Whee

A few months ago, I was sup­posed to get some help on my job. Specifically, some­one to work on the .NET side of things, which would free me up to do the job I was actu­ally hired to do: PHP devel­op­ment. He wasn’t my first choice, but he was sec­ond, in large part because of his mas­ters degree and (minor) expe­ri­ence with .NET. In real­ity, though, find­ing some­one to do .NET CF devel­op­ment is a total pain, let alone on a startup company’s budget.

On his first day, he never arrived. I called and called, and three days later he informed me that he was in India on an emer­gency, and had asked a friend of his to return my calls if/when I called him. His “friend” never did, so it fell through. About a month after that, the first-choice can­di­date called me up out of the blue and asked if we were still look­ing for developers.

I said sure, and he came onboard for the same salary as choice #2 (the main stick­ing point for him the first time around). He was sup­posed to start on or about the first of November, though the owner and him had those con­ver­sa­tions and it was never quite clear what exactly was said as far as a def­i­nite start date (if any­thing was). So last Monday, I called him up, and he was in Austin. We worked out that he would start yes­ter­day at 8am.

He too, never showed up.

Five more mes­sages and 30 hours have passed since he was sup­posed to start work­ing here. Reading Glen Greenwald today, I come across this lit­tle tid­bit, which he quoted from an Associated Press story from Monday (empha­sis is Greenwald’s):

In court doc­u­ments filed with the 4^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., the Justice Department said a new anti-terrorism law being used to hold detainees in Guantanamo Bay also applies to for­eign­ers cap­tured and held in the United States.

Immigrants arrested in the United States may be held indef­i­nitely on sus­pi­cion of ter­ror­ism and may not chal­lenge their impris­on­ment in civil­ian courts, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion said Monday, open­ing a new legal front in the fight over the rights of detainees.

The story also goes on to note that the “test case” of this is a Quatari pro­gram­mer liv­ing in Peoria, IL (yes, that Peoria) — about an hour and a half south of my house. Nice that some geek is now sim­ply a test-case of Presidential TortureAlternative Interrogation Procedures, not a human being with a wife and four kids. If I were an immi­grant, I’d get the fuck out of the coun­try and not look back as well.

Of course, it’s also pos­si­ble that dude is just an ass­hole, and the whole “we can dis­ap­pear you” thing is just a coin­ci­dence. Not that it really makes the “we can dis­ap­pear you” thing much bet­ter, sim­ply less immediate.

BTW, where are the Democrats on this? Or was the plan to just get elected and let Bush’s phony “bipar­ti­san­ship” non­sense pre­vent them from actu­ally doing any­thing lest the media paint them as “Terra-loving San-Franciscamites”?

[Kinda sorry some­thing this snarky is the first post to PGO in months, but this par­tic­u­lar paranoia-kicker is a lit­tle close.]

Update: Turns out dude had a “per­sonal life cri­sis” that meant he had to stay in Austin, and would’ve called except for his dead cell­phone bat­tery. I guess Texas is worse than I sus­pected, since they appar­ently don’t have pay-phones or e-mail there either… *fume*