If it is any comfort, our German au pairs have complained about the American system, so we might be worse?
I’d actually say the American system is decent, just expensive. It works well if you can pay for it. Which is a different sort of societal problem.
Argh! I have been keeping an eye on the LEGO Mighty Bowser set at Best Buy, priced $257.99 or something close to that, for a while as I wanted to pick it up for our older kid’s birthday, and I was saving up rewards to discount it. I had enough for $115 off, plus another $10 certificate which expires this weekend.
I was going to get it last Monday, but saw that if I pre-ordered Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which I was going to purchase in any case, I would get a $10 gift card when I picked it up and with it releasing today, I figured I would go ahead and wait for the extra $10 off. Checked my account yesterday and more of my points got registered, so I am up to a $130 off, plus the other $20 from certificate and gift card.
So, naturally, it is sold out. And the price was reduced to $215.99. 
It is 8:30 Tuesday night my time right now. I just finished grading all of my remaining assignments for my students before their final exams for the semester. Their finals in my class are open notes/book available to them online and due Thursday at noon. I have the remainder of tonight, all day tomorrow, and Thursday morning with no work to do except occasionally check my email for student questions/complaints. It is a glorious feeling.
Hey, do you wanna know who managed to get their Paypal account hacked today?
So that was my favourite way to spend an hour, followed by hours of trying to get through a password manager.
Crap, I should change my password here as well… argh…
(I was lucky: there were no charges to my Paypal account. I joked that whoever it was logged in, saw the state of my financials, sent me $10 in sympathy, and then logged back out).
So sorry to hear that. It is always a shock when an account gets hacked. More so if it is an important one or one involved with finances 
. Sounds like you caught it in time though 
.
I’ve been having a wonderful holiday in Zanzibar for my first wedding anniversary. The place is beautiful, the history amazingly interesting and it’s relaxed and friendly. So far so good. Last night though a really bad case of food poisoning has kicked off and I’m no longer in paradise. I’ve not had this in many years and never this bad. Oh gosh I feel bad 
I’m trying to nerve myself up to biting the bullet and trying to find a new job. I’ve been looking for ways to shuffle sideways (back into teaching, or at least into a department remotely relevant to my skills and interests) and while my boss is supportive, senior management have other ideas.
OTOH quitting a full-time, permanent job to move (back) into full-time teaching is a big step and I don’t know what it’d be like teaching here. I’d prefer to start with part-time teaching, but that’s financially dangerous, unless there’s a sudden and inexplicable surge of interest in my RPG material.
Ack, food poisoning can be diabolical… I hope it winds up being more towards the less-awful end of the scale than the alternative.
I did 6 low effort applications last night.
I refuse to write fan fiction about me in the job (a cover letter) and that might be hurting my chances.
I’ve generally avoided engaging with the “AIs” but I was wondering yesterday if one of them could do a half decent job at a cover letter
Yes. It’s pretty good for this type of thing
Same here. I refuse to spend extra time on a job application that will unlikely give me an interview even if I do spend the extra time. Also the shit you’re supposed to write in them is awful. Fan fic is an excellent description
Now there’s an idea… I hate writing cover letters
Who does cover letters these days? I thought those were gone?
I had to send stuff to my insurance recently and needed an accompanying note with some information. I basically wrote a paragraph and told chatGPT to please make it nice and it did.
(I also had it write unit tests for me today at which it did a pretty good job, precisely because it lacks the project context around the methods I gave it → obviously a lot of manual refinement was necessary on my part but as I had a hard time concentrating we did a better job together than I would have on my own.)
As somebody actively applying to jobs: almost everyone requests a cover letter.
Now, I have gotten a sum total of zero responses despite custom writing each letter, so maybe it’s a trap? Like, anyone who bothers to write one is immediately removed from consideration?
From the other side of recruitment process, applications without cover letters normally get a harsher deal. Taking the time to write a cover letter normally shows the candidate is actually interested in the role, rather than just a speculative application.
My partner says when he gets an application with a cover letter it is irrelevant unless it is incredibly good or bad. The CV and the profile is more important and that it fits with the role the person applies to. But that may just be him. It might also be that HR filters by cover letter before he ever gets anything.
“what are they supposed to write into that letter that they’d like a job?”
When I was unemployed, a Job centre employee suggested I added the entire job specification to the cover letter in white, size 0.0000001 font in case the application was pre read by a computer looking for key words.
Sounds like nonsense to me.
If you’ve written something in white in that post, size 0.00000001 then I salute you
Dammit