I Stink!

So when you’re looking for meaningful work, you face a lot of down time, rejection and plain old weirdness and that can be quite the bummer. To keep your spirits up and to keep yourself from descending into madness, you can perform social experiments to pass the time. Because if you spend hours and hours and hours looking for a job each day, eventually the only social experiment you will be participating in is a psychiatric evaluation.

 

I bring up the subject of stinkyness because lately I have felt very much like I stink. In the metaphoric sense. So part of this post will be a rant about really unprofessional HR people.
If you are a professional HR person, please ignore my rant.

 

Rant About HR Douchebags

It’s been really really REALLY hard to not get onto social media and call out the unprofessional HR people for their despicable behavior. By despicable I don’t mean not giving me a job, but I mean mind boggling examples of douchebag like behavior:

* We are going to contact everyone we interview to let them know, regardless if they get the job or not. Don’t say it, if you don’t mean it. I call that lying!

* The job is Monday-Friday from 8-5. Then when I get to the interview, The job is 24/7/365 shift work. If you were given the wrong information, at least admit it and apologize. I won’t hold it against you if you were given the wrong information but I will be annoyed if you use bait and switch tactics.

* Leave a phone message at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon instructing me to call your cell phone anytime. I did not get the message until Saturday night and I cautiously defined anytime as anytime during business hours. So I called back Monday morning at little after 9:00 am and you were on your way to a meeting but yes you would call me back. And then you didn’t. So I left two polite messages and hung around waiting for you to call. It’s been three weeks and the job is no longer posted so I get it, you aren’t interested in me even though you called me. By the way, I won’t be doing business with your company now. Yeah, I was a potential customer.

* Post an entry level job at Christmas, interview a bunch of people multiple times, and then not hire anyone and re-post the job five months later.

I understand that these examples are all RED FLAGS but going through the process of learning that these time consuming experiences are red flags, is not a day at the beach. Unless the day at the beach involves being eaten by a shark.

After a while you really start to doubt yourself and think, man do I stink.

 

Maybe I Need to Stink?

With the cool weather and a non-existent spring, I am going a little crazy with itchy skin. Buckets of lotion, quick five minute efficient showers, humidifier, limited swimming and still very dry skin. I switched to a basic soap in the winter and it did nothing for my itchy skin.

So I thought, maybe I should give up soap for a week. Then I can write a slightly entertaining blog post about life without soap.

Since I did not want this social experiment to include e-coli, I washed my hands with hot soapy water after I did germy things. To avoid soap temptation, I removed the soap from the shower and put it in the medicine cabinet. Just water and a wash cloth for scrubbing. I still used shampoo for my hair cause my hair is pretty gross after riding around in a bike helmet for more than fifteen minutes.

I was sure this experiment would fail and I could sit back and search the thesaurus for all kinds of adjectives to describe my musk.

Nope. After a week of obsessive sniffing, I did not stink.

I was shocked. I smelled about the same, perhaps slightly better. After two days my skin stopped itching. NEVER has my skin been so soft. I still reeked after exercise but I always reek after exercise, and I always have a quick shower after exercising. I scrubbed myself post 60 minute bike ride and lo and behold, I did not stink.

To figure out how my soap free skin would react to shaving, I shaved one leg with lotion and rinsed and the other leg with just water and alas, my skin was just as irritated as it is with soap.

So what now? Waiting for warmer weather to test my soap free existence. Stay tuned!