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By Mina Xavier, January 26, 2009 3:28 pm

This number has called me several times over the last few days. Because I am a nosy little rube, I called them back just to see who this was. A woman with a heavy eastern accent named “Abigail” (yeah right) identified herself as a representative for University Opportunity Services. When I grilled her for how they got my cell number, she finally slipped and uttered the phrase “career site”.

I hit the roof. I had joined a few job search sites months ago for the sake of upgrading my then-impossible position.
One of them, Job.com, has a section where users are asked if they plan to increase their level of education.
They are VERY manipulative with this. The options read as though you are either interested in a degree “someday” or you are a deadbeat who doesn’t care about your future.

They prey on your insecurity about what employers will think of you, and then bombard you with advertisement screens for colleges.
Whether or not the job you were being teased with in the first place actually exists is impossible to know, since no one ever contacts you regarding your application or your resume. Users give their cell and home numbers so that prospective employers can contact them.  These calls are the final result.  They sell your information to these telemarketers.

THIS IS SLEAZY, AND I DO NOT LIKE IT.
I have had the same bombardment from Jobseeker, CareerBuilder, Monster, and so on down the line.
DO NOT use these sites to find a job. The number of complaints received by the FTC and the BBB are astounding.

INSTEAD: Go to a reputable classifieds site for YOUR region that is affilated with a real newspaper (like phillyburbs. com) and start looking there.

These telemarketers are under investigation by the FTC and you can help by posting your experiences and complaints to www. callercomplaints. com.

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By Mina Xavier, November 20, 2008 4:15 am

This has a two-part punchline:

November 25th is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and to raise awareness about rape in Italy, the organization Telefono Donna has been placing posters in major Italian cities putting the issue directly in the face of the public.

Across the midsection reads, “Who pays for man’s sins?”, while the copy reads, “Only four percent of women who suffer sexual violence report their assailants”.

The media agent gets +5 points for avant-garde nudity even if it does immediately raise the ire of male politicians like city councillor Maurizio Cadeo, who promises, “”I’ll do everything in my power to stop this poster going up.”

Not to be outdone, the Vatican has threatened to sue… for copyright infringement. Indecency notwithstanding, the Catholic Church has forgone the usual aneurysm about unsuppressed sexual innuendo and instead asserted that it owns the copyright to the crucifixion symbol. (I will pause for a moment to allow that to sink in.) I would have thought that God owned the rights to the cross but evidently this one has been rendered unto Caesar.

Ironically, the Vatican has not offered an official statement regarding the nation’s tragic statistic of unavenged sexual violence.