Video killed the radio star, and my beard.

Whenever I head west for a ski week I always grow a beard. We established a tradition in college that it was bad luck to shave on a ski trip and I'm superstitous so I've stuck with it. Last year in March I shaved my head as a cancer fundraiser for the St. Baldrick's Foundation so I thought I would up the ante this year by growing an epic beard that I could also shave as part of the fundraising deal.

Now my plan is falling apart. I was contacted by Taiwan HR yesterday that my "new boss" in Taiwan wants to have a VIDEO conference with me while we are waiting for the paperwork to go through so he can talk to me more specifically about what I'll be doing once I arrive.

What is it with Taiwan and the whole "visual" thing? Every job application my wife has submitted requires a photograph to go with it. Obviously, the American response is one of concern of privacy, if it was in America, I would assume they just don't want to hire fat or old people, right? Any insight would be appreciated.

But my issue is more of actually executing this video conference. We don't have this infrastructure built in to our workplace. I have a webcam on my personal laptop but the boss in Taiwan doesn't use Skype or any other web based chat software. We use MS Communicator on our work laptops for chat but I can't install my webcam on my work laptop because I'm locked out from making any modifications.

The suggestion was that I contact someone in US HR or IT to solve this problem. Luckily this was not proposed over the phone because I'm not sure I would have been able to choke back the laughter. I have attempted both and have gotten nowhere, yet. I think I might know someone in IT who will violate the International Creed of Information Technology and help. Hopefully his boss doesn't catch wind of this plot; I don't want to get him in trouble.

So back to the beard...if the technology side of this pans out I will shave the beard for the video conference as I don't want to appear homeless, though the backup could be a job as a Derelicte model.