Shock and Caw
Cyber-site-overload short-circuits the electrical impulses in my brain. Too many job sites, too many want ads touting useless propositions like, “Work from home. Make money storing nuclear waste in your basement,” or “Be your own boss and earn enough money to start banking in the Cayman Islands.” There are too many vultures circling the battered bodies in the trenches. The job market is dark and moody like an Alexander Proyas film, a director of movies such as “The Crow.” (I’ll get back to crows later.) Reading the want ads — an oxymoron — can be depressing. I see more jobs that are not in my field and the few that are recruit students, moms, or retirees. “Is now the right time to ask your doctor about Prozac?”
When vultures act like crows
I take a deep breath, exit the Internet, and listen to crows cawing outside my window. My dog hates crows and barks at them. The crows enjoy getting under her skin. After all, a crow’s modus operandi is picking the meat off bones. They mock my dog. They think they are better than she is, sitting high on their hemlocks. Once after my dog killed a chipmunk on the front lawn, then left it to come inside for dinner (talk about irony), I watched a crow swoop down, grab my dog’s kill, and fly away with it. Snarky bird. No wonder my dog hates those lice-laden wing-flappers.
Becaws they are loathsome creatures
Besides being loud vile carcass-eaters, crows enjoy mocking both man and beast. They delight in being disruptive at 4 a.m. with their incessant cawing and sound like old bitter men gossiping. The loud harsh cry of a crow is more abrasive than the rumble and thrust of a prop plane, which is fleeting. You see crows never leave. They prefer to loiter in trees, squawking among themselves, while plotting their next crime against humanity. Stealing garbage from bins and then scattering the leftovers across lawns and driveways is one of their most notorious misdeeds. I thought the pièce de résistance of all their birdbrain schemes. Yet, as I pick up cans of empty cat food, a crow perched on a branch above me, drops chicken bones on my head.
E-mails wearing a disguise
Internet scammers remind me of crows. I recently received an e-mail scam after applying for what I thought was an accounts receivable/collection position. The responding e-mail from the bogus company requested my personal information. I quickly hit the delete button and likened the incident to a CSI worker stealing a wallet from a corpse at a crime scene. There is no honor among thieves, even if they know how to Google or send automated e-mail messages. That makes it worse, a savvy scammer (in the axis of weasel) using his intelligence to prey upon people down-on-their-luck or just down. To put it into better context, I am road kill. Scammers are crows waiting in the gutter for an accident to happen, so they can devour the remains. Morose, isn’t it? Well, at least, the sun is shining. Crows are harder to spot on a cloudy day because they blend into gray sky. Their abrasive cawing gives them away. It always does, which is also true of scammers.
Which is worse?
a. Scammers b. Crows c. They both suck d. Pop up ads