Debate Lesson: Be Careful How You Refer to Your Opponent

It was inevitable that some­one would take this moment in the last night’s Pres­i­den­tial debate, when John McCain sounded like my grand­mother used to sound as he berated Barack Obama*:

and do what peo­ple often do with an epi­thet these days, which is to wear it as a badge of honour:

Which led to the inevitable T-Shirt:

Amaz­ing how the Inter­nets let you respond that fast. Kind of changes the rules, doesn’t it?

*She also liked to scold my father and the rest of us by say­ing: “You mon­key!” when we did some­thing she didn’t like, like arriv­ing 15 min­utes later than she thought we should from a car trip from Bal­ti­more to Philadelphia.

Fear and Loathing on Main Street

It’s no secret that I’ve been search­ing for a job (or a con­tract, I’m not picky at the moment) for a while now. I’ve had lots of first inter­views, nearly as many sec­ond inter­views, and even a few third inter­views. Noth­ing has con­nected yet. For one rea­son or another, the oppor­tu­nity has not borne fruit.  Up until now, I was expect­ing it to be just a mat­ter of time, patience and per­se­ver­ance. This morn­ing, I’m not so sure.

Up until now, I thought that the dis­as­trous down­ward mar­ket spi­ral in the US (and now in Asia and Europe) wouldn’t have a direct impact on us, at least not for a while, and that we would be able to get to safety before the shock wave hit the Cana­dian econ­omy. How­ever, this morn­ing I got an email from a com­pany I was sup­posed to be inter­view­ing with this after­noon. They are US-based com­pany, so that should be a clue. They can­celed the inter­view, and the rea­son is that they are sus­pend­ing all new con­tracts until fur­ther notice.  So it’s been a rough day, as Pam also got word that she didn’t get a con­tract that she was bid­ding on.

While I’m try­ing not to dwell on doom and gloom sce­nar­ios, I have to admit that I’m get­ting pretty ner­vous, not want­ing to be pound­ing the pave­ment for job in a reces­sion with high unem­ploy­ment after hav­ing been out of work for sev­eral months already.  As some­one who always tries to antic­i­pate the worst (Hey, we left the US partly because I saw a melt-down like this on the hori­zon), I’m deter­mined to be real­is­tic and always look ahead, but some­times real­ism and pes­simism look awfully similar.