the soupmenu

Look at me, I finally start a blog then I immediately turn into the deadbeat blog owner. I’m sure it happens a million times a day where people think a blog is a cool thing…sign up…then never even remember their password. (it did take a couple tries). I haven’t posted though, due to me wanting to keep the quality of posts high. Life is going to be interesting(hopefully) in the upcoming months, so at the very least I’ll probably use this just to write and get my ideas out of my head at least temporarily. We’ll see how scary that will get…

Anyways, I’m down to 7 hrs of sleep before work and have been ‘job searching’ for the last two hours. I put the ‘rock quotes’ there because job searching is simply the phrased used for the activity of mindlessly looking at listings on monster while you are pondering within yourself why someone would ever set out to have 10 years experience in retail pricing or 15 years experience in typing with your feet. It’s bad enough sifting through all of the ‘inside sales’ and ‘marketing rep’ positions, but coming to all of theses descriptions that are completely asinine really makes me think this is some huge joke by the whole field of HR. (Since they don’t really do anything I guess they fill their time with comedic job descriptions) So once you find a job you might be interested in, you get pretty excited…only to find out a couple pages further in the search results that that company is hiring a million people because they are ‘doing so well’ or that that position is actually an elegant description of intern.

So we get to the fact…job searching sucks.

It’s actually a sub-fact of graduating college sucks.

All of these lead to me procrastinating and making everything worse by being less prepared. I’ve realize my problems though (two of them at least). I truly want to be a modern renaissance man. I feel everyone is becoming way to specialized, and while there are advantages to that….i personally do not want to be specialized. I want to be worldly, I want to be knowledgeable on many topics, I want anyone to come up to me and ask me any question because they know that I have not specialized and that I can help. I’m fighting an uphill battle against the world on this one though. My second problem is how I simply want to be passionate. Good quote from adaptation “I guess my only passion is the search to find something to be passionate about”. It really hits home right now. In my business thought I’ve really realized that’s the key to the type of company I want….passion. In my normal day happiness, it’s all I need….passion. But of course as with anything…the time that you most desire something, that’s when it’s the farthest away. I can not create passion. I can not fake passion. I can not have a one night stand with passion. So I sit here and figure out how I can fake 7 years of experience typing with my feet.

This post is terribly detached…I’ll stop it now before I go on more tangents…but I’ll throw it against the server and see if it sticks

I think I forgot to lay down some common themes

I can’t spell

I ramble….a lot. But whatever I bring up, I will go back to it

I apologize now for wasting time with boring entries

I love stories. I tell a lot of them. Some are good, some are bad, but hopefully everyone will get something out of all of them. Usually though they just make me go on huge tangents that might someday come to an interesting point.

Story one: car flirt

Driving home from work. Now one thing about me recently is that I’m constantly looking at other people in their cars…I mean CONSTANTLY. I’m kinda afraid I’ll hit something sometime because I was starting at some girl who was really cute from the neck up. (cars are one of those deceptive things that makes girls look cuter than they ma be. . .(examples: floppy skirts, puffy sweaters, and distance)) I find people in the cars really interesting. Most of the time they look like zombies, but if you ever see a couple flirting, people singing, or a family talking…..it’s great. So my obsession with looking at people has never really impacted anything that much….just simple enjoyment to me. Today as normal I was almost home and pull by a bunch of cars who were stopped and stare all of the cars down. Right as I stop I notice a cute girl in the car to the right. I look as I stop and she is looking at me. We both look away. 60 seconds pass. (can’t look back right away..that would mean that yer staring, but you have to check to see if they were looking) I look back…oh shit…she’s looking at me….we both look away. Now, we both caught each other looking at each other twice in a row at the exact same time. What do you think would happen next? We both drive forward. My lane goes faster…I’m saddened. My lane stops. . .i look slightly to the side, without doing a full look around…there she goes! Driving past…..MAKING A FACE…..aweee. (this is where the movie theatre laughs in that light-hearted ‘awe’ style) Now I’ve seen a lot of cute faces, but wow…this face was cute…almost darling. Maybe it was just the fact that she was going to have fun with the whole situation that made it so cute, but I’m not picky…cute face is cute face. So now we know the girl is fun. But now she is 6 cars ahead of me. But then traffic stops….in her lane. My lane goes…and fast. I’m gone. I continue looking back. Then my turn comes, and I get into the left lane. She’s real far back now. Eventually she pulls up and goes in the right turn late. My eyes are locked, sure enough…she looks back. I’m ready. I shoot her the smug-smiling wave. She smiles. We both get green lights and drive off into the distance. End scene.

Thank you car flirting girl. You were cute and not a zombie in your car. And you are as big of a dork as I am with watching people and making faces. People like her though really make me enjoy….well…people. Just when you think everyone is boring and doesn’t do the stupid things to make life fun, you run into another crazy like you…then you feel ok.

*semi-boring, yet interesting business post

So the bad habit begins. I could be doing research for my upcoming industry analysis paper on the candy and confectioners industry, but it’s too easy to open up a new document and type away. It brings up an interesting change in things these days. I guess what I’m going to talk about all falls under the notion of ‘switching costs’. Since the new fangled internet thing we have seen the importance of switching costs fall off of the face of the earth…. I’ll describe further …in pre-computer times when you were going to go purchase an item you would go to a store. While in the store if you were not happy with the price you could choose to leave and switch to a different store for a different price. But alas, that other store is on the other side of the railroad tracks, you already tied your horse up on the post right next to the door, and the storekeep always smells like 5 day old fish. Not to mention that this store is right next to the saloon. . .location location location. So slap that scenario next to the environment of today – Online purchasing. With a simple ctrl + L and a few keystrokes you could be at the register of a whole new store. With no consideration of costs, whether it be location, price, or horses.

So now, back to what I started. The idea of switching costs can be transferred to computer action. With a vast array of programs on everyone’s computer and those programs only being a few clicks and a splash screen away, there is no consideration towards if you should not do something because of switching costs. Hence when I got the notion to write to the blog it was too simple that there was no reason for me NOT to do it. So this case holds up with my procrastination, but I believe it creates both efficiencies and inefficiencies elsewhere. In work it’s wonderful to be able to think of something and do it instantly without any switching costs…it allows things to get done right when they need to be done. The flip side of course is with work procrastination. It’s soooo easy to check your personal email 30 times a day at work, cause it’s only a shortcut away from the work you are already doing in firefox.

So where is this going? When is easy going to be too easy? I wonder if things will turn around to keep people more focused and on track. Perhaps we’ll start making operating systems where you can only use one group of programs. Perhaps we’ll put timer limits on opening numerous things so you won’t be temped to check google news because it will take 5 mins before you will get access to load the page. I know I’m getting extreme, but the average attention span seems like it will be 10 seconds in another few years, simply from tons of options and no switching costs.

In fact, I bet only a few people read the menu this far.