I have a phone at work. I couldn’t tell you my extension, nor the company’s main number. Several of the people with desks near me have been with the company for years, and none of them know the number or their extension, either.

Starting yesterday, though, some recruiting company beat me to figuring out my own phone number, and has been calling me repeatedly trying to place candidates with me. They don’t seem to care at all that we’re not a .NET shop, not hiring*, that even if we were, calling my department wouldn’t make any sense, or that I wouldn’t be involved in the hiring process at all even if the Systems department decided to hire programmers.

The first time I was trying to help the caller, thinking it was maybe an important call or something. Only when I realized the call was going nowhere did I start to get annoyed. And then he asked if I would mind if he put me on hold. Before I could say that I did, in fact, mind, I was on hold. So I hung up, and then discovered from my coworkers that recruiters rank somewhere in between spammers and rapists on the totem pole.

So I got another call this morning, and today I was a little more curt. After reiterating—repeatedly—that I have nothing to do with the hiring process, and that we weren’t even hiring for the position she was talking about, I said something like “I’m sorry, but I really don’t have the time to talk about this any further.”

“Oh, did I catch you in the middle of a fire or something?”

I confused her by replying, “Pretty much, yeah.”

But before I could hang up, and with her apparently convinced that I was in a burning building, she asked, “Well, before you go, do you think that, if you were hiring, the candidate I described is someone you would hire?”

Yes. If my office were ever on fire, and the company had decided to put me, their junior systems administrator, in charge of hiring a senior Ruby (on Linux) developer, even though we’re not looking for one*, I would definitely hire the .NET developer you’re pitching.

* Actually, we probably are. But we’re not telling the recruiters this, because then they’d call even more.

Reporters have gotten the White House Communications Agency to pretty much admit that the not-so-secret “codenames” they assign to the President and the First Family are pretty much totally pointless and arbitrary.

Obama is Renegade. And I can’t help but wonder… Isn’t a renegade a lot like a maverick?

I think I mentioned, at least in passing, that I bought an iPhone a few weeks ago. Here’s an early review.

In short, I’d give it mixed reviews. It’s pretty slick. But the little extras that initially sold me on the iPhone aren’t things I use often. Visual voicemail is a good idea, but I don’t use it often. Google Maps is slick, but it’s not good at turn-by-turn stuff, which could replace an expensive GPS. The web browser really has nothing else in it’s league, though. I can load normal pages, which look the same as if they were on a PC. Scrolling and zooming is amazing.

It charges over USB, a big plus. (And it comes with a wall wart adapter too.) It’s not a standard USB cable, but it is the normal iPod cable, so it’s easy enough to replace.

The keypad takes some getting use to. I’m really a fan of tactile response and physical buttons. The OSD keypad is big, though. I’m getting better at it, but it still reajiees thY…. See, that’s a pet peer. Peeve. It gets you into a string of it detecting every keypress accurately, and suddenly your text is garbage. It sometime tries to guess your words, which is often accurate but sometimes has amusing results. But often it’s annoying mrs TVA. Amusing. See!?

AT&T has better coverage in be rural areas I use it on than did Verizon. However, Verizon seems to be the only one trying to bring 3G to New Hampshire. My plan is about $70/month for 450 minutes and unlimited data. This is absurd, but all the other plans at competitors are comparable.

All around it’s slick, but it has some things that annoy me. One is openness. I could do MIDI ringtones on my Treo, for example. Not so here, where you’re heavily steered into buying them. The App Store is nice, but it’s lame that there’s no way to “sideload” your own programs: unless you jailbreak it (bye bye warranty), you can only get apps through Apple. It’s my freaking phone!

With my Treo, I could easily use it in the car, as I didn’t have to look. Here there’s no buttons to feel while you keep your eyes on the road. I miss that.

All in all, I’m not disappointed, but I’m not in total love, either.