Living ~400lbs

… and believe me I am still alive

Work

  • Retirement

    My last job was at Amazon, as a QA Engineer. “It was fine until it wasn’t” is one summary. “It was a good distraction from the stress of my dad’s failing health so I could keep balance, but fell apart after other losses and health crap that made me not care about work much” is… Continue reading

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  • Halloween

    The company I’ve worked at for the last three years has parties for Halloween & trick-or-treating in the office. I’ve sometimes felt strange, in past years, to be the fat lady handing out candy.  (No cultural baggage there…!) This is the second company I’ve worked at to do the full-on trick-or-treating. Some years at the… Continue reading

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  • QOTD

    The National Federation of Independent Businesses, National Retail Federation and National Restaurant Association all operate on the premise that none of their workers will ever be their customers. Customers, they assume, are magical creatures who come from a world in which no one works in a store, or a restaurant, or manufacturing, or the service… Continue reading

  • QOTD: USian Healthcare

    From currently unemployed teacher Diana Wagman, writing in the LA Times: Some 700,000 Americans every year declare bankruptcy because of medical bills. The number in Japan? Zero. The number in Germany? Zero. And the kicker?  It could be worse. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, my new insurance company can’t deny me because I had… Continue reading

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  • Job requirements

    “Put this all together and it means the IRS needs tens of thousands of people who are (a) smart, (b) willing to do really tedious work, (c) for moderate wages, (d) while working for a soul-crushing bureaucracy, and (e) being loathed by all right-thinking people. Does this sound to you like a recipe for disaster?… Continue reading

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  • “Big data” and hiring

    Having job-hunted recently I found this article in The Economist interesting: Evolv mines mountains of data. If a client operates call centres, for example, Evolv keeps daily tabs on such things as how long each employee takes to answer a customer’s query. It then relates actual performance to traits that were visible during recruitment. Some… Continue reading

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  • Thankful Thursday

    [An occasional exercise in gratitude.] It’s Thursday.  I made it to Thursday. Monday I took 5 hours out of my day for a training class on interviews (with a special focus on behavioral interviewing, joy) followed by working late. Then my carpool buddy and I drove to the 1 post office still open so he could drop… Continue reading

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  • Quotes: Work

    Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.  — Dorothy L. Sayers Work is the curse of the drinking classes. — Oscar Wilde If you don’t want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you… Continue reading

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  • Weight Talk, Business Travel Edition

    I’ve been working with people in the UK and German offices of the company I work at since I started.  Now that I’m a manager, my boss mentioned that a trip to Germany for training may be in the works. …which would mean flying while 400lbs. In the interest of being diplomatic, I expressed interest… Continue reading

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  • International Women’s Day

    Happy International Women’s Day.  You might want to check out the free album Talis Kimberley created for International Women’s Day: On Thursday I saw someone tweet that she’d like to celebrate International Women’s Day but she’ll be busy with “precarious part-time work”, housework, and child care. This started me thinking.  International Women’s Day isn’t all that big… Continue reading

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  • Thankful Thursday

    [An occasional exercise in gratitude] It’s Thursday and I’m thankful for…. I belong to a church where women wearing pants to church is common.  As are women in leadership.  1-year anniversary at work.  My signing bonus is now all mine, instead of something I have to pay back if I leave.  Also I get another week’s vacation… Continue reading

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  • What is a job for a morbidly obese woman?

    This showed up as one of the search terms used to get to my blog: what is a job for a morbidly obese woman? Let’s see…”morbid obesity” is usually defined these days as having a BMI value of 40 or higher.    The BMI Project includes photos of multiple folks who are, officially, morbidly obese. So, what… Continue reading

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  • Things to Read

    The first thing that makes me wonder about the supposed “skill gap” is that, when pressed for more evidence, roughly 10% of employers admit that the problem is really that the candidates they want won’t accept the positions at the wage level being offered. That’s not a skill shortage, it’s simply being unwilling to pay… Continue reading

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  • Things to read

    From Jezebel’s Work-Life Balance Isn’t Just for Moms: The basic point of all of this is that whether you have kids, have a partner but no kids, or are living alone, working too much sucks. It’s no way to live, and we’re not dummies. So at some point, most of us realize that we’d rather do… Continue reading

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  • Five Things Makes a Post

    New job! I have a new job.  The place I was temping hired me in late December.  I’m not doing exactly the same job, which is both “new and scary” and “cool and interesting”.   It’s also been interesting to note that the things I was looking forward to ending with the contract (the commute,… Continue reading

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  • Office Breakfast

    The man of the house had picked up a variety pack of instant oatmeal for a trip.  We didn’t eat it then.  Monday I brought it into the office with me. 2 packets in a coffee cup + hot water = hot breakfast.   I don’t eat it every day, but when I was too… Continue reading

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  • QOTD: Nutrition, exercise, and sleep

    It’s a stressful time in my household. Both I and the man of the house have temp gigs after months of unemployment.  A relative is ill, needs to move to an assisted living situation, and I’m organizing most of it.   The to-do list is long and getting longer. But I need to take care… Continue reading

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About Me

Former software tester, now retired heart patient having fun and working on building endurance and strength. See also About page.

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