Nerdery Public

I’ve been dreaming of starting my own company.  It’s happened before, and nary a business plan or a change in business card has yet come about, so it’s unfortunately unlikely to pass.  Any company I work for, I start to think how I’ll do things differently in my company.  MY company will be driven by values.  MY company will harness the best thoughts and energies of its employees (me included) to greater success than if we worked as individuals.  MY company will engage with the community, in ways beyond just giving checks.  MY company will be a ‘Small Giant’.

Right now MY company would need to replace MY salary, which is our family’s primary source of income.  That’s a pretty heady requirement for a startup, to reliably replace a certain salary and benefits package.  You have to have a fair amount of confidence in both the business opportunity, and your ability to execute on it, and be more certain that you’re right than that the statistics on small businesses will fall against you.  Hence my reluctance to actually engage.  But that doesn’t stop me from thinking.  Thinking about who’d be the right people to bring on board.  Thinking about, what would attract that combination of people.  Thinking about what magic we could accomplish.

For all of the faults any of the companies I’ve ever been at have had, they have had the distinct advantage of actually having pulled the trigger and acted on that startup dream.  I keep reminding myself of that.

“So how dumb are we? Well, if we don’t vote some people who actually respect women into Congress soon, we just may be as dumb as those senators think.”

— my quote of choice from Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick in her article “How Dumb Are We?How long will women shoulder the blame for the pay gap?”, on the topic of Congress’s rejection of a bill that would have recognized each subsequent inequitable paycheck as an act of discrimination, rather than just the first one.

I guess the argument is that, although folks realize that womens’ salaries are artificially low because they are women, not remedying the situation is OK, since they didn’t instigate the initial discrimination. The discrepancy after that point can be argued as that individual receiving equitable percentage increases, but just not starting from as large a base. First job seekers, take note: your initial salary anywhere, but particularly for that first job, is one of the primary determiners of your salary trajectory for the remainder of your career. Take your second job as the job you really love; take your first job to set your salary benchmark, and make sure you negotiate for every additional penny you can get. That advice holds for everyone, but for women in particular. Make sure that you can justify any discrepancy LATER as years spent out of the workforce raising children, or sweatshop environments avoided. Just don’t let yourself be pigeon-holed as the woman who’ll cost you less just because she’s a woman and doesn’t know any better.

Every once in a while I like to take a look at the headers of the spam accruing in Google’s Spam folder for me.  There’s the usual assortment of titles indicating that, were I male, certain areas of my anatomy could be enlarged for the benefit of the ladies.  There are also offers, usually made in ALL CAPS, to help someone down on their luck by acting as a money agent to allow them to transfer funds from some foreign company.  Sometimes there are job offers, promising to let me work from home.  Nearly always, there are some number of medicinal offerings, beyond the ones promising enlargement of male organs.  Once in a while, someone tries to convince me that a certain stock is certain to go through the roof and I just need to get in on the ground floor.

These are all apparently items that folks have tested to some degree or other and believe will cause some percentage of folks to click through and either pick up the virus or spend some money or go to a website that will then let them pick up a virus.  Once in a while, though, someone shows some flair and comes up with a new angle.  I’m always interested in what the angle is, as much for its commentary on what’s thought to be attractive to the general population.

Turns out, the new thing is shoes.  There were 54 items in my Spam folder related to shoes, of the 813 Google Spam items has nicely sequestered away for me.  3 or 4 look to be from legitimate merchandisers with whom I’ve done business with before, though not as a shoe shopper.  The rest are honest to goodness spam.

Who buys enough shoes that this is the hot new spam?  I’ll send these messages your way.  They look to offer amazing deal, from Google’s preview of the message.  Gosh, I could get Gucci or Prada or high-end sandals for what I presume must be amazing prices.  Just let me know if you want these messages, and I’ll set up a Google filter to forward them your way.

P.S.  I’m highly amused that Google’s AdWords account expiration notification ended up sorted by them into their own Spam folder.