Recursive Reasoning

Although I think it’s because it was a big spending month (couch), or because the past few months have been extremely low-spend months, I actually want to believe more that it’s because I’ve been successfully divorced for a year+ from a man who, at the age of 41, after living in the US for 10+ years, admitting multiple times in public that his partner (and her family) understood finances better than him, and also asking said partner for financial advice, still refused to open a single credit card to build his credit because he didn’t want to be in debt, even though I BEGGED him to PLEASE just do that so we could buy a house together or, at the very least, so we could rent a nice apartment in Denver together and not get denied because he had zero credit

Basic credit card tip: if you want to build your credit and don’t want to be in debt, pay off your credit card in full every month. Treat your credit card like a debit card. You can pay it after every purchase if it makes you feel better. Keep track of your receipts, compare them with your statements, and shred/tear up your receipts after you confirm everything to make sure no one has made fraudulent charges and pay the bill. It sucks that the US is like this, but you have to play the credit score game.

So actually I sorta basically worked an 8-hour day, just in chunks. But also I have been fully consumed by thoughts of work for 11 straight hours.

It would be very difficult to overstate how incredibly un-motivated I am, starting when I saw an email from a new PM replying to me cancelling next Friday’s meeting (“cancelling for Juneteenth holiday”) saying “is this for tomorrow 6/19? Just want to make sure I go to the right meeting!”

So we’re working with PMs who can’t read their own fucking calendar now AND don’t know what day it is??

I recognize you’re a startup but equity alone isn’t going to attract me because I have never made it long enough at either of my jobs for equity to be worth fucking anything. Do you offer a 401k. Do you offer health/vision/dental/disability insurance. How much PTO do you offer. How much sick time, if PTO isn’t unlimited.

I’m trying to figure out what people labeled “linguist” at other companies do so that I can, you know, present the best version of my resume at my interview next week, and I’m also reflecting on when I’ve asked this question in interviews, and it’s always the same fucking answer. Ohhh it depends, you know, every day is different

It’s not THAT different, though. My answer to the question is something like: I work with clients to determine what their current and future needs are for an Interactive Virtual Agent. To do this, I meet with them on a regular basis with a list of questions, I write out sample scripts and dialogues for all possible scenarios, I document what the client’s business does and what its needs are, I work with engineering and product to find out the practical limitations of our software, and so on. Today, for instance, I’m redesigning a conversational flow for a client to make it snappier and shorter overall, which means I’m reading the pre-sales documents and the documentation that was made by the previous designer to suss out the bare essentials of the conversation, because this is to get people in touch with an on-call nurse in case of an urgent medical problem. I also need to make sure that all the documentation is there and accurate in the first place, so I’m making Claude scrape meeting transcripts with the client on top of everything else and having it compare requirements from those meetings with the ones in the design document and the original conversation design. At the end of the day today, I need to have a visual representation of the conversational flow for this product that accurately represents what the client bought as well as their business-based requirements and restrictions so that I can discuss it with the rest of the project team on Monday, and present it to the client later in the week.

Sucks that I have a 7:30 AM meeting and then my next one’s not till 12, but whatever