Who wants to be a fire engine??

Gosh, it's practically April already? Where, oh where, has the time gone? Oh yeah, I forgot. It flew out of my truckbed on I-35 somewhere between Waco and Hillsboro. I swear, isn't there some government grant they give to people to drive as much as I have? Anyway, that's done. It will be a long time before I remotely resemble normal, if that's even a possibility in the first place. So here I am, blowing off more steam (translated: nervous energy) and this is probably a sick attempt at auto-therapy, but what the hell.

I realize that the more spare time I think I have and the more I think I've accomplished, the more, I realize, I have yet to do. So today, while flipping back and forth between another I'm-900-pounds-and-haven't-left-my-house-in-4-years and yet another stupid '80s movie that is apparently 25 years old and was a big hit then but I've never heard of before tonight, I came to the realization that in a couple of short weeks, I'm going to have to play Personnel Manager again (between sneeze attacks, which I'm still blaming on Dallas-Ft Worth) and actually. Hire. Someone.

This someone will be someone near and dear to my own circle of influence: a massage therpist. How is that for irony; I'm massaging hamstrings and calf muscles one month and posting a job ad the next. That's how it goes. I realized I needed to write a job ad. Now, just because you've spent the past 10+ years reading (and deciding whether or not to give the time of day to) classified job postings, doesn't mean that when it comes time to write your own, you can. Nope.

I tried to think back to the job ads I found most compelling. All were different, yet roughly the same. What they all had in common were two things: they mentioned the salary (even if it's just a range) and they sounded relatively down-to-earth. The ones I laughed at right before flipping the page? Those who mentioned 401k, listed an 800 number, re-ran ads week after week (thus demonstrating they couldn't keep anyone), required a resume for $8 an hour, and those who mentioned commission.

Then I heard all the horror stories from fellow massage therapists. Sure, MTs can be a flaky bunch, but so can some employers. I think some employers/supervisors completely lose touch with those they're trying to hire, and in the process, scare/turn them off. So here's the basic culture I would've loved to have seen, from a decent soon-to-be-employer's point of view...

Here's what I am looking for:
A Massage Therapist with a current license from the State of Texas and current malpractice insurance to work as an independent contractor in our office.

Here are other requirements (I won't negotiate on these):
What you must possess can be summed up into 4 concepts: maturity, initiative, common sense, and support for chiropractic and other holistic/natural medicine. Maturity means you'll show up on time, whenever you have an appintment scheduled. Initiative means you'll show up even if you don't, in case one of our patients could use some work on the spot. Maturity also means you're level-headed and you won't bring any drama into our office. We realize you're human, but your personal problems stay at home; the office isn't just a continuation of a bad day within a different set of 4 walls. Maturity means you'll act professional in front of patients, not chew gum or gab with friends when you're supposed to be working, that kind of thing. Initiative means you take classes for the joy of learning and acquiring new skills, not just because you have to. It also means you've got some of your own clientele already and you'll do what it takes to keep them happy, attract more, and not let us down when we refer our patients to you. It also means you'll refer your clients to us. We want you to actively promote yourself and what you do; we encourage you to promote the practice as a whole. If we make money, so do you. Common sense means you won't pull anything stupid. Don't say you did work you didn't do. Work the areas we recommend. Don't use too much pressure; back off when they say lighter or stop. Don't smoke or eat junk food or any smelly food, you get the idea. To support chiropractic ideally means you've been under care yourself and know how to explain it effectively to skeptical or apprehensive people, but at minimum it means you advocate and suggest it when appropriate. Here's the bottom line: we're a small office and we're mainly looking for a compatible personality fit with the necessary credentials, a great attitude, and most importantly, a focus on the patients.

Here is our wishlist (these are more negotiable; the more you fit, the better):
It's helpful if you already know medical massage, trigger point therapy, or deep tissue. And by deep tissue, I mean how to go deep without working too hard or causing discomfort to your client. If you know Neuromuscular or medical massage protocols already, you're ahead of the game. Same if you can spot a common trigger point by its referral pattern. If you don't even know what a trigger point is, all hope is not lost; we're willing to teach you, but that previous paragraph is going to apply to you even more. Ideally, you have your own established clientele, but if you're just starting out or you're not running at your peak due to the sagging economy, we understand clients don't just show up and knock on your door. We are going to expect you to work that much harder, though--just like we will. If you're bilingual, that will help you a lot.

What we don't want:
We don't want a drama queen (or king) who repeatedly makes bad life choices that are then blamed on everybody else. We don't want someone who is hostile, skeptical, or even nonchalant toward chiropractic. We don't want someone who thinks massage therapy is the answer to everything, like we don't think chiropractic is the answer to everything. We don't want someone who is late, or regularly can't do their job (the reasoning doesn't matter). We don't want someone who doesn't convey a picture of decent health; don't smoke or gorge yourself on McDonald's. Obviously someone unprofessional is out; strange comments, smells, etc. Bad. Just don't go there. We don't want someone who is going to expect us to supply you with all your clientele without actively going and getting your own. And we certainly don't want someone who will steal clientele or encourage them to come to another place for things we provide. Someone who falsifies notes is also gone. And please don't bring your kids unless they're getting treated, after which they leave with a responsible adult. No rumor mills, no pot-stirrers, you get the idea.

Here is your bill of rights, MTs:
1) We will not say we're hiring when we're really not. Putting up a "Help Wanted" sign just to get free massage is not cool. If we say we have a position available, we really do.
2) We will not make you give a ton of long freebie "interview" massages during the interview process. We'll bring you in for an in-person interview. We'll then move on to (or we'll ask you back for) a demo massage where we might ask you to work a certain area, do a certain protocol, or present you with a certain complaint scenario and have you do what you would do to alleviate it. The first massage will last at least 15 minutes but no more than 30; a second demo massage is possible, but rare.
3) The contract we'll present you with will be straight-forward and fair. There are no excessive non-competes, product sales quotas, or laundry sidework. (Even if the contract contains a non-compete, it's not going to be over the top like some I've seen.)
4) We're not going to play both sides of the W-2 vs IC fence. You're an IC. This actually works out to your advantage, as it did for me, because it opens up a whole can of goodies you can now write off your taxes. I'm not a CPA; seek a good one! As an IC, you set your schedule and how you do things. We're not a spa and I'm not going to shove "our signature massage" down your throat. Please note that we're going to refer our patients to you for specific work, and we expect that you'll do that work effectively, without hurting the patient. As former full-time (and current, actively-licensed) MTs ourselves, we'll probably eventually show you some cool moves that might help you, or moves/sequences we might've developed over the years, but in the end it's all you. We do have hours of operation, and we have times that a patient is likely to be scheduled for a massage. We won't make you show up, but it's to your advantage to do so; if you're not, we'll find someone who is. No hard feelings; it's just business.
5) You have the right to corral a misbehaving patient or to refuse service altogether. If a client is taking the conversation in a direction you're not comfortable with, steer them back into benign territory, or give them a warning, if need be. You can terminate the massage right then, and you can also refuse to work on them ever again. If someone acts like a jackhole, we're behind you. If they demean you or treat you with disrespect, we probably don't want them in our office around us, either.
6) Your pay rate will be set and you'll be paid on a regular schedule. I'm not going to make you wait until the insurance check comes back, because that could be a while. Sometimes, they don't pay at all. I'm not going to put you through that; you get paid every week or every 2 weeks. I'm also not going to make you take the brunt on some obnoxious discount I decided on and you had no control over. The fact is, you still spent the same quality time, gave the same great massage, and spent a whole ton of core energy doing so; I'm not going to make you take the discount when you provided the same work as regular price.

That's what I can think of for now. I'm sure there will be more. I'm full of tough love. It might be tough, but it is love. Y'all come?

Woke up this morning

And after 3 months of bustin' our butts getting everything ready, we had an inklin' to go on home. So we're drivin' down I-35E through rush hour one last time, as the sun hangs low at 3 or 4 o'clock in the evenin'.

The sun's going down and I'm clench-gripped and singing. We wind ourselves down the road, the General Blender playlist cued up on the Ipod, settlin' in for that long, long haul down the road back home.

And the brakelights continue ahead of us, mingling with the rest of the traffic, always traffic, too much traffic, and it never stops. All of a sudden I flash back to having been hit from the side. Four or 5 times in the last 9 years, yes, 9 years I've spent here in this rat-race hell-hole, 9 years wasted bathed in cortisol, 9 years with a defensive snake coiled around me in protection.

And now I'm gonna let it all deflate, dissipate, dissolve into the clean air. I say, so long, Dallas. So long, brazenly-pushy sales associates who don't even bother hiding their exclusive quest for money anymore. So long, tailgaiting BMW or snotty Mercedes all over the road. So long, Lexus SUV up on Legacy and Lebanon who arrived at the 4-way stop sign last and attempts to go first. So long, miserable ppl in line at Chipotle who have it all and yet hate their lives. So long, irresponsible 80-hour-a-week-working parents who use money and electronics as babysitters for their orphaned children in their ultimate quest to make the third mortgage on a 5,500 sq ft McMansion. So long developers who turn this quiet grassland with mature trees into monotonous brick stripmalls who can't be bothered to put up lights for Christmas. So long utopian Nazis strangling yourselves in petty ordinances. So long lego pad lawns that reek of chemicals. So long asshole single people who tailgate me in the HOV lane because you think you've got one up on everyone else. So long crazy people who elect to sit in rush hour traffic for 2 hours each way because you work in towntown Dallas but live in once-peaceful Prosper or Celina to "get away from it all". Well now I'm finally getting away from you.

Woke up this mornin', turned my engine on. Mama always said we'd eventually get there sometime. It's a chance in a million, gotta make it shine, leave these crazy people with the full moon in their eyes.

Settle in for that long, long haul down the road back home.

Reward/Brownie Points of Contention

It's about time I snapped out of my utopian love affair with my new city of residence for a while, because as much as I'm not sick of it, you might be, so I figured it's time for a good rant. Haven't had one of those in almost two months, which means we're at least a month and 3 1/2 weeks overdue.

Come, children, let's shift our crosshairs to Facebook and its affiliated games. How coincidentally timely, since the day after tomorrow marks my Facebook account's 1-year anniversary (although I'll be--where else?--D-F'king-W and thus I won't get to conjure up any posts that day).

Facebook and Zynga, to name a couple, have not had a good PR month...or year. Their secret's out about their scammy advertisers and their privacy-breaching antics (behind peoples' backs and without their knowledge, no less), not to mention the perpetuation of things like ID theft, viruses, and another spam outlet. One could reasonably argue that a couple of these items are inevitable and perhaps impossible to prevent. But some of these things, Facebook allowed, encouraged, or downright instigated themselves, and this is not cool. It doesn't sit with with me, and apparently I'm not alone.

Let's start with Facebook itself. It's cludgy. It's slow. They could give two shits about your privacy (but they don't). But what the hell; after all, none of us care about privacy, right? I mean, that's what the founder actually told the press a few months back. And he's right--I mean, houses don't even come with curtains anymo--oh wait, they do? Still? People still want privacy? Dude, that is so 2006, but what-evar.

Being able to vote an ad up or down is cool, but sometimes ads you voted down resurface later. The "Get an MS in Biotechnology ad" that I voted down on the grounds that it was offensive to me (it actually is, because I don't think we need to be playing Goddess, but that's another post for another time) actually resurfaced after a time. You would think that with all the data they're storing on your hard drive that they would be able to keep track of things like that.

And spam. Madre de dios, it's starting to become an unattended, un-babysat Yahoo newsgroup circa 2003. I'm starting to get messages in my personal inbox from people who are not even on my list with no text in the body but a simple TinyUrl for a YouTube clip. Dude, I don't know who the f*ck you are or what the f*ck you're trying to send me. For all I know it's some sick jackhole getting his rocks off by drowning hamsters or something. And Facebook groups I'm not even a frigging member of send me announcements of events happening in frigging Kansas. I've only been to Kansas twice, and both times were for weekend seminar classes, and trust me, if I had any say in the location, it would not have been held in Kansas. As Constitutional Party as I am, and as much as I like political Tea Parties, I'm not coming to yours. I'm Texan, so I barely have any reason to leave the state.

Now let's turn to page Bash-the-games. I play three of them. Last week it was just two, which means (for the math whizzes) that I recently started playing a new one. I know it seems a little off to be bitching about games when I'm only adding more to my list, but hey, it's my blog. However, two of them in particular (Mafia Wars and Sorority Life) are more-than-slightly-annoying on multiple levels. First off, NO, I'm not going to pester my entire Friends List with invites to join my mafia or sorority. There are Facebook groups devoted to the bashing of these game requests, and many of my friends (and myself) have joined them, basically indicating that they don't wish to receive invites. I can't blame them. Facebook does indeed pester its users for every little thing ("So-and-so answered a question about you! Click here to see what they said", "So-and-so sent you a heart using iHeart! Click here to send one back", "So-and-so fought you in Lame-fantasy-game-you've-never-played! Click here to fight back!") See what I mean? And the onus is on you, the user, to turn all that shit off. Facebook--and its games--nag worse than a hormonal woman (I should know).

The nagging doesn't stop there. When you actually start playing the games (I couldn't resist some, and I don't regret signing up to play them), you can't do a job in Mafia Wars or organize an event in Sorority Life without stupid pop-up windows coming up telling you to send gifts to friends or recruit fellow sisters to join your house. Or a lost puppy or cute guy on the sidewalk. Or an extra goodie in your shopping bag. It's not like I don't want to share gifts/extras/goodies/loot with friends, but the constant hassling to do so gets a little old. Just let me play the damn game already. I'll give stuff to my friends and recruit fellow members when I'm damn good and ready.

And...yeah.

It ain't easy being green

Father forgive me, for I have sinned. And I am going straight to hell, after I am lynched by the Sierra Club and Greenpeace. Because for as environmentally conscious as I try to be, and as small an environmental footprint as I try to leave, I have to admit that we fell out of the recycling habit when it came time to clean our newly-vacated house and it felt somewhat...liberating. Yes, my own red-blooded and red-necked American laziness went straight into some Dallas-area county landfill, although it may soften the blow a bit for you to know that I was, in fact, hit with a twinge of earthly guilt with every recyclable thing I put into a trash bag.

It's a strange combination, really--guilt and liberation. I once thought they were mutually exclusive, but no more. You see, the liberation came from the realization that recycling programs of the last 2 decades have made me feel like even more of a pack-rat than I already am (and this is not good or healthy). Shame was socially engineered into my psyche should I ever throw away anything that could have been reduced, reused, or recycled.

I must say, the feeling of liberation came as a surprise to me. With that guilt and shame, I also felt relief because no longer did I have to sit and sort things and deal with them separately; I could toss them all into one big pile that went into one (or twenty) great big bag(s) and be done with it. It didn't matter where it went, because the point is, I am free of it now. It's no longer cluttering my space.

I'm sort of off the hook for now because, in 2010, my apartment complex does not even have a recycling program (and I'm starting to wonder if our city does either), so it's not even really an option for me. Nope, the only way I can clear my Mother Earth conscience is getting some kind of hybrid or smart car and tooling around in that. One word: hellno. I'll drive around my big solid stainless-steel pickup truck, knowing I can be taken seriously and that I will make it to my destination alive. No biodiesel for me, thanks. In fact, I moved out of an area heavily strangled by EPA controls over reformulated gasoline and my gas mileage actually (significantly) went up. And guess what? Our air is still great, and we don't even have draconian EPA tentacles shoved into our orifices. Meanwhile, my former city sits in a toilet bowl with a brown toilet ring just on the atmospheric side of the horizon, shoving the hypothetical, socialist-influenced Green Movement into everyone else's orifices. Lucky them.

My point is, I just find it interesting that a city with so much emphasis on the environment is actually one of the most toxic places in which I have ever lived, while another city who couldn't give a rat's ass about anything environmental ("green" is a color here, not a faddish campaign buzzword) is still one of the cleanest places I have ever seen. The paradox is more than amusing.

I still do wish I could recycle something, and I do wish my truck got slightly better gas mileage (let's all turn to the oil companies who have been buying up all the more efficient technology), but until then, does a blog count as a confessional?