HOME |
RSS | 
I don’t know about you guys, but unless the applicant was absolutely terrible, I would totally hire him after that.
Founder and former CEO of Apple Steve Jobs has died after a seven-year battle with cancer. He was 56.
The hard-driving executive pioneered the concept of the personal computer and of navigating them by clicking onscreen images with a mouse. In more recent years, he introduced the iPod portable music player, the iPhone and the iPad tablet — all of which changed how we consume content in the digital age.
More than one pundit, praising Jobs’ ability to transform entire industries with his inventions, called him a modern-day Leonardo Da Vinci.
“Steve Jobs is one of the great innovators in the history of modern capitalism,” New York Times columnist Joe Nocera said in August. “His intuition has been phenomenal over the years.”
Jobs’ death, while dreaded by Apple’s legions of fans, was not unexpected. He had battled cancer for years, took a medical leave from Apple in January and stepped down as chief executive in August because he could “no longer meet (his) duties and expectations.”
CNN has the highlights of Jobs’ eventful life in the obituary. Link
(Image credit: Apple)
I’m a librarian, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people provide wildly inaccurate descriptions of what we do. This is a common experience in many professions, so Derek Thompson of The Atlantic asked people in twenty-six professions, one for each letter of the alphabet, what laypeople don’t understand about their jobs. Thompson’s interviews included opera singers, graphic designers, and quiz masters. Here’s what a soldier in the US Army had to say:
The thing that surprises people is that some of the most free-thinking people in the United States are in the US Army. The problems that we have to contend with require innovative solutions and given the breadth of educational backgrounds of Army Officers, you find some incredibly adaptive people. Deployments and combat result in an environment where evolution is sped up by a million and those that cannot adapt fail. As long as basic forms are obeyed, you find that most leaders actively encourage free thinking within their ranks. To be sure, we have our share of intellectual dullards and buffoons but the reality is that the more time you spend with Soldiers, the more you begin to realize how vibrant, adaptive and broad they are in their thoughts.
Link -via First Things | Photo: US Army
Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation about the need for more skilled blue-collar workers.
In high schools, the vocational arts have all but vanished. We’ve elevated the importance of “higher education” to such a lofty perch that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled “alternative.” Millions of parents and kids see apprenticeships and on-the-job-training opportunities as “vocational consolation prizes,” best suited for those not cut out for a four-year degree. And still, we talk about millions of “shovel ready” jobs for a society that doesn’t encourage people to pick up a shovel.
In a hundred different ways, we have slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a “good job” into something that no longer looks like work. A few years from now, an hour with a good plumber – if you can find one – is going to cost more than an hour with a good psychiatrist. At which point we’ll all be in need of both.
His purpose was to encourage support for industrial education through programs Rowe participates in, such as Go Build Alabama, I Make America, Discover Your Skills, and mikeroweWORKS. Read his entire testimony at the Discovery Channel site. Link -via reddit
US prisons are used more and more for manufacturing. You know about license plates, but private companies also contract for prison labor to make some of the things you use every day.
The companies who employ prison labour for making dentures and other dental appliances are members of the National Association of Dental Laboratories, so they must have their workers properly trained to do the job. This may actually give a skill that could be used on the outside and keep prisoners from re-offending.
That’s just one of the items on the list of Everyday Things You Didn’t Know Are Made in Prisons. Link
An important piece of data to the question of when we will welcome our new robot overlords is just how many robots are there in the world right now? (Answer: about 1,000,000 – still a puny number compared to humans, so Google may want to wait a while before it achieves sentience).
Focus Magazine has a nifty infographic about robots, specifically robots in the workplace. One interesting (and I’m sure controversial) nugget of info is that if you think illegal immigrants are taking your jobs, then you’re blaming the wrong party:
It is estimated that by the year 2025, robots will have taken over nearly one-half of all jobs in the United States. In certain job sectors, robots may even completely replace human workers.
Link – Thanks Jason!
People can pick up skills in the strangest places. Georgia Durante learned evasive driving techniques when she was married to a mobster and drove a getaway car.
Years of evading the police had taught Georgia how to drive like an action hero, so she formed Performance Two, a stunt and precision driving company and wrote a book about her life as a model and mafia wife. Her company has done stunts for over 100 movies and commercials, and she’s personally doubled for both Cindy Crawford and Priscilla Presley.
Durante is just one of 6 People Who Turned a Life of Crime Into Legitimate Careers that you can read about at Cracked. Link
Chances are you don’t love your job.But at least we have modern conveniences and machinery to do some of hte dirty work that was once done by human power. Here are some jobs from bygone times that you don’t want to try. For example, a Gymnasiarch dealt with Greek athletes.
Back in ancient times the way to clean up was by pouring oil on your body and scraping yourself clean. At the end of it all, you ended up with a gross mess of dirt, dead skin and oily mush. Sounds awesome doesn’t it? Well if you were a Gymnasiarch it was your job to deal with that.
Interesting enough, because athletes were in such high regard even this position was seen as very important and reserved for nobility. However, you did get the great bonus of carrying around a large stick and hitting young athletes over the head when they didn’t perform well enough.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by milos87.
Sure, they may be whacking people and laundering money in the evenings, but mobsters have to have something to fall back on… or at least a job that covers for their other activities. Here’s what a few of them did (or claimed they did).
Al Capone’s business card claimed he was a used furniture dealer. He used the “I’m just a secondhand furniture salesman” line for years and finally had business cards printed up to hand out to police and investigators. For a used furniture salesman, he was doing pretty well – his annual income often exceeded $100 million. For that kind of money, I think I might go open an antique store…
Louie Bagels, AKA Louis Daidone, a member of the Lucchese crime family, apparently once spent his days kneading dough and filling vats of cream cheese at Bagels by the Bay in Howard Beach, Queens. As you can probably deduce, that’s how Louis got his mobster nickname.
You might remember Frank Sheeran from the Jimmy Hoffa saga – one of the many theories floating around is that Sheeran was used to get Hoffa in the car that would take him to his death. Hoffa and Sheeran were good friends and it’s widely believed that Hoffa wouldn’t have put himself in harm’s way without a trusted ally along for the ride. Before Sheeran was rubbing elbows with the likes of Hoffa, he was making money as a trucker. It didn’t take long for him to discover that he could be making a lot more money by committing some crimes along the way, including murder.
Albert Anastasia was a pretty bad dude. He ran a gang of contract killers called Murder Inc., and was once the boss of the Gambino family. But that’s not what his business card would have you believe. According to his card, Umberto Anastasio (his name at birth) was simply a lowly mattress salesman at Convertible Mattress Corporation in Brooklyn, New York. Something tells me he couldn’t have given you much advice on Serta vs. Sealy, though.
William Daddano, Sr., AKA Willie Potatoes, actually did have a legit company, not just a phony business card. By night, Daddano may have been a top enforcer with the Chicago Outfit. But by day, he was busy running the West Suburban Scavenger Service, a Chicagoland garbage collection company.
Harry J. “Doc” Sagansky could have made his mother proud – he actually had a degree in dentistry from Tufts University. He opened a practice in a liquor store in the pre-Prohibition days (liquor, dentistry… they go hand-in-hand, don’t you think?), which is where he got his feet wet in the life of illegal crime. It started with illegal gambling, which he used to fund a couple of nightclubs and a loan agency. He was quite successful and never had to return to dentistry as his day job, but he did continue making donations to Tufts and to Beth Israel Hospital for the rest of his life. In fact, he died at Beth Israel in 1997.
Bugsy Siegel, of course, was pretty instrumental in the development of Las Vegas as we know it today. First he bought the El Cortez on Fremont Street and ended up selling it for a profit of $166,000. Then he used that money to “convince” the owner of the Flamingo, which was in the planning stages, to accept new partners. He basically took a controlling stake and closely oversaw final stages of construction, even though he really had no idea what he was doing. He spent way too much money and got angry with his construction foreman, who was a little worried that his mobster boss was going to off him if things didn’t shape up. Reportedly, Siegel told him, “Don’t worry, we only kill each other.” I’m not sure I would be too reassured by that, really. The hotel opened on December 26, 1946, but Bugsy’s “legit” job didn’t last long – he was shot to death on June 20, 1947.
Apparently used furniture was an inside joke among mobsters, because it seems to be chosen as a “profession” more than any other, perhaps thanks to Al Capone. Joey “Doves” Aiuppa managed Taylor & Company, which was supposedly a furniture manufacturer, but was really just a front for a company that made illegal slot machines. “Doves” got his nickname because of all the things he could have been busted for over the years, the crime that landed him in jail was smuggling doves across state lines. It’s illegal to have more than 24 doves on your person outside of hunting season (who knew?), but in 1962, Aiuppa was caught by FBI agents with 563 frozen doves in his car and went to jail for three months.
Joseph Massino, who was once the head of the Bonanno crime family, was a restauranteur. He owned CasaBlanca Restaurant and catering in Queens (as well as several other eateries) We know for sure that he arranged for meetings at CasaBlanca, but Time magazine will only say that Massino allegedly ran an operation that included extortion, loan sharking, illegal gambling, narcotics and murder from the kitschy restaurant.
And then there’s the Pizza Connection. It was a massive Mafia plot to sell and distribute heroin and the cover for the entire thing were a bunch of independently-owned pizza parlors. The main one was located in Queens and was called “Al Dentes.” It reminds me of Loverboy, that old Patrick Dempsey movie where women could order a gigolo by requesting “extra anchovies.” The case cost more than $50 million and made prosecution lawyer Rudy Giuliani a highly sought after attorney.
Comments Off
Jeff Kisseloff interviewed grocer Harry Dubin about an article written about him in 1947, but then found something much more interesting about Dubin.
I picked up the album and opened it, and my eyes nearly jumped out of my head. Inside were some 30 color photographs taken in and around the city in the 1940s. I had never seen such vibrant photos of the city in those years. In fact, I had never seen any color photos of the city in those years, yet here they were. It was such an interesting collection. Each of the pictures depicted a man in uniform intently doing his job, whether it was a street sweeper, gas station attendant or hansom cab driver. When I looked at them twice, I realized something, all of them were Harry!
Needless to say, while our subsequent interview was wonderful, the album left me speechless in delight. These were the most evocative photographs of old New York I had ever seen. Harry explained that all of them were taken by his son Ronald, who was then a teenager, after Harry managed to convince each worker to change clothes with him in an alley and let Harry do his job for a few minutes so the picture could be taken.
You might want to check back with The Kisseloff Collection as more pictures are added. Link -via Metafilter
Seeing-eye dogs, police dogs, and cutting horses: they have nothing on these unexpected employable animals. Some animals have very dangerous jobs. Well, certainly more dangerous than mine!
Since the late 1950s the U.S. military’s Marine Mammal Program has been working with dolphins and sea lions to see if they could be employed for the purpose of national security.
The dolphin’s echolocation and high intelligence make them ideal in detecting mines, patrolling harbours, guarding boats against unwanted underwater incursions and aid in the retrieval of lost equipment.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Nightcrawlerx.
So the gals over at Lemondrop and the guys over at Asylum each came up with a list. What are the best professions to date, and what are the worst, regarding both men and women?
While these definitely qualify as stereotypical, the results are pretty funny; just remember that grain of salt.
Best – Librarian
She’ll be pretty smart about lots of random things, great at Googling and a good connection for free books. Bonus: say goodbye to those nasty overdue charges. Plus, everyone knows librarians are sexual dynamos waiting to explode. Right?Worst – Singer/Entertainer
There may be potential perks if she makes it to the big-time, but it’s statistically likely she’s not very good at what she does and you’ll have twice the fibbing to do in your relationship, answering not only “How does this look?” but the frequent “Did you like my show?”
Link to Asylum. Link to Lemondrop.
Writing for Popular Mechanics, Claire Martin has a list of jobs that she thinks can only face increased demand in future decades, including undersea welder, digital detective, and battery engineer. Here’s the rationale for the latter:
Today, Gardner leads a team that designs, builds and tests batteries for hybrid electric cars at A123 Systems, a fast-growing firm based in Watertown, Mass. A123’s clients include Chrysler, GM and automotive upstarts Think and Better Place, and the company’s staff has jumped from 150 to 2000 in the past three years. Ann Marie Sastry, who directs the University of Michigan’s master’s program in energy systems engineering, says, “The DNA of the automobile is changing, which means the composition of the workforce has to change.” Sastry also runs her own battery company, called Sakti3. “We’re hiring,” she says. “It’s a great time to be a battery guy.”
Link via Instapundit
I posted this resume in my blog almost 2 years ago and suddenly is getting a lot of hits. I guess that with unemployment raising people are looking for good examples of resumes… and once you read this one, you can’t help but pass it on!
This is definitely a great example of how to do the best with the worst. The guy making the job search spent his last 10 years in jail for trafficking marijuana but he didn’t let that small detail stop him and he managed to make you see his past under a new light.
Some highlights of the resume are:
"… I co-owned and participate in the executive level management of 120 people worldwide in a successfull pot smuggling venture with revenues in excess of 100 million annualy..."; "I am well-traveled and I speak English, French and Spanish"; "References available from friends, family, US District Attorney, etc".
Seriously, his resume (published as an ad under "employment wanted" in Canada) is priceless and a great example of how you can come clean and even make something of it!
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by scbr.
