journal features

tried to apply for a government job

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Vancouver, 2001.10.11

I tried to apply for a job with the government today. The form was a typical affair that gave precedence to my qualifications such as minority status. On page three the thing barfed because the ID attached to the job wasn't in the gov'ts database, supposedly. The government is damn strange.

On a brighter note, I went and had the negatives from my trip to Tofino developed. Ran them through the scanner and there are some gems. My photographic skills are improving, I think.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton