It's good the New Year has started and I can pretend to make Resolutions.

Way up there on the list is the renewed resolve to avoid all Indian recruiters. In spite of my last two posts, I yielded to temptation a couple of days before New Year's. There was Haranth, passing me on to his good friend Rameet, who in turn had a friend named Anish who was the onsite hiring manager for an interactive firm located in...well where do you suppose? Yes, way out in East Buttfuck, New Jersey. 

It was a contractual job, the sort of thing that sounds less and less attractive the more you hear about it.  But your new Hindustani buddies somehow persuade you that this job--which pays decently, after all, and starts next Monday--is practically yours for the asking. 

So you break another promise to yourself and agree to do a Phone Interview. A phone interview is what they do when they don't really want to hire you but are obligated to do some perfunctory looking-around. Sometimes this is for a budgetary rule, sometimes it's because HR is pushing the Diversity racket. This has nothing to do with using Indian recruiters. No, it means somehow hiring a Woman. A Woman to work in a very Uncongenial Atmosphere, entirely populated by socially maladjusted males who are not even Americans, and in some cases not even Caucasian.

Work is a social experience above all else. You need to work with people like yourself, or Work just doesn't work. How can it? You're spending all your time doing anthroplogical investigations of another culture, and trying to understand your coworkers' incomprehensible idioms. Personally, I don't want to work with non-Caucasians, or even non-Americans, apart from the odd European. No, I want to work among nice all-American north-European types, the kind who built this country. Otherwise I'll go crazy and get cancer, because that's what Diversity leads to.

Anyway, I was interrupted in my afternoon's sejour at the Performing Arts Library by a mobile call from Anish, who was trying to set up a conference call with Konstantin. Konstantin! Fancy that, my prospective boss is a Russian geek, probably inarticulate, prone to firing trick classroom-style questions about "design patterns" at me.

And that's how it went. I eventually just said that I wasn't really interested in the job. That got Konstantin off the hook. He ddn't want me either. He wants another Russian, male. He doesn't want to work next to an American woman who makes him feel uncomfortable all the time.

No more, Rameet. No more, Anish. Au revoir, canards, canaille, conundrums.