03 Oct A Slow Roll Down a Bad Hill
I originally published this piece on Patreon on July 24th of this year. Whenever I’m on YouTube and see clickbait titles and photos, I wince. You know what I’m talking about…
- You have 30 days left!
- You have 6 more weeks.
- We are only X days away from…
Then when nothing happens, no one calls these folks out. In fact, when you watch the videos, they usually say, “I don’t really know the future, but…” after they’ve sucked people in with apocalyptic titles. IMO, this is a slow roll down a bad hill. It’s possible that the snowballs could pick up speed as they roll down the hill and thus become a fast avalanche, but as I wrote in this blog post, to me it feels more like we’re the proverbial frog in the heated pot.
July 24, 2022
There’s a term in poker called slow playing, which occurs when a player has a strong hand but is pretending not to. I think in some respects, the economy is slow playing all of us. But my use of the term is a bit different from the poker meaning.
In the job market, whenever I feel that a client is slow playing a candidate, it’s similar to breadcrumbing. (Good Lord, there’s a term for everything nowadays). The client doesn’t want to cut the candidate loose – they’re just stringing the candidate along a little at a time so they can wait to see if “someone better” comes along. If not, then they will hire the candidate and if so, they won’t. And no, for the record, I do not condone such behavior.
On the other side of the transaction, if a candidate is slow playing a client, they are non-committal on things like start date, expected salary, always seem to have “just one more question” that needs to be answered and so on. In the meantime, if they get a better offer, they will finally bow out of consideration. If not, then they’ll suddenly become motivated and cooperative and take the job.
I feel like we are the proverbial frog in the pot these days. Little by little, the heat keeps getting turned up. Like we are on a slow roll down a bad hill. It reminds me of when you know a deal is about to go sour – you can feel it in your gut, but the other people involved are trying to slow play the situation along without actually telling you the whole truth. I’m not sure how much longer things will stay this way. I suspect we will continue to limp along with things getting just a little bit worse and a little bit worse until the midterms. Or until WWIII breaks out in Europe. Then whichever party wins/loses will blame the other and so on and so on.
I hope I am wrong on that, but I’m not seeing any real signs of relief. I really, really hope we do not live through the horrors of war. With NYC Emergency Management releasing a video about what to do after a nuclear event, it makes you wonder.
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