CareerOne’s Payrise Calculator – A picture is worth more than a $1,000

Before I start: I should point out all mentions of women making me a sandwich are meant to be taken in the form of a joke.  There is no way I actually hold those views.  If I did, my wife would punch me in the babymaker.

One of the major things that has happened since I last started spamming my own site with bootleg posts is…I got a job.  A nice, low stress job.

I’d love to post here about why I left journalism and radio producing, but there are two things standing in my way: 1) (and the most likely one) is that I’ll get sued for damaging a reputation.  2) After getting out, I realised the amount of pressure that journalists and producers (especially TV and Radio producers) are under is ridiculous.  I don’t want to have to do that for the rest of my life.

Hang on a second…this blog is meant to be somewhat funny.  Whoops. In a time honoured Internet tradition: here, have a demotivational poster.

My thanks to Nightstorm56 at Dad's Hideout for this. *click to see full funny*

So one of the things I wanted to find out about my new job was how much money I would be taking home after student loans and tax were taken out.  Answer: Not as much as I expected.  Long answer: Holy shit this is such a bad way of communicating pay calculations.

Click on the link to be taken to the calculator I’m talking about.

The site is an Australian job search site called “CareerOne” and is backed by most of the newspaper owners in this country (well, owner, but we won’t get into that big old bucket of sludgy pocky right now).

Here’s a screenshot of the calculator at work, first at fifty thousand dollars a year:

Now at one hundred thousand dollars a year:

And then set to the maximum:

Ooookay.  So what is wrong with this you might ask?  The whole purpose of the site is to find you a better job (actually, it isn’t, the whole purpose of the site is to sell space to potential employers and sell advertising space to make the owners a mint, but again: bucket of sludgy pocky). So why is this bad.

Because it is terrible communication. 

We often say things like “a picture is worth a thousand words”.  Well, it is in communications.  You can get so much more done through pictures than you could through words alone.  BUT here is the kicker – whilst a picture is worth more than a thousand words, that picture could also contain other ways of ‘decoding’ it (that’s “interpreting it” to ordinary people like you and me) that the designer didn’t think about.  For example:

Why the f*cking f*ck is the main person male? Are you saying women shouldn’t work, CareerOne?  Are you saying that women are only good for making sandwiches?

NO! I said make me a sandwhich, not practice piano on the lettuce!

Instead of pointing out all of the things wrong with the calculator, I’m just going to focus on the food.  That might be because I’m so hungry my Maltese Terrier is looking tasty.

But here’s a thing : I like baked beans on toast.  I love me some baked beans on toast.  I eat really damn well, but sometimes I feel like junky food and I’ll bust out baked beans on toast.  So why is that my only “Unwind” option for a low paying job?

I can cook a meal that will last me dinner and four lunches for under $20.  Sure, I could make it cheaper, but I’m kinda like one of those guys who buys expensive beer on a low salary – I’m not going for cheap as hell, I’m going for awesome tastiness.

Damnit, I said "Sandwich". Why are you so happy you just stole my food?

The other day we (wife and I) busted out a pumpkin and silverbeet soup with deep fried wantons that had spicy seasoned lamb mince in them.  Total cost: $33.  Total amount of meals gotten out of it? 11. Eleven!  That makes it worth $3 a serve.

So why am I saying all of this?  Look at the food on the calculator again.

The problem here is that I look at these pictures and instead of going “ooo, I want shiny lobster”, I say to myself:

How did somebody who is working back (see the picture in the bottom left of the calculator) get time to cook lobster and mussels?

But on a serious note, I ask myself: Why should I be aiming to live the lifestyle where I can eat lobster?

What is going on here is the higher you raise your bar, the more luxurious your lifestyle becomes.  At $150,000 per year, you get to go to work in a limo, have the top office space and eat lobster.

The difference between $30,000 a year and $50,000 a year is a cheap, knock off and ugly coffee table. Literally.  That’s it: $16,000 a year more will only get you a coffee table made out of something that resembles dark chipboard that wants to eat your soul.

From a communications perspective, this calculator doesn’t work as well as the designer thought it would.  It reinforces the idea that somebody who earns less than a certain amount per year is dumb and can’t figure out how to buy nice cheap furniture or cook properly.  Essentially, it is hammering home the idea that the only thing you should aim for in a job is higher pay.

Without going all socialist/bohemian on you, I can say from my own experience that this is crap. As a radio producer, I was earning $6,000 a year less than I will be earning shortly.  I have a job that has a lot less stress – a lot less excitement and a lot less creativity, yes, but a lot less stress.

So how would this calculator feel to you if you were nearing the end of your career and only earning about $50,000 a year?  It would make you feel like crap because it lays a foundation of a thought that maybe you didn’t work hard enough.  Look at what you could have achieved if you had worked hard!  Lobster! Crayfish! Whatever the hell the red tasty crustacean is!

If the calculator had done it’s job properly, it would show how you can live off a wage, not just survive.  The protagonist changes from survival to living at about 120,000 a year.  In between the stages, small objects are changed for enormous amounts of money – $16,000 for a coffee table, for example.

The transport is not much better – it goes from a picture of waiting for a bus in the pouring rain, to catching a taxi in overcast conditions, to driving a sports car in nice weather, to taking a stretch limo to work.

Everything in this calculator is deliberately designed to show you that your life would be fantastic if you earnt more.

This is terrible communications, because it deliberately attempts to make the person coming to the website feel inadequate.  Because let’s face it, somebody earning $150,000 a year plus is not going to use CareerOne to find a job.  They’ll use their contacts.  Us plebs use CareerOne to find a job.

Insulting your customers is not a good communications strategy, CareerOne.  Next time you build a calculator, it might be an idea to show people how they can enjoy life at every wage, not how they are just surviving.

A change in my blog.

Ok, so it’s been forever since I posted on this blog.  That’s a good thing.

But stay tuned because over the next few days I’ll be changing how I use this blog.  I originally had the idea that this could be a sounding space for my personal life…but let’s be frankly honest here – my personal life has been too screwed to really write about and is only now reaching some form of normality. And who wants to hear about my year which included a miscarriage, suicide attempt/threaten, too much drinking, making an arse of myself and my myriad forms of extreme social anxiety.  On top of that, my continual failings at busting into any form of ‘prestigious’ niche in the local comedy scene.

…yeah.  So screw this perpetual whining and instead let me attempt to decode other parts of my life.

I’ll be examining communications, talking about how the media works, nitpicking online articles and talking about my two creative loves in life – writing and video games.  I recently completed an honours thesis in video game studies so I hope to start chatting to you a bit about that. I’m currently half way through writing a vlog (urhg, do people still use that word??) about my thesis.  It involves the phrase “kind of like that night I got completely wasted and swapped life stories with a dodecahedron“.  So you know that’s comedy gold, right there.

Yep.

Gold.

*cough*

So stay tuned.

In the meantime, you go and enjoy yourself and I’ll get to writing something better than intoxicated geometry.

Cheerio,

Brad

Mash Up Monday: Too Many to Mention

And the award for the most mash ups effectively used in one piece without becoming too crowded goes to DJ FarOff with:

The Beatles

Joan Jett

Cyprus Hill

Rage Against the Machine (yeah, only the intro, but still)

House of Pain

//

On Game Studies 101 and Why it Doesn’t Exist

Trigger Warning:  Referencing.

(For those of you who have gone through university – this is a bad thing to be reminded of).

I’ll also need to explain a few definitions before I get my academic wank on.  ‘Academic Wank’ kind of sounds like a vacuous catchy pop song, doesn’t it?

Right, I've done my bit, over to you guys.

So here we go:

University: a centre of learning that has faculties, schools, units.

Faculties: these are the umbrella topics, so Engineering, Law, Business, Computing, Arts, and Humanities for example.  The faculty is what your uni degree is in, so I got a Bachelor of Arts.

Schools: the specific subjects within those faculties – Civil Engineering, Gender Studies, Tax Law, Family Law for example.  These schools are what you major in, so I have majors in History, and Journalism, Media and Communications.

Units: these are the actual subjects you go and learn, which make up your majors.  I did a unit in Radio Journalism, which contributed to my major in Journalism, Media and Communications, which then contributed to my degree in Arts and Humanities.

Undergraduate: Somebody who completes the bottom level of university learning.  Generally most people.  An undergraduate degree is a three or four (sometimes five) year degree that ends up being called a ‘Bachelor’.

Academics: the teachers and staff of a university that research things.

Academia: the fuzzy area that incorporates all university based researchers.

Discipline: the same as a school – it’s an area of study.

Theory: in this specific case, theories are beliefs that assist in the study of the subject.

Methodology: the way in which you study a subject.

I was working on a post for this site about how flash/browser-based games are showing originality far beyond that of their more expensive, branded cousins you buy in the store for up to a hundred bucks.

I never finished that article because I got so caught up in having to teach myself a new university discipline and plan what is, essentially, a thirteen thousand word article (about the length of a novella).  The flash games article fell by the wayside as I waded through a miasma of half-baked theories, methodologies and concepts surrounding Game Studies.

My little library of reference material on video games now contains over eighty entries, of which I have read all of them. Including the psychology papers.

Yeah, yeah, killing sex workers is bad. We get that already.

You see, I’m doing my honours in Journalism, Media and Communication at my local university. By studying video games.  Game Studies is a new field…a very, very new field.

Let’s put that ‘new field’ statement into perspective – to the universities, and specifically to arts and humanities, media studies and journalism itself is a new field.   Journalism, as we know it, has been around since the early 1700s.  Media Studies looks at print, radio, television, magazine and internet journalism – areas that have existed since the early 1700s, 1920s, the 1940s, back to the 1800s and then 1990s, respectively.  The discipline of Media Studies is a baby in academia.  My local university just began teaching public relations, which has existed and has shaped our world for decades.

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities (to many out there reading this, the equivalent is a ‘Liberal Arts’ degree) is not a very quick-moving beast.  That is to be expected when you look at what it contains – philosophy, gender studies, history, and literature.  Traditionally, Arts and Humanities tend to look backwards and study and learn from what has gone before.  Units – those subjects you learn that then build up to a degree – can be quite modern.  There is a unit being taught in Gender Studies examining Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Arts and Humanities tends not to be as modern as the units within them.  This isn’t a fault, it’s simply how they work – Engineering wants to make stuff, Law has to teach legal precedent of the here and now so those graduate are able to practive it.  Arts and Humanities looks at what’s already been done.  This isn’t bad.  Just how it’s geared to examine stuff.

Game Studies looks at what is happening now.  ‘Now’ being a relative term as in academia you will find articles published in 2009 about Ultima Online at the height of its power in the late 90s.  Those Ultima Online articles?  There’s a great number of them and they all look at the same game from about seven different angles.

Where Game Studies really falls over due to a critical miss roll is that it doesn’t have the agreed on set of tools that other areas of academia use to study the subject with.  Those methodologies and theories that I mentioned in the definitions.

Damnit, I drop my methodology on my foot for +6 damage.

 

The field of game studies is fractured on these points.  Yes there are theories and yes, there are methodologies.  Both are coming out of the wazoo, to put it bluntly.

But Game Studies goes across so many disciplines over so many fields of study it is currently impossible to find one set of theories and methodologies to study video games.  Even the most vaunted of the academics can’t figure it out.  There has been a lot of academic discourse (*cough* blazing rows*cough*) at conferences about it.  For a while, the entire field was split between two opposing theories, that of narratology vs. ludology (I won’t go into that argument here, instead look up Frasca’s blog on ludology http://www.ludology.org/).  Since then, academics can only agree that we need a combination of both theories to study video games.

This is the problem - how to study video games.  The ‘How’ hasn’t been solidified yet.  And while I have to sift through papers written by academics in the field of Communications, Computing, Psychology, Sociology, Literature studies, Mathematics and Business, there is no way that we can call it its own field.  To date, the industry hires people from all these disciplines to work in the field.  Because every field has something to contribute to video games.

It may be that it is a case of too many chefs spoiling the broth.  Or it may be a case of not enough chefs of the same discipline in the room.  Or something else to do with chefs.

M(*&^%^$ing Chefs. F*%*^ng.

Until all interested parties can get under one banner in the university and can agree on how to study games, we won’t have a concentrated body of knowledge outside of fan run wiki’s on an industry that is bigger than Hollywood, exports culture from every corner of the globe to every corner of the globe and is present in almost every living room.

And that is a sad thing for those of us who love games, gaming and writing about gaming and games.

Mash Up Monday (1 day late): Beatles vs LCD Sound System vs The Kinks

A day late and, not having any hours right now so definitely a buck short.

Go ahead.  Write a report.

One of my all time favourite mash-ups.  Catchy as all hell.

Mash-Up Monday: Thunderbusters

It works, oh so well.

I met Sherlock Holmes. He took my stray dog away.

It was about 10:30pm on a chilly Autumn’s night that I was out walking my dog.  The events that unfolded over the next twelve hours led me to meeting a guy who is obviously the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes.  Although, since Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character, it would make it difficult for him to be reincarnated not having lived the first time.  Incarnated?  Oh, screw it, the dude was awesome and I have to blog about him.

My dog is called Astro (after Astro Boy).  He’s a purebred Maltese – non-allergenic so my wife doesn’t want to scratch her own eyes out everytime she pats him.  He’s the opposite of the runt of the litter – he’s a massive Maltese.  Apparently, people look for tiny Maltese when they want one.  To put it in a handbag.  Or to shove up their sleeves like a fluffy, live tissue.

Eww, this one’s used. Get me a clean one.

 

So I was taking fluff ball for a walk.  We were about a hundred metres from my house when I saw a shadow move up the street. 

 Generally, this is cause for concern for me.  After all, I live behind the Tasmanian ‘flannelette curtain’.  Apparently up here coffee is always instant, people will punch you for no reason and wine automatically turns into sweet pre-mixed spirit in a can out of peer pressure and force of will.

Not Pictured:  The thirteenth disciple, Bazza, slammin’ down some Vodka and Raspberry while eyeing off the bridesmaids.

Instead of somebody mugging me, a tiny dog ran out of the shadows, came up and attempted to lick my hand.  He was a beautiful dog.  Tail thumping, he sat down next to me, staring up into my face with his big brown eyes.  So, naturally, Astro attempted to take a piece out of his hide.

 I took my dog back home and went back up the street to locate shadow pup.  I couldn’t leave a stray out on a cold night, on a busy street where people hoon their cars along the long, dimly lit road.  The only way I managed to locate him was through the sound of squealing tires.  And there he was, sitting in front of a car that had smoking brakes, staring into the headlights, wagging his tail, like the car had just wanted to give him a really powerful pat.

I managed to coax him into our yard.  He was a beautiful dog, well looked after, obviously a pet and not a long term stray.  So we (wife and I…after she stopped attempting to scratch her own ears off via the roof of her mouth) made him up a bed in the laundry, settled our dog down and went to bed.

That is when the crying started.

I don’t think the damn thing drew breath for three hours. 

whinewhinewhinewhinetumphowlwhinewhinewhinethumpwhinewhinecry.

Sure, he was pining for his family, but even so…the damn thing didn’t shut the hell up.  After I muttered to my wife “Maybe if I left the gate open…he might just go home…” she got up, moved our dog to the foot of the bed and went into the lounge room with the stray. 

She then had to – literally – hold his hand for the next five hours for him to stop whining.

My wife, for an entire night, held a strange dogs hand, a dog she was allergic to, just so we could both get some sleep.

I’m not proud of wanting to turf him out, but he was an annoying sh*t.  Sometimes, being ‘an annoying sh*t’ can justify almost everything.  Especially at 1am when you aren’t getting any sleep.

Wife got up and went to work, severely sleep deprived.  She is a legend who deserved me cooking that nights dinner (I didn’t).  Now it was up to me to look after two dogs, which didn’t like each other.  However, they became united in their hatred of the cold morning to lie next to each other by the heater.

‘Being cold’, the number 1 cause of ‘Doing weird sh*t to get warm’

So I called up the council, and they sent a dog catcher along to take him away.  Dog catcher dude turns up.  Dog catcher dude looks at stray for five seconds and then comes out with something I didn’t think I would ever hear from a dog catcher.

He tapped his finger on his cheek while eyeing the dog and says:

“This dog comes from up on the hill behind you.  It’s obviously pet dog.  The family is at least middle class, if not lower upper class.  A bit of disposable income.  This dog is an indoor dog.  The house is mostly carpeted, there aren’t any floorboards, but probably tiles in the bathroom and toilet.  They look after the dog, but the family has small children.  If not one small child.”

He then looks closer at the dog.

“Yep.  At least one kid, who is a toddler.  Probably between two or three.”

This was my reaction. If I happened to be a Starfleet Captain, sitting behind a bench with my second in command at the time.

So here is where it gets weird.  He was able to justify every single claim and it made sweet, undeniable logical sense.

 I asked him how he knew and here is the logic:

 

Claim

Family is at least middle class, if not lower upper class.

Family has a bit of disposable income.

The Dog comes from up the hill behind you.

 

Logic

The dog is a hybrid breed – that is, it was a cross between a pure bred Jack Russell Terrier and a pure bred Dachshund.  The breed is called a ‘Jackshund’.

They would have called it “Dack Russell”, but they guy who bred them is called Russell and it brought back too many awkward memories of high school. 

So apparently, the disposable income is not only from buying a hybrid breed, but also the overall cut and gloss of the coat.  This could only be done one way – especially the underarms.  A salon.  Salon cuts are expensive.  Ergo, disposable income. Since the hill behind my place is colloquially known as ‘Mortgage Hill’ due to the size of the houses, and if the dog went in a straight line down the hill he’d end up where I found him.  With little knowledge of how to cross roads, the logic would be that he came from up the hill.  

Claim

House is mainly carpeted.

Dog is an indoor dog.

Not many floorboards in the house. 

Evidence

So not having your dog’s nails clipped gives this impression.  The dog doesn’t know road rules and he was immaculate, so he’s mainly an indoor dog.  His toenails are long, because he doesn’t get walked enough for them to wear down on concrete footpaths.   Since long nails on a dog in a floorboard house would be really, really annoying, the house is obviously mainly carpeted. 

Obviously. 

Claim

Family has small children.

Child is between two and three years old. 

Evidence

A small marking on the upper part of the dogs hind leg, on closer examination, is the remanent of permanent marker.  A small child would mark their dog at about this level, which would be eye level to small child kneeling down.  There is obviously at least one parent in the family, and that parent is attentive, because the gloss on the coat is different – indicating that the marker has had an attempted washing with soap, separate from the salon grooming.  Which means it happened recently.  Which means that the parent noticed the marker quickly and tried to wash it off straight away. 

Because I always put slash in front of my emotions. Thanks for nothing, Internet.

Wowsers.  Dog catcher made my head spin.  

Anyway, Dog Catcher dude took the stray and headed up the hill, exactly as he deduced.  Stray dog was microchipped and, yes, the address was up on the hill.  

I couldn’t help but formulate my own hypothesis from this meeting. 

My local Council has hired a Sherlock Holmes style logical genius to track down stray dogs.  Why? Easy.  Pretty soon, somewhere in the back alleys of my suburb he will face off against his arch nemeses, Meowiarty. 

Meowiarty in his natural habitat. Casting magic, in a clock tower. Didn't think of that one, did you, so called 'Sir' Conan Doyle?

 

And that, is when Dog Catcher Holmes will unleash his army – all the strays he has rescued over the years, especially those of irregular breeds, while screaming “I let the dogs out! Woof, woof, woof woof!”  *

Until then I can only hope that, through the power of logic, the stray dog mysteries of my area will continue to be solved by the underutilised genius of Sherlock Holmes Dog Catcher Dude.

 

 

*Note: Will most likely not happen.  Blogger needs more coffee.  Otherwise, the crazy gets let out a little too much.