On the drive home from work today I passed a hillside where a few goats were grazing. Sometimes, the goats are out, and sometimes they’re not. I like seeing the goats. When I see them, I say (in my head) hello goats. Today, shortly after I passed, I tried to imagine the goats in the middle of San Francisco. I tried to write a line of poetry about goats stopping traffic on Van Ness. Hours later, while scrolling twitter, I come across a tweet from NPR, “You may have seen a viral video of goats running wild in San Francisco, which raises the question: How do goats fare in the big city? We asked a goat specialist to weigh in.” I had not seen a viral video and knew nothing about this story… which made my earlier thought experiment in poetry about goats on Van Ness feel odd in its coincidence.
Sandwiched between my drive home and my Twitter scrolling, I went to a bar where I had drinks and talked with a friend and then, when everyone left, had dinner. I wrote while I ate. I looked around the restaurant and had the strange sensation that I could choke out, pass out, or have a heart attack right there, and began to wonder, what if this is the last thing that I see? What if these people, these strangers are my last vision here on earth? It was morbid to be sure, and in keeping with my personality, I worried that by dying in the restaurant, I might inconvenience others. The poor waitstaff who might have to clean up the puddle of being that dead me becomes. The lovely people eating whose dinner is interrupted by such unpleasantness as someone gripping their chest or gasping for air as everything goes black. I’m sure it happens from time to time. It reminded me of the one and only rodeo that I went to. A rider died in the arena in front of everyone – it was the ride (bucking bronco) that, had he succeeded, would have won a free steak dinner for one lucky family. We all hope to pass quietly and privately. What an awful spectacle a public death could be. I didn’t die in the restaurant and only felt slightly morbid for playing with the idea. I walked to my car under a clear sky and unseasonably warm temperatures.
What pulled me out of such morose thinking was an email job rejection I had received. Less than 24 hours earlier, I had applied for a director of community investments position with a fortune 500 company. By 5 pm, I had my rejection in hand. I don’t apply for positions unless I feel I have a reasonable shot of succeeding in the job. I get plenty of rejections, but this felt quick. I can’t rule out that I had some major typo in my application, and I’m willing to own “user error.” What bothered me was the speed in which I was rejected. Something makes me doubt that this was a human decision (more and more companies use AI to screen candidates). Something about this felt automated. And on the one hand that’s fine – that’s the way of the world, but on the other, it feels like another capitalistic slap in the face. Candidates put time and effort into their applications (at least I do) only to be turned away by some unthinking and mechanistic screening tool. What’s worse, if I remember, this was one of those systems that asks you to upload your resume and then asks you to enter all of the information on their form. I suppose I expect or hope that recruiters would put similar time and effort into the decision making process. I’m not sure my application made it on to anyone’s desk… and I’m qualified enough for this position that it should have – which simply reinforces my belief/suspicion that in their efforts to cut costs and be efficient (by using AI screening in HR) corporate America can be soulless and not very people-centric.
I’m trying to up my game and apply to more jobs than I’ve been applying to. For me, increasing my effort means a few a week as opposed to one every two or three weeks. Not dying in a bar interfered with submitting applications. I suppose dying in a bar would have equally hampered the efforts. All of it feels pretty random: AI rejections, visions of bar stool curtain calls, goats on the Van Ness… Tomorrow I get to do it all again.