Things You'd Hoped Would Happen

It’s been a long time coming but well into October now I suppose it is undeniably fall.  Even if it is warm and the leaves are still on the trees and jackets are optional, the sun makes its way down quicker at this time of year.  It’s necessarily melancholy when the day feels like its winding down at 4:00PM.  Some of the things you’d hoped would happen today, now, clearly, will not.

Thick and polluted but you already knew that.  These days that should otherwise be sunny when there isn’t much of any cloud up there in the sky, and the temperature would make it just right for walking around.  This sort of day hurts the most as there is nothing but pollution, no fog, no haze, no condensation to share the blame.  It should be a great day and it looks like someone just shook a carpet over the horizon.

How do you find a contractor to help with office work? I know the sort of person I’d like to hire.  I had such people employed in the past.  But most of those connections were serendipitous.  Serendipity isn’t something you can invoke.  I just met someone and I’d intended to ask them, "hey, do you know any smart twenty something who’d like to pick up some part time work, but I forgot."  I fear I will continue to forget. 

I went on line to look.  Clearly most sites are designed for the job seeker rather than the job offerers.  I didn’t see a smart way to find someone in Chinese and soon I found myself veering off into someone else's idea of what a "personal assistant" should do.  No, no.

In fact I’ve been doing a bunch of searching on the Chinese web today.  Not unlike dialling up for information I tend to get frustrated conducting myself in a foreign language.  I frequently make stupid inferences that have nothing to do with what is really happening.  Searching on Baidu, one is very quick to blame the search engine for its inferior algorithms gummed up by pointless for-pay placements.  But in fact I suspect that a literate person would discern a lot of what's nonsense rather quickly.  It's I am am forced to look things up in order to find out that they're insipid. 

Saturday, 10/07/17