Unemployed in Europe Hobbled by Lack of Technology Skills, The New York Times reports. They can’t tweet, don’t send selfies, but just want to feed and clothe their fellows, an outdated and selfish desire.
All across Europe, companies are eager to hire several million people to oversee Facebook pages, manage servers, and think up new ways to put the same information in the cloud. But several million Europeans can’t or won’t take those jobs because of an egoistic belief that their decades of training in the food and hospitality sector are somehow superior.
Chef Pierre Huitres has wasted the last twenty years of his life perfecting his cooking skills and new preparations for dishes such as foie gras a la papaye, homard sous vapeur a l’oignons persillees, and approximately 300 varieties of omelettes. Now his restaurant is closing because Google bought the building and wants to replace the restaurant, Le Coq Volant, with a fast food outlet so that “the employees can get back to their cubicles and create more search terms to sell.”
Similarly, Patrice Glace, who has also wasted decades learning every nuance of all three hundred and something French cheeses as well as an equal number of foreign makes (although when asked by TPV whether she knew much about Cheese Whiz, she gave an extremely Gallic shrug and could only give one single characteristic, repeating “merde, merde, merde….”). Now her cremerie, Le Faisan Dançant, is closing to be replaced by France’s first “sept-onze”, a 7-11 recruited by Facebook to “help our French employees find everything they need under one toit,” as Kevin Smith, Facebook’s manager of foreign personnel, put it. “I just learned that word. It means one roof,” he explained, adding, “but it sounds dirty doesn’t it?”
Pierre and Patrice have both been offered several positions in IT, but they seem to spurn the opportunity. Only Guillaume Defenestré, a farmer from the little town of Où, in the Dordogne, where he works as a gavageur, has taken a job in IT. Guillaume has spent two decades shoving a metal funnel, the gavage, down the throats of geese to fatten up their livers for the French delicacy, foie gras. He has been hired by Microsoft to sell cloud space to people who don’t really need it. “Guillaume is a miracle,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. “He’s a great salesperson. He can make people swallow anything.”
Not just people, of course, but as jobs go begging across Europe, Europeans may learn, as the Microsoft person explained it,
“what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” When TPV asked what that could possibly mean, he said, “IT is like a goose. If you just fatten it up, Europeans will gobble it down.”
We said our au revoirs.
For an Americanized version of this bad news, go to http://nyti.ms/Koteov.
red link? You should put some kind of a warning that the first link brings readers to the NYT article – nothing funny there.
I liked Kevin Smith and “but it sounds dirty doesn’t it?”
gavageur? really? I had to look it up.
technical point – merde isn’t an active ingredient in Cheese Whiz (just look at the color, if the name isn’t enough of a hint) anyway, there is a trace of no.2 but only for texture and fragrance – secrets of international trade forbid me from saying more.