Job opening ads

Have you seen some of the job ads? Sometimes the requirement, in terms of years-of-experience, in a nascent technology exceeds the age of that technology itself! Long time back seeing those requirements I used to get baffled. Slowly, as time progressed, my eyes (and brain) got trained to such ads. I classified them as "advertising gimmicks" of the recruiting companies.

But it took a dilbert cartoon strip to let me realize the real and true motive behind such ads :-) Click here to see the 29-Feb-08 strip…

In the strip, Catbert (the evil HR director) posts a job opening. The requirement states: Candidate must have an I.Q. of 300, Two Centuries of Unix Experience and a track record of winning Nobel prizes.

After posting the ad, Catbert thinks with a smug: 90% of my job is convincing people they don't deserve theirs.

PS: HR professionals, please excuse this post.

The Candy Dish

Once upon a time, when I went to US to work in the US branch of my company, my friends and I came across this cubicle of a lady, who used to keep lot of candies in a dish on her desk. She used to leave the dish, filled with mouth-watering candies, out in the open. If you have been to US, you would be knowing that it is a common practice to leave candies, pastries etc in the common place/room/desk to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries etc. Please note the word "common place/room/desk"; NOT private cubicles or desks.

Just as how cats and fishes are inseparable, we unsophisticated, naive Indians found those candies quite hard to resist. The late night work, growling stomach and the unguarded candy dish - brimming with chocolates - made us commit that crime: Every night, we started picking a few candies from that dish. The longer the night stay, the more the chocolates started vanishing. Soon the true owner of the candies - the lady - realized that there is something fishy going on. She locked her candy dish in her cabinet and thus ended our rendezvous with her candies.

We thought the story ended there. But we were wrong. A few years later, Scott Adams published this story in his cartoon...