war political bullshit, and this was no small feat.

So they managed to find one of the few local funeral homes who were able to embalm him

And stuffed him into the cheapest wooden coffin they could acquire to ship him back.

And of course, there were some customs hold-ups that delayed things to make sure they weren’t smuggling anything back with him I suppose.

I believe the whole process took a few weeks.

Luckily American money went a long way in Poland at the time. My family is not wealthy, but they were basically treated like celebrities there, flash a little American cash and you were bumped to the front of the line and got preferential treatment for everything, and from the US perspective, everything was dirt cheap.

A couple stories to illustrate that- one day they’re out in Warsaw with their relative Wojtek, and they’re looking for a place to eat. My grandfather spied a nice-looking restaurant. They go to the door and Wojtek is told that they wouldn’t be able to seat them. My grandfather gets a bit angry and points out that the restaurant was almost empty. When they found out they had Americans with them they were welcomed in with open arms.

My grandfather ordered a steak, Wojtek got a bit of sticker shock seeing the menu and ordered a hot dog. When my grandfather found out that’s what he ordered, he called the waiter back over and told them that Wojtek would also have a steak. He said it was too late and they’d already started the hot dog, so my grandfather said to wrap them up and they’d take them to go, and ordered the steak. A steak dinner there for the whole group, probably around 4-6 people, cost peanuts for an American at the time, but the Polish relatives they were staying with had been saving up things like sugar rations for weeks or months in preparation for hosting my family, and steak was definitely not on their regular menu.

There’s also the story of when Wojtek visited the US (coincidentally at the exact same time as the USSR fell apart, but that’s another long story) and literally broke down in tears at the sight of an American grocery store. I know the grocery store they would have went to, it was not a big or particularly impressive store, today it is a kind of small-ish CVS.

Another time while in Poland (they visited several times back in the day) my grandmother went to get her hair done while she was there. She worked as a hair dresser for most of her life, so while she was waiting in line she was watching them cut hair, and pointed out one lady and said that she wanted her to do her hair. She was told that’s not how things worked there and that shed get whoever was available when it was her turn. Until she flashed some American cash and they bumped her up to the front of the line so she could have her hair cut by the hair dresser she wanted.

Anyway, circling back to my dead grandfather, they eventually got his body back to the US, stuffed him into a nicer casket, had a funeral, and there he is to the ground to this day.

But the story doesn’t quite end there. What became of the casket they shipped him back in?

It sat in the funeral homes attic for a couple decades. It was cheap, but it wasn’t a bad casket, just not what’s in-demand for the American funeral industry, and believe it or not, there’s not a lot of demand (or supply for that matter) for second-hand caskets.

Then one day, some guy, who actually happens to be a second cousin or something of mine, decides he wants an actual coffin to use as a Halloween decoration. So he calls around to the local funeral homes to see what they can do for him.

He calls up this place, and they basically say “we have just the thing for you” and so that’s where that is now.

I have no doubts in my mind that trump and Epstein were as good friends as two narcissistic assholes are capable of being.

But it’s also pretty damn clear to me that trump isn’t exactly the letter-writing type.

I suspect how this all played out is that Maxwell was putting together this book for Epstein, and reached out to trump for his contribution

And so trump had some lackey throw together something appropriately sleazy for it and just signed it wherever he was told to sign.

And I don’t think that’s even just a trump thing, I’m pretty sure just about any celebrity, politician, etc. has staff whose job is to answer mail for them.

And he’s too much of a moron and narcissistic asshole to say that, so instead he’s going all-in on it being forged.

But if he were someone with a half functioning brain, that’s all he would need to say “I am a very busy man, so I can’t remember every piece of mail I sent 20 years ago, I probably had an intern write it for me, and I just signed where they told me to, I probably didn’t even read it, I trusted my staff to write a good letter because I have the best people working for me”

And boom totally plausible, keeps the whole thing at arms-length from himself, and probably pretty damn close to the truth.

If you don’t mind getting into the weeds here a bit

A “heart attack” is normally understood to be a myocardial infarction, where blood flow in the coronary arteries is blocked leading to damage to the heart muscle.

And the most common cause of cardiac arrest is arrhythmia, and most specifically ventricular fibrilation (v-fib)

Now that damage to the heart from a heart attack can and frequently does cause v-fib and other arrhythmias, which can lead to a cardiac arrest, either relatively immediately, or further down the line from that heart attack.

But there’s a whole host of other conditions, risk factors, and just plain bad luck that can also cause them.

Picking apart what percent of those arrhythmias are attributable to a heart attack vs those that were caused by other issues isn’t something that I’m willing and maybe not even able to do as a layperson, so I won’t begin to speculate on that.

But that’s kind of the root of my issue here. A lot of people just kind of casually lump all sorts of heart issues together into the same basket. We all have hearts beating away in our chests, and they’re pretty damn important if you want to go on living, so it’s best if we all have some decent level of understanding of what these terms mean and how to treat, manage, recognize, and avoid these issues, and I think that just kind of casually throwing terms around like heart attack, heart disease, heart failure, arrhythmia, cardiac arrest, etc. like they’re interchangeable does a lot of harm to people being able to properly understand what’s going on with this weird pumpy muscle thing in our chests.

My wife and I work different schedules. on the rare day off that were both home, she’s often out of the house when I wake up. She’s not great at replying to texts. I never know when she’s going to be home, and usually have no clue what she’s out doing or where.

But I know who she’s doing while she’s gone- no one. Because I trust my wife. I know who she is as a person, I know what our relationship is like.

I have no particular desire to know her location at all times. I’m sure if I asked, she’d share it with me, and I’d do the same for her. I might occasionally do that when I’m off hiking or something in case there’s an emergency, but half the time I wouldn’t have a signal anyway.

We are two humans with our own lives. Those lives are very intertwined, but we’re both allowed to go off and have our own adventures, occasionally some secrets, and we don’t need to know where each other is 24/7

That, or numerous other health problems, his body was pretty much wrecked from years of wrestling and such even without the steroids, he’s had drug and alcohol issues, and the dude was in his 70s, it’s not exactly unheard of for even relatively healthy people his age to just kind of keel over.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly interesting to his death, he was an unhealthy old guy, it’s not in the least bit surprising that he died. But “cardiac arrest” in articles is a personal pet peeve of mine. It says absolutely nothing about the cause of death, and people who don’t understand what it means tend to automatically think “oh, he had a heart attack” when that’s often not the case. It tells you basically nothing that a headline of something like “Joe Schmo, famous taxidermist, dead at 69” hasn’t already told you, and can be kind of misleading.

I work in 911 dispatch, the codes and policies and such used by different agencies will vary from one agency to another, I’ve entered calls for a “cardiac arrest” for countless different causes

1. Read the article, that’s why it’s there.

2. The post title even says it’s a French Jewish group. Not sure what kind of world map you’re used to but France people don’t generally come from Israel, nor Israeli people from France.

3. Fuck Israel, but shitty people come from all over the world, and 50 kids with 1 chaperone is a recipe for a bad time no matter what country you’re from.

Cardiac arrest just means your heart stopped beating, which is pretty much the textbook definition of death.

That’s basically like saying they’re dead because they died.

The interesting thing we want to know is what caused the cardiac arrest. Any time you see “cardiac arrest” in an article, it means that they either don’t know or don’t want to say the cause of death.

A heart attack can cause cardiac arrest, so could an overdose, or falling and hitting your head, or getting shot in the face.

Also, everything on that Amazon page seems to be “shipped and sold” by various 3rd parties. I don’t really understand the inner workings of how being a seller on Amazon works, but I’m not convinced that WSU actually has anything to do with that page, at the very least it doesn’t seem like you’re getting your cheese directly from them when you go through Amazon and there’s some extra companies adding markups and taking a slice of the pie along the way.