Ooooh! Very, very cool: Indeed.com Just what this disillusioned cog needs in her Christmas stocking this year.

Monster, beware!

(via John Battelle’s Searchblog)

I really did. It started when I turned on my cell phone as I was leaving the house, only to discover a frantic message from The Big Cheese, left about 11:30 on Friday morning (just as I was screaming out of my silly offsite meeting):

“Blah, blah, blah. Urgent! Blah, blah. Call me as soon as you get this!”

Um. Hmmm. I know. 7am on Monday generally doesn’t qualify as a timely response in a case like this.

So I made my way into the city, mulling over how best to handle The Big Cheese. I carefully wove my way through the piles of leaves and leaf sludge that have taken over most of our lovely residential streets (the rant about leaf pickup will be reserved for another time - that’s a doozy!), thinking, “I, uh, had a medical emergency… uh, and forgot that I turned my phone off.” Nope. Can’t pull that off with a straight face.

I parked at the train and found my way to the platform, hugely overcrowded as the 7:10 hadn’t yet shown up, wondering if I should just play stupid, ” Good morning, Boss. That meeting on Friday was a really good one. When will you have time for a briefing on it?”

Nope. That’s just sucking up in the extreme.
(more…)

I was living and working in CT back in September of 2001. I’ve spent my whole career in and around the travel industry, having come from an airline family, but was deep in the throes of negotiating an offer from a Wall St. insurance carrier. I hated the CT job and was thrilled at the prospect of getting out. Like so many people, I remember the weather that morning - it was spectacular.

We had been haggling over terms for a month or so and I got an e-mail from the HR manager on the evening of 9/10, promising that she would call the next day. Of course she didn’t

Since negotiations were going well, I had started house-hunting in SO/Maplewood - and had arranged with a friend to have him meet my RE agent at a house I was seriously considering, so I could get a second opinion. Just before 9 that morning, he called me to say he was at the house and had I heard that a plane had just flown into the WTC?

I had just gotten into the office and was booting my computer. I went directly to CNN’s site and saw a photo of the first plane going in. CNN must have gotten immediately overloaded because the page didn’t even finish loading. I have a very clear memory of looking at that frozen image and just being dumbfounded.

I heard about the second plane from a radio in another office and then we all realized that there was a TV in the gym in the basement of our building. It finally hit me for real when they announced the hit on the Pentagon.

I went home about noon and fielded phone calls from family out west who knew I had been interviewing in the city. Driving up I-95, away from the city, I watched a string of fire trucks and ambulances scream towards the city from as far out as Fairfield. The silence in the skies was surreal.

I slept in front of the TV for the next three days.

I didn’t know anyone in either of the towers. I was horrified as we all were to watch them fall. In my airline career, I’ve probably flown as much as anyone. I just kept thinking about the people on those planes, looking out of the windows and realizing what was about to happen.

I took the job. I bought a house. I started in the middle of October and the fires were still burning. I still look up every time a plane flies low over the city.

I know, I know. It’s been too quiet here at OSW for the last week or so. Well, as of Tuesday, the party ended and Western Medicine sent me back to the Salt Mine.

Two months away from the Salt Mine was enough to completely convince me that I am done with Corporate America. If that wasn’t enough, three days back was enough to seal the deal. It’s pretty amazing just how quickly the hallowed halls of capitalism can lose their appeal. OneWoman will be moving on just as soon as a change can be arranged.

In the meantime, updates here will likely be weekly, rather than daily.