There’s been plenty of press lately about “job creators,” which, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is a made-up media code phrase for “rich white guys who don’t want to pay taxes so let’s keep lowering their taxes why don’t we?”

Say what you like about rich white guys, taxation levels, and what have you, but could we please please please PLEASE stop kissing rich people’s asses in this country? Rich people are no different from you or me, except they figured out how to fleece other people and then hang on to their ill-gotten gains, whereas you and me can’t be bothered building wealth because big corporations (and rich people) keep offering us up Blu-Ray DVDs and CD Box Sets of our favorite bands.

Also, please note that these rich white guys (aka, the “Mitt Romney set”)  may be “job creators” in that they might use their millions to start a business, but no business survives unless the real job creators show up. For those of you who skipped the insightful classes at the Harvard Business school, this constituency is called customers, and usually a business needs a metric fuck-ton of them in order to keep the employees ummmm employed.

I mention this only because I recently spent a year working at a startup funded by a high net-worth individual who rolled the entrepreneurial dice but it all crapped out because the idea didn’t attract actual customers. So instead of continuing to fund this pie-in-the-sky dream, he decided to shut everything down and lay everyone off with 2 weeks notice.

From job creator to layoff creator in one short year, all because the simplest of business precepts wasn’t adhered to. See, they’re not all that smart, or worthy of our worship.

Hey! You! Yeah, you, company that does [whatever webpage/tool/thing]!

Look, I realize you’ve got a bad case of keeping up with the joneses over there, but seriously, stop. Just stop. If facebook makes a ui change, that doesn’t mean you have to. If G+ adds more whitespace, that doesn’t mean you should. Stop and think about two things. First, is your interface that problematic that you need to make a change? Second, is this change going to actually improve the user’s experience?

Note that the words “dated” and “theme” aren’t in there. If a good chunk of your users are saying something about it, then maybe you should take a look. If they’re not, then DON’T FUCK WITH IT. Sure, you can make a minor change to a rounded corner on an input box, or a slight color tweak here and there. Wholesale changes that significantly alter functionality or alter readability are probably not a good idea.

Last, when you do need (not want, need. You know, you’re “dying and need water to live” need, not “need a cheeseburger because it’s noon and I’m hungry” need) to make a change, do it as infrequently as possible. More than once every couple of years is downright brain dead. Do you hate your users or something? There’s no reason for that!

I realize I’m using your “free” service, but I’m paying by letting you have access to that data. You want me to keep using [x,y,z], then stop fucking my experience with your product up.

Dear client: I realize the customer is always right, in theory.

I also realize that part of my job as a consultant is to help you navigate the confusing ocean of business technology products out there – and to help you be more efficient and productive. But I can’t do it alone. You’ve hired me to provide a service and then refused to allow me to provide it.

My skills are better than yours.
I spend hundreds of hours learning these complex products, getting certified on them, scouring blogs and knowledgebases so that I can be as informed as possible when I make my best recommendations to you. I’m an honest person with integrity and professional pride, but I do my best to turn the other cheek when you comment that I must not know my stuff when we come across a new error message. Do you have any idea how many things can go wrong on an enterprise-level system? No one person knows everything.

It is software for business, with rules.
I get it that you want to just delete something. But the reason the system won’t let you is that this is accounting, and if you “just delete” that, you’re compromising your financial records. Neither I, nor the software, is trying to make your life more difficult here. The software not letting you do that is not the result of me trying to somehow cheat you or having lied to you about whether or not it was good software.

You’re not as smart as you think you are.
Nor is the guy you sat next to in first-class. Despite how new his iPad is, he is NOT more qualified than I am to tell you what you need, especially since I’ve been working with you for years. I’m sure his briefcase was spiffy-looking, but what he told you is actually impossible and you telling me it “should” work is not going to change that.

Your failure to understand the process does not equate to me not explaining it. You can’t ignore the whole discovery and project planning process and then be pissed off when things don’t look the way you imagined them. Although, that’s exactly what you’ve done.

Don’t think you’re not going to pay me for my time. I’ve got the contract and all the documentation to back me up – so write me a check and get the hell off my lawn.

Yup, one thing I don’t miss from corporate life is the 3-powerpoint-per-week minimum brain-cell-annihilation sessions that every company in North America thinks is mandatory to maintain profits.

I would say I’m sorry for being mean, but then I’d be lying. 90% of you suck at PowerPoint. Your slides have no power. Your talks have no point to them. Everything that you do is the antithesis of those two words, power and point:

* Don’t crowd your goddamn slides with 8 bullet points apiece, and 10 words per bullet point.

* Don’t fucking read your presentation word for word, you’re interrupting my reading experience, asshole!

* For most presentations, that old chestnut about “tell ‘em what you’re going to say, then say it, then tell ‘em what you said” is 1000000% overkill. As in killing me by stabbing me in the brain with a pencil.

* Please please please don’t weigh your slides down with internal acronyms, pointless secret project code names, banal redundancies (“update assessment”) and other quasi-militaristic bullshit whose only purpose is to cover up your lack of objectives and strategy.

* Also, please note that even the most brain-addled person in your audience (aka, me, after being subjected to your moron ray for 6+ minutes) can tell when you have NOTHING OF FUCKING VALUE TO ADD to the room, the company, or the human race. Stop repeating yourself in different ways to get your point across.

* Marketers, stop slapping hugely intricate “market architectures” or whatever the fuck you call those chutes-and-ladders diagrams onto slides. We can’t see them very well and they don’t make a lot of sense to anyone who gives a damn. Stop trying to cover up your job, which is basically “we trick people into buying our shit.”

* Coders and technology people, stop snickering, you’re next. Stop cramming 80 lines of stack trace onto a slide and then explaining it to us. Even the coders hate that shit. And no, we’re not impressed by your hacking skillz, I’d rather go drink now thanks.

Try this instead: limit yourself to one word or image per slide, then prepare an honest-to-god presentation around those slides. Use humor. Warmth. Connect with your audience. Ask them to jump in with questions. Present your ideas, don’t just read from the slides.

Please stop punishing us with your fucking slide decks.

One more thing, and then I’m done. If you’re going to insist on lowering humanity’s IQ one presentation at a time, then we insist that you provide coffee and high-quality baked goods.

[Ed. Note: Yesterday, I wrote a piece on people who don't use business cards. True to form Mr. Rumbelow has decided to give his counterpoint. Direct all correspondence to him. :)]

I’ve got a drawer – where, incidentally, I used to keep my underwear – that I have lovingly named my “conference crap” drawer. It is full to the brim of lanyards, conference passes, free pencils, flyers, bags, annoying keyrings, glossy programmes and yes, you guessed it, business cards.

When you meet somebody new at a conference, your conversation could go one of two ways:

• The Right Way “Hello, I’m Jamie”, “Hi, I’m Steve Jobs”, “Good to meet you Steve. Are you on Twitter?”, “Yes, I’m @stevejobsrules”, *Jamie gets out iPhone* “Great! I’m following you”, *Steve gets out iPhone* “Are you @jamierumbelow?”, “I am indeed!”, “I’m following you back”, “Fantastic”
• The Wrong Way “Hello, I’m Jamie”, “Hi, I’m Steve Jobs”, “Good to meet you Steve. Do you have an annoying sized and shaped piece of paper with your name, telephone number and some unfunny quip about your business or home life?”, “I do indeed. Here it is”, *Jamie fumbles for wallet, tries to find space for Mr. Jobs’ card. Eventually:* “Ahh, here we go.” *Receives card and fumbles more for his own card, by which point he has forgotten this mystery Moo.com-touting man’s name or purpose*

Business cards are easily lost, forgotten, left or burnt. Business cards take up space in my wallet, which, frankly, is filled to the brim with the money I’ve saved on not buying business cards.

Besides, by the time I get your business card, I’m likely to have forgotten you, your job, or what you look like. If it’s a decent conference (in a decent country, but I’ll save that for another time), I’ll be drinking anyway so my memory will be even more fuzzy. They all end up in my conference crap drawer, so they lose context and meaning.

If I am following you on Twitter, a week later when I get back home I’ll be able to see a plethora of new people I’ve met. They’ll usually be tweeting about things specific to the conference I met them at, so they’re in context. They’ll have a picture so I can remember them. They’ll have a link to their website, so I’ll be able to find out their email or other social network details.

And for the love of Jehova, I can contact them. Anything at all I need to know I can contact them with. We have a rapport, having met face to face and having bought each other a pint.

So damnit Myer, stop using business cards and deal with the fact that we are in the 21st fucking century. Hell yeah.

Okay, so I’ve been recovering from both SxSW and the post-SxSW crud, and I’ve planned a whole bunch of new GOML goodness for next week…..but this one couldn’t wait.

You people who don’t use business cards….what are you, broke ass? I don’t mean people (like myself, naturally) who might occasionally forget their business cards or run out of business cards, I mean you folks who run around without any business cards at all…..say what?

I understand that smart phones might allow you to follow me on twitter or friend me on facebook or even capture something about me on a QR code (dammit, I forgot to wear my t-shirt with that QR code again) but honestly, nothing beats that simple little piece of paper.

Yes, yes, I’m the slayer of fucking rain forests without limit, et cetera, a useless, helpless backward hick who don’t understand nothin’ about yer high-falutin’ technology….but honestly if you don’t have business cards you’re conveying a range of unappetizing options:

1) I’m unemployed and didn’t have the forethought to even print out those serrated numbers off my desktop laser printer.

2) I’m running a startup that only has $23.00 in the main checking account, God knows how I’m gonna get my ass home from this event.

3) I really don’t want to have any future discussions with you unless of course it’s only on Twitter or Hashable and besides, I can bug you later for your phone number or email when it’s convenient for me, right?

It’s not the year 2258 when we can telepathically beam information to each other’s cloud profiles via retinal implants. We still use paper to try to help our little simian brains process the act of meeting for the first time in a business context.

Chance are, I won’t remember who you are even if you hand me a business card, but at least with it I have half a chance of recognizing you at the next event.

I doubt I really need to post about these people and their so-called “organizations.” I’m sure everyone already hates them. But nothing stirs me into a seething, smoldering, laser-eyebeam-shooting rage more than getting into a good flow of work and then having to field calls from motherfucking telemarketers.

See, it’s my job to answer the phone. I am the first line of defense, so naturally they get to talk to me first. Poor bastards. They want to speak to “My Boss’s Full Name That He Never Uses,” or better, “Someone Who Can Make Decisions For The Office.” Well, guess what, you sniveling piles of cold-calling refuse? The buck stops here. You will never get to talk to my boss, and no, we’re not interested.

I know you’re just doing your job, but I do not have time to listen to your spiel, especially when I’m trying to accomplish six different tasks. I’m certainly not interested after I’ve already talked to three more just like you. I’m immune to your refusal to state your purposes. I’m deaf to your insistence that you won’t leave a message and that you will just try him again later. Know why? You’ll talk to me again. You’ll never get to talk to my boss. Ever. In fact, after the third try, you need to just give up. I am made of stone.

But you know what really hacks me off about telemarketers? They pretend it’s a personal call. They try to sneak under the lines and waste my time and my boss’s time. Yeah. Or if I say that I can make decisions for the office and they give me their spiel, they try to get all up in our shit. “Oh, well, even if you do have a company insurance policy, our’s is better.” No, it’s probably not, as the insurance companies are all interested in robbing us blind. As are telecommunications companies, credit companies, and the government. I just threw the government in there, because everyone hates the government, too.

I have put us on every “don’t call” list with every telemarketing company that ever calls us. Like hordes of evil squidgy worms with annoying voices, they keep coming. While I appreciate the opportunity to hang up on people on a regular basis, it’s kinda getting old.

Incidentally, it wasn’t so bad around here until we switched our cable phone over to a company that rhymes with Slime Carver Table. Then we were inundated with calls congratulating us on our new business. Thanks, Slime Carver, for selling our phone number to everyone. I would like to do something really terrible to your ears.

Telemarketers, I loathe you. Don’t you know this is the era of internet advertising which I can disable in my browser settings? Get with the program, get off the phone, and get off my lawn.

Have you ever applied for a job as, say, a dog catcher, and later received an email telling you your profile matches another position—as a cobbler? Or telemarketer? Or garage-door salesman?

I have it on good authority that Human Resource managers love this. They love that computers can do the heavy lifting of reviewing resumes and job applications, and screening out the riff-raff.

But. It. Does. Not. Work.

Lazy programming propels these bad job matches. (“You have the word ‘office’ in your resume? You’d make a great corrections officer!”) But lazy people created the demand for them.

Even worse is that many talented people don’t bother applying for jobs in the first place, because the online applications make the employer look stupid, and who wants to work for someone stupid?

Most online job applications are so buggy and onerous that they might as well be shouting “GO AWAY!” to anyone who dares to fill one out.  You spend 20 minutes entering your information, only to have all of it lost when you hit the “Next” button—because you missed the required field for “Year You Technically Lost Your Virginity.”

This has HR people congratulating themselves, because fewer applicants means fewer resumes they have to scan cursorily and discard. But you know what? Your prospective employees are also your customers. Treat them as such or get off my lawn.

Okay, so I’ve found a solution to the Content Spammers mentioned in a previous post (http://www.getoffmylawn.org/2011/01/comment-spammers/), and that was simple. All I had to do was remove comments from all my blogs. HUZZAH!

Of course, now I am faced with something far, far worse:

THE TROLLS ARE EMAILING ME!!

Yes, that’s right, the people who are psychotic enough to bitch and complain all over my portfolio website’s blog (despite the fact that it’s meant to show off my professional work, and not someone else’s utter lack of intelligence on the subject) are now going to my Contact page, typing in a bunch of slanderous garbage, and hitting send.

And it is all being swiftly delivered by WordPress. Thanks, guys!

Seriously, is there an app yet to block these fuckers? I don’t want to read their nonsensical rebuttals to my blog posts about their absurd articles on why we should all work for content mills that pay $5 a post. I don’t want to get into email flame-wars about who is right and who is a troll. I don’t want to be emailed 6 dozen times by some troll who found my email and has apparently added me to her mailing list wherein she blasts out newsletters seeking work for her dumb, troll ass.

I just want them out of my inbox and out of my life.

Seriously, trolls, get off my motherfuckin’ lawn.

Virginia Woolf wrote that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” I’m pretty sure if Virginia Woolf were alive today she’d sit in her room checking Twitter and Facebook all day long, and trying to get to the supposed Shangri La of “zero inbox” instead of writing great books. She was a genius, but still only human.

I am seriously mourning my attention span these days, and I blame its decimation on our multitasking culture. In fact, every time I see a job description asking for someone “multitask-oriented” my rotten husk of a heart wizens a tiny bit more. And yet as I write this I have 16 tabs open in two different web browsers.

How much scientific evidence do we need to convince us that humans are not wired for multitasking, and that trying to do many things at once usually results in things not getting done, or at least done more slowly?

Hang on while I check Facebook.

Back.

As I was saying, we’re really bad at doing many things at once. It’s amazing how much more gets completed when we slow down and focus on one thing at a time. Try checking your email four times a day, instead of having it open all day long. If you can do this, you are a better human being than me. I tried it for awhile, then quickly lapsed into old bad habits.

There’s a quick, simple solution to all this, which…

Wait, hang on. Twitter.