space junk

ok my mellow period is over….

in the last three weeks, i’ve been a mad dog, a gentle companion, and a flu-ridden lump of complacence. I’ve watched the iranian comi/tragedy on twitter, and been rained on more than i care to admit to. i’ve had several interviews, been scrutinized, questioned, tested, flattered, bs’ed, and made several people laugh. my spam filter has almost died from exhaustion.

time is up.

Neda is immortalized, Farrah Fawcett is gone, Michael Jackson is going, Iran is being born again, and we are stymied… I am talking transformation here, guys…this summer is going to be the summer of too much, if nothing else. Too much blood, too much rain, too much stupidity, too much waste, too much old business that won’t go away:

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)–Bank of America Corp. (BAC) is facing a federal lawsuit filed Thursday in New York, which claims that the bank is discriminating against the female brokers from Merrill Lynch because on average they were offered lower retention packages than white male brokers.

The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, was filed by Jaime Goodman, a legacy Merrill Lynch broker who had been with the firm for 16 years before it was acquired by Bank of America on Jan. 1.

Goodman contends that women brokers were typically eligible for lower retention bonuses offered by Bank of America following the acquisition because the company based the bonuses on production. Goodman claims that because of gender discrimination at Merrill, particularly the practice of giving wealthier clients to male brokers, women have lower production than men.

Now, I was working for Merrill until January, and there were a lot of non-american women in the IT departments….hmmm…were the powers thinking that women in IT are less likely to be upstarts, those especially from countries where women are still (still) considered second-class were even less likely to give lip? is this one reason for the volume of outsourcing especially to female workers in IT? Are Iranian women proving to be the most brave, the most ethically and intellectually superior members of out human race right now?

I had a subordinate who was a non-american non-iranian female, and when i was her boss, she kissed my a**. i trained her out of that, and taught her to be more appreciative of her natural intelligence, and respectful of her own voice. However, when things changed, and she became my peer (on a different project) she became truly herself, and applied her native cultural bias against females to me! so ….

do women from other countries carry the seeds of cultural prejudice against women into the workplace? you bet! do american women who have achieved position in the work field put up with this? no way! most have settled into (what I don’t know). Now, Jamie Goodman has credentials…she is (was?) First Vice President-Investments, Global Wealth Management, and looks pretty serious to me…I’d bet she wins her lawsuit…

On another note, why am I getting spammed into the next century? is it possible that there are still enough boobs out there who answer these things, marketing being the whore of the consumer corpse? who are these people? is anyone really making money with “Medical Billing and Coding” ? ?

I’m getting pissed again, but since i’m still getting over the flu, I’m not sure I’m making any sense.