YMCA type Sports, Practice Results Calendar Resumed

The link to my November 2014 Sports Practices Results Calendar:

November 2014 Sports Calendar for David Virgil Hobbs

From June 8 to November 23 2014, my only sports activity was long walks of 6 miles. Walks are fun when it is warm outside & there are lots of people outside & the people are talkative. 

Also I got distracted by things like: World Cup Soccer in Brazil; trauma of not being able to get a good job from the Greater than Hobbs Boston YMCA. 

And my usual habit seems to be to drift away from a given sport for a few months of the year.

Waltham Y Exec Dir Application

8/6/2014

Spent 4 hours approx 1230 AM - 430 AM 7/6/2014, filling out a very lengthy job application I found at the YMCA website, to apply as is traditional for the Waltham YMCA Executive Director Position.

Accidentally noted in 'legal skill' section, that I defeated 82% of my fellow-test takers on the Law School Aptititude Test. Then when I returned to correct the error I could not correct the error. It was a typo. Actually I defeated 62%. When I tried to re-enter the application to correct the error I could not.

I filled out the questions best I could, when they demanded what month of what year I moved into where I live, I just sort of guessed, because it was long ago, but I did the best I could. And so it went with a few questions for which answers were demanded, re which, no way I could remember exactly which month I did something 10 years ago.

After I went through the 4-hour process, I got a pdf from the online program I was dealing with, showing part of the info I submitted:

PDF record of part of Waltham Y Exec Director Application

The program demanded a cover-letter from me, which it did not include in the pdf output it produced at the end:

Greater Boston YMCA cover letter

At the end of the process, I felt like 'Paul struck down by his vision of Christ'. Because I saw in my life, a strangely moving mix of: god, heroism, endurance of persecution, tragedy, achievement, talent, and some other things.

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9/2/2014

August 27, I responded to the Greater Boston Y's email of August 6 to me, re my application for Executive Director job at Waltham YMCA (their only communication with me so far re my application):

August Response to Email from Y re Job

This time, and also last time a couple of years ago, the the best I could get from the  'Greater (than Hobbs)' Boston YMCA re my application was a machine-generated auto-response, produced in 0.0053 nanoseconds.

I've been angry about this job, because though not a talkative person I've encountered at least a half-dozen persons some of them important, who express contempt for the Greater Boston YMCA hiring practices. Absent encountering those, I would be my usual mild-tempered mild-mannered self. Hypothetically this has to do with my human nature: for thousands of generations, humans have lived in tribes wherein it makes natural sense to be angry when several persons agree with you but mild-tempered otherwise.

Points coming to mind lately (my opinions as of now):

1. It's comically pretentious when people pretend that some job position requires much more experience than is actually necessary. Fact is the importance of 'experience' varies widely depending upon the position in question. Overemphasis on experience, leads to underemphasis with regards to other factors. Dishonesty in terms of how important a given employment-placement criteria is, gives rise to a generally dishonest and incompetent organizational culture, featuring lies leading to poor performance.

2. The YMCA Administrators serve the YMCA not vice-versa. YMCA Administrators overemphasizing criteria they are strong in, is something that serves not the YMCA but the YMCA administrators.

3. Administrators who make hiring decisions excluding those who are more competent than themselves is obviously unfortunate.

4. Administrators excluding from the workplace persons who are more attractive than themselves is obviously a case of something going wrong.

5. It contradicts the spirit of Employment Law, when employers overemphasize experience, when judging a disadvantaged applicant who is accomplished talented skilled and competent. This because the disadvantage makes it difficult to obtain experience.

6. It contradicts the spirit of Employment Law, when employers trash persons who go to the top whenever 'experience' is not an issue, simply because said trashed persons lack 'experience'.

7. The 'experienced' persons that the experience-obsessed gush over, are merely examples of persons who have occupied important positions for years without accomplishing anything beyond the mediocre.

8. There is the supervised, paid, on-the-job experience they are obsessed with. Then there are other types of experience that can be at least as important: the simply having been alive for many years; the 'experience' of time spent reading info sources; the 'experience' of time spent writing about the subjects read info sources are concerned with; the 'experience' of self-supervised projects; the 'experiences' one has when not on the job.

9. They value 'experience' so much. Not because it allows for the 'experienced' person to make mistakes when confronted with things he has not dealt with before, but because such experiences involving new things, improve the persons's ability to deal with various possible events. Therefore, they value instances wherein an 'administrator' or some such pretentiously-titled critter encounters something new. How then is it, that they fail to value 'inexperienced' persons, seeing that the 'inexperienced' persons have more learning experiences dealing with new things, compared to the 'experienced' persons?

10. Obsessive emphasis of 'experience', leads to a de-emphasis regarding voice, personality, appearance, intelligence, and sexiness (qualities which carry no weight with the typicalists who dominate these parts). Relatedly, in this geographical area there are large numbers of very public displays of charity for those who are the opposite of being talented/gifted, yet concern for the talented or gifted is absent. It defies the Spirit of the Laws, that employers fail to accomodate talented inexperienced persons by providing on-the-job training (OJT), allowing for a job to be split between an inexperienced but accomplished person and an experienced person, etc.

11. The C in YMCA stands for Christian, not Catamite. Scripture describes the 'gifts of the spirit': "God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues" (1 Cor 12:28). These gifts are not bestowed by way of human credentials. Obsessive overemphasis regarding human-bestowed credentials leads to serious damage by way of underemphasis re abilities of the 'gifts of the spirit' type.

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Dream about Greater Boston YMCA Executives

I have been feeling somewhat annoyed by the management of the Greater Boston Y. They oversee about a dozen YMCAs in the Boston area. I applied for a job as Exec Director of the Waltham Y and did not get it. I watched as they forgot about me and appointed someone half my age to get paid more than I have ever been paid to be their Membership Director, and gave him credit for things that happened on his watch, simply because the things happened on his watch. I have been somewhat unimpressed by the people they have appointed. I have noticed how apparently, they (seemingly almost superstitiously) tend to simplistically give credit for anything a YMCA accomplishes, to some executive who happened to be in place at the given Y at the time the Y achieved something. About a week ago, I had a dream about them.

In the dream, I was meeting with about ten of the top Greater Boston YMCA Executives; it was just me and them. Sr VP for Human Resources Paul Mantell was there (he decides who gets many of the top jobs at the YMCAs in the Greater Boston YMCA, he is the one who gave the Waltham Exec Director job to someone else). I have never seen Mantell or a photo of him. In the dream, Mantell was about six feet two inches tall; he was kind of stocky; he wore a plad Scottish-style shirt made of thick red and blue stripes; his hair was thick and brown and medium length; he was clean-shaven; and I think he wore spectacles. In the dream, during the meeting, I was feeling as if the Greater Boston YMCAs were boring people, and I felt irritated by them.

There are various problems with the obsession personnel officers have with experience. I wonder if they even realize, that an emphasis on how much experience a job candidate has, leads to a de-emphasis of important factors other than experience. I wonder if they realize, that half the jobs are placed by way of connections and many of the remainder are placed as a result of experience derived from connections. I wonder if they realize, that how much experience people have is determined by the decisions of the hiring managers of the marketplace, decisions that can tend to be merely of average quality, or even worse (plus every institution is unique, different from the marketplace at large). I wonder if they realize that obsession with how much experience job candidates have, results, demonically, in the perpetual punishment of those who early in life experienced bad luck or were the victims of sins or crimes.

When King David was appointed King by Saul, he was 'merely' an inexperienced shepherd. When St. Peter was appointed the human head of the Christian Church, he was 'merely' a fisherman. When St Paul first became a leader of the Christian Church, his 'experience' consisted simply of having been a leading persecutor of the Church.

For 20 years now, in the upper right hand corner, there has been a quotation, namely, 1 Timothy 6:17-19. Seems to me, that therefore, Ishould be treated well by an organization like the YMCA. I have suffered enough because of the quotation on my resume. It's as if, like a classic British Navy Captain, I'm 'going down with the ship' because of the quote on the resume. But it does'nt have to be that way.