Continuing Spanish Infamy
Do you remember my rant last month about the Spanish job market? Well, it hit some sort of nerve because it's being fowarded around in an email with an attached analysis. I kid you not. Someone copied my post, analyzed it in Spanish and sent it off to a bunch of their coworkers who've sent off to groups of people in the high-tech industry like Telefonica, Lucent, Ericsson, and more. How do I know this? Well, I got an email from an old coworker of mine who got forwarded it by our mutal boss... "Some people never change..." it said. Oof.
Blogs and real world colide yet again.
Why that post had such an effect to be zipped around Madrid and maybe Spain like this I have NO idea. I still get daily hits on the page a month later. Think about it. Have any of YOUR blog posts been put into emails and come way of you by old coworkers via total strangers? It's not like I'm anyone special or the sentiment that I expressed in my email is anything new or particularly educated or insightful... And it wasn't written in the New York times, just on my weblog. Soooo weird.
I wonder if weblogs are at this weird turning point that television was in the 50s when people took everything that was said on television as fact? Seriously - before just recently, to have a popular web site that was highly ranked on Google, you needed to be a major news corporation or some hot-shot funded dot-com startup. But now any shmoe like me can rant and it has this big effect. Look. Imagine this: I'm this guy. Greying and getting fat. Sitting in a small one bedroom apartment in not-particularly-special corner of Madrid. Typing on my 3 year old laptop. In my shorts. I work in a non-particularly-special job doing not-particuarly-special work. There is nothing about my words that should carry any real weight... are you getting the picture?
I see more troubles lying ahead. This email HAS to arrive in my current office at on point or another, and we'll see what sort of ruckus it makes. I'm not going to change how I write here because of this, but this sort of thing is nutty. It's a WEBLOG people. I rant. You read. (If you want to...). Nothing more than that. Get it?
While we're on the subject of Spain again, I was in the travel agency today buying train tickets for my Mother-in-law who goes home on the weekends after taking care of Alex during the week for us. I had to wait 30 minutes in line because of all the people making their vacation plans. Semana Santa - Easter Holy Week - is in a couple weeks and everyone is going on vacation. The guy behind the counter was telling the couple in front of me about the deals he had. It's very late, he said, "Rome is booked. So is Athens. Morrocco has spots. Paris. But Tenerife is booked. Hmmm... " All these vacation spots were taken already - when I say "everyone" goes on vacation, I'm not kidding.
Life in another country continues. Dave quoted someone today, "more people see themselves as citizens of the world not of any specific country." Yeah. Right. These are the people who are sitting at home thinking everyone else in the world is just like them. I can tell you right now that feeling goes away REALLY quickly when you're the foreigner.
More to come on this subject, I'm sure.
-Russ