Profunksticated

Profunksticated was in the Washington, DC area last week, visiting staffing firms that hire out people like me who specialize in pulling together business proposals. Like I said in an earlier post, my unemployment benefits are about to run out. Matter of fact, I’m down to my last check, due early next month.

While down there, I looked up and met with a brother I worked with out at a newspaper out West 20 years ago. It’s been 13 years since I’ve seen the guy. He’s still in journalism, tells me he earns six figures and lives alone. He’s been divorced for more than 10 years after a short lived marriage. He has no kids. I admit, hearing that the guy earns six figures made me kind of jealous. Shit, it took me 25 years just to crack the $50,000-a-year level, and as soon as that happened, I got the boot.

Despite being in his mid 40s, dude still smokes weed and drinks, two things I don’t do anymore. For a moment there, I wanted to join him in indulging, but I remembered I didn’t want to fuck up my "clean time," now approaching six years.

I’m thinking that I should at least try to encourage the guy to teach a class or volunteer to work with the less-privileged young brothers in DC. Guys like him tend to live for themselves. Yes, I was selfish once too (actually still am to an extent), but at least I had a family to somewhat keep me in check. ("Somewhat" being the operative word. Read my first post).

I guess the thing that really got me was that dude never once brought up the idea of whether I’d like to work at his shop, even though he knows I can do the work and introduced me to his boss. And his boss, a white guy, of course, was someone I nearly crossed paths with some 25 years back. The boss was leaving a newspaper as I was joining it and we knew some of the same people.

When it came to helping me to gain employment in mainstream (e.g., white-run, higher paying) journalism, I’m sorry to say, I’ve found my fellow black journalists, save for one, totally useless. Guess they don’t want to be seen by their white supervisors as being pro-black, despite all the hand-wringing over creating more diversity in newsrooms. I think that whole diversity thing is a crock of shit.

But I digress. I thought seriously about calling dude’s boss just to ask about what my prospects would be, but my mind started to play with me, telling me I would be told that I’m disqualified because I’ve been out of the news business for a decade. Folks in journalism tend to be unforgiving like that.

Meanwhile, dude took me to a female friend’s birthday party at a private club in DC. I felt like I was on the outside looking in as I tried to make sense of the conversations I had with the alternately self-important and drunk African-Americans and few white folk who attended. I drank a lot of Red Bull — at $6 a can. Amazing.

On the job hunt tip, the idea of going into someone’s office, even as a contractor, still scares me somewhat. What makes me nervous is dealing with the sociopaths that wreak havoc in corporate America. But I shouldn’t be. I did vow that the moment things got funky, I would be the one to sever the employment relationship.

I often wonder if it would be easier just to make a few hundred playing basic strategy blackjack every other day at the east coast casinos. That way, I wouldn’t have to deal with the sociopaths, just the cards being dealt from a shoe. Just a thought.

Peace.

Profunksticated decided that in order to expand his network, it would be a good idea to finally attend one of those local alumni football game viewing parties this past weekend.

I’ve gotten regular such invitations by e-mail for years, but simply ignored them. Save watching a couple of bowl games in recent years, I’ve been mostly indifferent to sports teams involving Big State School in the South since my graduation 26 years ago. I’m more of a fan of professional sports.

But being unemployed and needing to meet new people, I felt this party represented the perfect networking opportunity. I e-mailed the host, the president of the local alumni association, and expressed my desire to attend the party. He e-mailed me back, sure we’d be happy to have you.

Let me tell you something: This white guy is probably younger than me, but yet he appears to be living as large as the old campus. He graduated a couple of years after I did so we may have crossed paths somewhere on campus. But I certainly didn’t know him until this weekend.

After driving an hour, I got there late. This guy’s home was on a side road that’s hard to find in the dark. When I found the house, there was a note on the front door telling folks to let themselves in. I walked in and immediately felt like a burglar. There was no one in the living room or the kitchen. It took me a full minute to listen for where voices were coming from. I was opening doors to closets trying to find these guys.

I finally found my way to the guy’s basement, where the staircase is lined with trophy cases filled with sports memorabilia. When I finally joined the group of about 15 people, I think a guy sitting at the end of the bar and looked at me like "who the hell is this nigger?" But he noticed I wore a hoodie bearing the school logo, so I must have belonged there. Then, the first words out of his mouth were not "Hello!" but "You’re late!"

That pissed me off for a second. OK, so the game was into the second quarter. I thought, sorry, but I have a life, too, dickhead. Then, I figured the guy’s attitude must have been the combination of white-privileged arrogance and alcohol. So I’ll try to forgive his dumb ass.

I then learned this rude guy was the host’s old college roommate. The host was a lot more gracious, and we shook hands. I had a couple of cokes, introduced myself to a few of the people, and finally during the game settled into a pleasant conversation with another guy, an late ’80s graduate whose life took several twists and turns before landing as a stockbroker.

Still, the irony wasn’t lost on me: Well-to-do white folks cheering for their big time college football teams, that, like ours, are comprised primarily of not-so-well-to-do African American athletes. And as I wrote in my first post, this school we all attended is an institution that didn’t admit black students until the early 1960s.

So this gathering could count one African American alumnus among its members. If these white people had been uttering phrases like "that nigger sure can play" before I arrived, now they’re gonna have to watch their tongues lest I shoot them a dirty look.

Back to host’s apparent large living. He is an outsized fan of his alma mater, so far as to create in one room of his basement a virtual shrine to the school, complete with signed football, basketball and baseball jerseys of every style, signed football helmets, several display cases, carpeting with the school logo and even a multimedia presentation of the football team on a flat screen LCD TV that includes smoke shooting from pipes installed in the baseboard, while playing 2001: A Space Odyssey, the school fight song and the alma mater. The room looks like something you’d see in the concourse of a stadium or arena or in the school’s athletic offices.

The host told me has season tickets to the home football games and attends as many away games as possible, which entails a lot of travel. He also has hosted receptions for the school president whenever said president visits the area, and also for teams that play opponents up here.

Did I tell you he also has a tiki bar on his back porch?

I’m thinking this is one of those guys known as a booster, a wealthy businessman who likes donate large sums of money to the school and to do "$100 handshakes" (for the unititiated that’s simply handing out cash on the sly) whenever he meets a student-athlete (technically a violation of rules governing college athletics). To have bragging rights about a successful football program is paramount in business circles.

That said, I still don’t know what this guy does for a living, but I’ll find out.

Despite my initial discomfort, I’m planning to stick around and ride this group’s wave to see where it leads me. Time to order some more gear from the school’s online catalogs.

An update: As of last Friday, I hadn’t heard anything from my two recent interviews. That’s OK, I’ll keep moving on.

Peace.

Well, I didn’t get the chance to throw the consultant pitch at my Monday interview.

After a drive of at least 90 minutes, part of it along a major traffic-clogged toll road, I met with three members of a major telecommunications firm interviewing for a proposal specialist.  I got the sense they were seeking to hire someone to work from this particular office, which markets communications systems to police, fire and emergency medical agencies. Two were from out-of-state offices, so they had no sense of how far away l live; the third came into the interview 15 minutes in.

I had told the recruiter who sent me up there that this office was too far away, but she advised me to go anyway. After all, I guess, her firm gets paid if someone it presents is hired, so of course she was going to encourage me to go see her client. She also noted that there was the possibility I could work at a client office closer to home, but that topic didn’t come up during the actual interview. That’s because the hiring authorities I spoke with were far removed geographically and organizationally from the recruitment sourcing process.

In all, I was just one in a string of interviewees seen that day. I felt pretty confident and offered all the right answers, even if they were bullshit. If I were offered the gig, I would refuse on the basis of distance. Long commutes (over 30 miles one way) are absolutely not going to be part of my life unless I’m offered six figures (highly unlikely) and even then I’ll have to think long and hard about whether to accept.

And enough with the 9/11 retrospectives already! I wish this country would realize that 9/11, as horrific as it was, could be seen as a not-altogether-unexpected response from folk who believe the U.S. has historically fucked with them. I remember reading a think tank’s paper, published in the late 90s, that predicted a terrorist attack on U.S. soil as a matter of "not if, but when."

Reason: The U.S. continually sticks its beak into other nations’ business. Come on, do you see Al Qaeda fucking with Switzerland or Finland, or even Australia?

Shit, if any group had justification to commit terror strikes agains the U.S., it would be African Americans. I can only imagine the chaos that would have occurred down south during Jim Crow if we blacks could have funded and organized ourselves into cells called "Al-Negro" and launched retaliatory attacks against the KKK and the state governments it controlled. This country is very fortunate to have a such a group of forgiving people on these shores.

Regarding 9/11, I was sitting in a cubicle when I first heard what happened that day. As the day wore on, I became ill to my stomach, thinking World War III was about to jump off with nukes flying all over the place. Well, the nukes weren’t fired, but perhaps World War III indeed has started.

Peace.

Just returned home today from the first of two job interviews on consecutive business days, with the other scheduled for Monday.

I had a bad case of nerves when I walked into what is a converted warehouse in a nondescript office park. I was decked out in a brand-new blue suit with thin grey pinstripes. The dress there was casual, which made me the freaking proverbial sore thumb.

My jitters dissipated when the hiring manager of this environmental remediation firm, a guy I’ll call Tom, mentioned a glaring weakness in my resume’: I lack the hands-on, in-the-field experience he believes is needed to write the scopes of work included in the proposals the firm would submit to clients when seeking jobs. I felt relief because I really didn’t want the responsibility of having to write highly technical stuff like scopes of work. And I really didn’t want to endure the hour-each-way commute on top of the job stress. 

I told Tom that my previous position involved more coordination than actual writing. I worked with people throughout the firm to pull together the various pieces of a given proposal. I did some editing and some tailoring of relevant past project descriptions and personnel resumes’, but usually the person who would manage the proposed project would write the narrative of how the work would be done.

Once Tom told me I might not be his person for this full time position, an amazing thing happened: I found myself going into consultant mode. For instance, I mentioned that the company’s website, while clean and spare, could benefit from embedded video of some of its successful projects, complete with client testimonials. He enthusiastically agreed with my idea.

I told Tom I’ve posted some video online and would send him links. (For you readers of Profunksticated, my admittedly rudimentary video work appears on my other, less edgy blog, which I publish under my real name. Can’t give out my name here, for obvious reasons.)

And I told Tom I also could help out by providing administrative or production tasks on a short-term freelance/contract basis if his full time people were overloaded. He seemed to like that idea also.

I then mentioned my current training in web design, marketing management and my photography work. Tom mentioned that the firm could use better photos of its project work for marketing collateral and that I might be a candidate as a shooter.

I felt great leaving the interview, because I had effectively sold myself as a possible contractor/consultant, which is my real long-term goal. And I mentioned in a prior post this firm is the spinoff iteration of a company that went bankrupt a couple of years back. So it stands to reason that although the firm is planning to ramp up its bidding efforts, it’s not going to want to hire a lot of full-time support staff, at least for now.

For Monday’s interview, I’ll attempt to use a similar consultant approach although this other position  is billed as a one-year contract job involving proposal development.

Stay tuned.

Peace out.

Profunksticated admits to being part of the problem of perception in entertainment. I was a fan  of VH1’s Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School Starring Mo’nique. My daughter and I discussed each week’s episode the way regular guys talk about their favorite NFL teams.

I’m just finding out that the blogosphere has been fanning the flames of a boycott against the former Video Hits One, the MTV sister network that once showed videos of easy listening and light rock artists when it debuted in the mid-1980s. 

Today, reality is a VH1 staple. And apparently folks are upset because a VH1 executive, during one of those infamous closed-door meetings, squashed a proposed reality show featuring educated black women because the women weren’t "ghetto" enough, a la Charm School.

The show was to be called The Interracial Love Reality Show, featuring a white father of two sons seeking a black woman as a wife and mother to his boys. The following is a comment from posted by a VH1 employee claiming to have been present at said meeting:

"I am the employee that leaked the information about the reason Vh1 turned down this reality show Interracial Love. It was told to the creators that this was not something Vh1 was looking to do right now and it did not fit with their network. The truth is that we was told to tell the creators this however that is not what was said behind closed doors. The truth is that this show does not fit the mold just as they said however they left out the part what also was said.

This is word for word what was said, ‘This is not a good fit for us here at Vh1 we are not interested in showing this family or black women in the positive light this show wants to. It is our thoughts that the viewers are more interested in seeing black people in a ghetto role. This show will not sell. Black women are looked at as being ghetto and not educated so we need to pass on this project.’ "

Damn, that hurts!

Not to defend VH1, but a little perspective is in order. Stereotyping is the lifeblood of the entertainment industry. Film and TV execs, with good reason, believe the American public is more comfortable watching productions that reflect its perception of reality rather than reality itself. The name of the game is to attract eyeballs that VH1 can charge its advertisers.

In other words, yeah, it would be nice to see educated, cultured black women on TV, but such women aren’t seen as interesting. More interesting, or entertaining, is the unscripted ghetto acting of women like Larissa (Boots) from Charm School.

I also checked out the last season of Celebrity Fit Club. Do you think it was an accident that Dustin Diamond, the former Screech from Saved By the Bell, was the resident raging asshole on that show? If not for him, CFC would have been a boring model of cooperation, support and encouragement among the contestants. Having been in jounalism, I was told time and time again that the best newspaper stories had at their hearts some kind of conflict. Same with this reality TV genre.

And witness that TV staple, the situation comedy. Buffoonery abounds, as portrayed by the following well-known actors: Don Knotts as Barney Fife (The Andy Griffith Show), Richard Bonner as Herb Tarlek (WKRP in Cinncinati), Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker (All in the Family) and Homer Simpson as, well, Homer Simpson (The Simpsons). And all those characters were Caucasian. What if the Simpsons had been a black family? The show probably wouldn’t have lasted past the second episode due to the inevitable complaints that would emanate from the black community.

Remember Good Times? Jimmie Walker as J.J. was as buffoonish as they came, much to the consternation of co-stars Esther Rolle and John Amos, who felt that J.J. was a horrible black role model. But the audience tuned in to see J.J. anyway.

So if we hate the fact that professional black women aren’t viewed as entertaining enough, we only have ourselves to blame, myself included, for lapping up the dreck served up by Hollywood, and to a lesser extent, New York.

Forget a boycott. Progamming we find objectionable will be killed by nothing short of a complete overthrow of the United States of America, its Constitution (remember the First Amendment?) and its media. My advice to folks is this. If you don’t like a show or movie, simply don’t freakin’ watch.

Interracial Love Reality Show, I believe, would be a reality show more suited for PBS, if it ever went reality.

Peace out.

Eddie Griffin needs pointers on how to play older, racially mixed audiences.

Griffin, the 39-year-old comedian, was reportedly all but given the hook during the 14th Annual Black Enterprise/Pepsi Golf & Tennis Challenge  in Miami this past holiday weekend. Shortly after Griffin started his riff, someone cut the juice to his microphones. This excerpt is from an online column on minorities in media:

"…when (Griffin) started tossing around the "N" word and the one abbreviated "MF," and then brought white women into his repertoire, he suddenly found his hand-held microphone go dead. Griffin tried a floor mic, but that one was dead, too.

Griffin then turned to the audience, whose members hadn’t been laughing at the jokes but were uncertain what was happening when the mics were turned off. He said, ‘f— it, I don’t need no mic,’ and finished his joke. Then he left, with Morris Day and The Time not quite ready to go on next."

My initial reaction: What did the event organizers expect from Eddie Griffin, who’s no Chris Rock? After all, we’re talking about a business networking soiree’ thrown by Earl Graves, the old-school founder and publisher of Black Enterprise magazine.

My theory: Griffin ignored admonitions to tone own his act for the audience of 1,200 and then was shown the door. Graves then took the stage and apologized to the audience.

Me, I would have liked to have seen Morris Day and the Time, as long as Morris didn’t utter that long "sheeeeeiiiiit" at the end of Jungle Love.

Peace out.

As of 4p EST today, I haven’t heard jack about the consulting gig in DC. I’ve left a couple of messages yesterday and today.

But God, as they say, works in mysterious ways. I was called by a Florida-based firm and asked to interview for a position at a satellite office in my home state. I scheduled it for 10a on Friday. I understand this is a company that was spun off of a legacy firm that went bankrupt two years ago. As I’ve said in a prior post, I’m not all that hot about taking on another full time corporate position, especially this industry, which is environmental consulting and remediation.

The position would involve some measure of marketing and business development, or so the recruiter lady in Florida told me. I have little faith in recruiters, so I’m taking what she says with a grain of salt.

The last firm I joined back in summer of 2000, also was into environmental consulting and remediation. I got the job through a referral from a cousin who was a project manager there. More than a year later, it too had gone bankrupt but was bought out for a relative song by some manufacturing/engineering firm in the Gulf South.

Already, this position I’m looking at already has one major strike against it — a driving commute of at least an hour each way.

I was up late this morning and happened upon MTV2, which had a program on the history of fashion at the MTV Video Music Awards, which I never watch. They showed P Diddy, who appeared at the VMA one recent year in a nice white suit.

Which got me to thinking: What if I showed up to my interview in a white suit, looking somewhat pimpish? It would convey the message that I could take the job or leave it; or it could signal that I’m the type that is willing to differentiate myself from the rest. (Of course, being a late-40s African American man is already a hell of a differentiator.) I probably won’t, but the very thought brought a chuckle.

I’ve also gotten a call from a recruiter about a similar marketing job for a major telecom firm. Again, there’s that problem, a driving commute that would take me even farther afield within the state than the above-mentioned gig. But I provided my resume anyhow, and the recruiter told me she’d provide it to the hiring manager. It would be up to that person as to whether I’d be called in. Whatever.

More later.

Thanks for reading. Peace out.

Sorry I’ve been away so long.

I forgot to mention that I currently reside among the ranks of the jobless, if you want to define a job as 40-hours away from home each week with 15-20 hours of commuting thrown in.

Yes, I was shown the door this spring along with several hundred others by my last company after 6 years of service. So I’m getting state-paid retraining in web design and development and marketing management from a local college. The end result will be the award of two "certificates," the newest craze in low-cost credentialism. I’ll need them, ‘cause it seems that glorified liberal arts Bachelor’s Degree I earned 26 years ago from the Big State School in the South ain’t worth squat today.

They say the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing while expecting a different result. This is why I don’t want do go back into a corporate job on a full time basis. For what? So I can get my hopes up that this could be THE JOB and possibly be downsized once more? Look, I’ve been downsized and/or otherwise forced out - oh, who am I kidding? I was fucking fired — from three positions in the last decade.

I’m collecting unemployment for the third time in my life and it’s about to run out. I’m hoping to go a freelance/consulting life by working through a corporate entity I created a few years back.

I really don’t care what the employees of the client firms will think. Why is this black man here? Yeah, I’m here temporarily. You got a problem with that?  Oh, I’m undercutting your precious position?  Take it up with your fucking management. Get out of my face.

It’s time to face facts — these white-run corporate entities you all work for don’t want to hire anyone full time anymore, and that’s fine with me. I’m just here rolling with the flow. And it’s a well known fact that black men don’t do well as employees in white-run companies.

I think I’d like the idea of working on one project for one client firm and following the project straight out the door once it’s done. Collect my cash, take a few days off, go to the next gig, whatever it may be. Benefits? The Spouse is a teacher, one of the few public sector jobs still offering good benefits, including health insurance, so we’ve got that covered.

My thinking shouldn’t come off as all that strange. We African Americans were entrepreneurs by necessity back in those bad old Jim Crow days. Today, most of us believe we have to have biweekly checks from the white man in order to keep up our showy, highly leveraged lifestyles.

This mindset is an unfortunate outgrowth of our unique history in this "great" country of ours. Other immigrant groups come here of their own volitions and seek economic freedom. We native-born descendants of kidnapped Africans-turned-slaves, on the other hand, have instead sought political power, but much to the detriment, I believe, of our ability to attain some measure of economic parity.

Anyhow, this consulting firm I signed with earlier this year following my layoff called just before the holiday weekend about a one-month opportunity with a client. It’s in the DC area. I’ll find out more later today.

Peace out.