I've tied myself to this medium for a couple of reasons after losing my day job, most specifically because of the opportunities I have been able to find here. From job interviews to how to dress for job interviews to where to buy what you need to buy to wear on job interviews - well, that could go on forever if I allowed it.
The biggest challenge is to separate hyperbole from fact. For instance, one of my early "interviews" was for a company which wooed me into coming in, telling me that my qualifications were ideally suited for an opportunity which would only be open for a short time and that I needed to come in at my earliest convenience at a scheduled time for further consideration. I rushed over (actually it was a few days later), arriving early enough to score a Geocache and to watch as several other people who were ideally suited for an opportunity which would only be open for a short time. It wound up being a mass indoctrination where about 15 of us sat in a room and were given a ninety minute presentation about some insurance company I have never heard of attempting to entice me into giving up six and a half days a week cold call selling life insurance.
I obtained several 'gems' from that meeting - For one was the image of a young woman at the reception desk of the insurance company lip synching to Beatles songs which were popular when her mother wasn't even a gleam in the eye of her grandmother. I borrowed the line and put it into a book I was writing at the time. I also found out that the life insurance company I had never heard about before was under the corporate umbrella of a larger company which seemed to specialize in recruiting agents for other life insurance companies I had never heard of before.
The parent company actually sent me more, similarly worded letters from some of those other unheard of companies for at least a month and a half afterwards. I would almost term it as persistence of advertising. It seems to happen a lot on the web, especially when the web is being used as a form of recreation.
The other half and I have a teenager in the house who is about to graduate from High School. Something the boy needs is transportation so that he can get a job and/or the Junior College less than 5 miles down the road. I spent some time on a website (Cars.com) to see what was available at a moderate price (less than $2,000) to get him back and forth. The day after I made my initial search, I started seeing advertisements from that website while I was on Facebook or getting roundly beaten on Words With Friends, as well as on a few other places where I would not have thought of seeing such well-placed ads.
Now, I'm not ignorant as to how those ads got there, nor am I going to begrudge Facebook or Words... or Yahoo their revenue for providing my entertainment. In fact, I find it somewhat amusing. We ended up retiring the other half's car, gave it a mechanical going over and passing it on to the teenager, doing so after finding a sweetheart deal from a local dealer - and I'll be darned if ads for similar cars didn't start showing up on my recreational pages almost immediately. Same goes for a pedal-powered piece of machinery I'm contemplating purchasing to add to the fleet... and of course the manufacturer of the computer I'm using wanted me to update almost from the moment I put the thing into use more than three years ago.
Oh well... people gotta live, somehow.
On the other hand, I may just find the pervasiveness useful to my own
Be Seeing You!
bdharrell
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