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Diaryland is da bomb I just *have* to tell you how much this all sucks. Who're these other people he's writing about? Who's the freak writing this, anyway? What's gone before. What's going on right now? Where do *you* visit on the web? What're you building right now?


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Another smart-assed remark from Mike
It's a living (maybe)
15:30:00 on 2000-01-28

Remeron ® Day 22 Remeron ®

Feeling:

My mood seems to have evened out a little bit, if only because I don't have enough time to actually sit down and cogitate on how much life sucks.

The medication is still wiping me out. Sometimes I can't afford to sleep a "good eight hour night." However, I set my wind-up alarm clock to wake me, and it doesn't. I need to get a digital alarm clock set up again, because persistence is definitely better than sheer loudness for a couple minutes in the act of waking me from my stupor.

Current thing I have a 'tude about:

I'm going to throttle the next person who asks me, "how is your new job? Do you think you're going to like it there? What will you be doing?" Urk.
It was easy enough to find this place during the middle of the workday when nobody is on the freeways. It's in the next office park over from someplace I worked about six years ago.

Wednesday I am whizzing along northbound on the West Loop past Transco Tower going to interview for this job. I didn't ask a lot of questions, I figured, as usual, they'd tell me everything I want to know in the interview and if they didn't, I'd just ask. No problem, so let's schedule it.

I'm looking on it more as a dry run; I go, I get back into the swing of interviewing, a process which I hate with a passion. I don't hit it off with many interviewers because either (a) I go in and am intimidated, or (b) I really need a job at that moment and probably have that air of desperation about me or, (c) I end up intimidating them or (d) the job sounds stupid and the person prattles on incessantly and I start to look bored (it's quite an involuntary reaction, believe me).

So I go in with no preconceptions, even though I'm pretty stressed because of the ordeal I went through getting ready.


I spent a fair portion of the morning wandering around trying to get ready, simply because I couldn't find most of the things I needed for the interview. First, I looked for my dress shoes. They were nowhere to be found, which is probably reasonable to expect, since I hadn't worn them since my paternal grandfather's funeral.

I discovered them finally, which is good. Where I discovered them wasn't, though: at the bottom of a pile of books. Heavy sigh.

They were a little dusty, somewhat scuffed and very crinkled. No problem, I think to myself, I'll knock the dust off with a rag, polish them, put them in front of the exhaust vents of the fridge to dry for a half hour and everything is gold.

Yeah, if you can find the shoe polish.

Domestic tip #479: vaseline can be handy for shining up your shoes and covering up scuff marks. (I don't know what it does to them long-term, though.)

That's cool. So let's iron.

Realize that I hate to iron. My modus operandi is to take something out of the closet and put it on. Yeah, that's right, no ironing. I'm a G.E.E.K., not G.Q., you know? Disheveled and comfy is my trademark. (Just like how I have a beard because I can trim it ever ten days or so, or shave every day (sometimes twice). You make the call.)

My first obstacle is that at our house most items have a home, and that's wherever it gets left. Lately, the ironing board stays up and it's become a piece of furniture, not entirely unlike a bookcase, so everything gets left on it. I unload it into Moogie's recliner, because that's who most everything on it belongs to.

So I begin to iron. You know that you can iron a lot of wrinkles into a shirt, too? I haven't done this in a while. Sigh.

Iron the pants? Well, they still have a good crease, but they have hanger wrinkles. Solution? Throw them into the dryer to get the wrinkles out (along with my jacket, it'll make it toasty since the temperature is sliding around here).

Finally, I'm getting ready to leave and I gather up printed copies of my r�sum�, because the print on it is relatively small (I don't like multi-page r�sum�s) and it doesn't always fax well, so I like to take some crisp, laser-printed copies with me.

Of course, I need something to carry them in. Only trick is I can't find my portfolio that I usually carry them in.

A frantic search ensues, and finally I find it in a box of books I got at a bookstore in an outlet mall on the Gulf Freeway down near Santa Fe or someplace else in Galveston County. (Books will be the bane of me yet.) Of course, it's got lots of book-dings in it. Look at watch, heavy sigh.

Domestic tip #480: a rag drenched in hot water and then wringed out will spring back the padded vinyl most of the way, and then just hold a residually-dinged side in toward your body at the interview.

Fair enough.

Let's go and be frustrated.


I get there about five minutes before my interview on Wednesday afternoon. I walk in and tell the receptionist I'm there to see the HR lady, whereupon she hands me a clipboard with some paperwork to fill out (you haven't seen my handwriting lately, have you? I think to myself) and they will be with me in a moment.

I take it and sit down and begin to scribble pretty much verbatim what I have listed on my r�sum�, since I read somewhere it's considered bad practice to just write "see r�sum�" on the page where they want to know your work and job experience. Heavy sighs are becoming the order of the day. For fun I slip one of those crisply-printed r�sum�s into the stack of paper.

Finally, an early-thirty-something with a slight beer gut and dressed in jeans and a pullover shirt wanders into the receptionist's area and starts looking at my paperwork, remarking, "hmmm... okay. This guy's got a lot of experience." I'm standing (like most waiting rooms, the centers of the seats are collapsed inward, uncomfortable, and awkward to get up from, so I just stood), facing away from that area looking at one of the prints they have in the lobby with alarm bells in my head going, "warning, warning, that 'overqualified' word is about to be used in this interview."

He comes out, and introduces himself, catching me trying to reorganize the paper in my portfolio. I grin, say "ahhh, you caught me!"

He smiles back and says, "yeah, I see how you are."

We walk to the back and take over one of the offices there, and sit down. He starts to talk. "Well, looking at your r�sum�, I don't know where to start." But he does, anyway. He tells me about the company; basically, they support this memory-hungry financial DOS application. I'd only be doing tech support, doing simple things like helping people set the program up, fix simple conflicts (like tweaking their setups to free up memory), modem problems, printer problems, etc. They have a knowledge base for issues, too, like most software support departments. It sounds more or less like cake.

Instead of interviewing me, he keeps looking at my r�sum� and finally we just start to chat about support issues and field service and end users and such. I have a rapport with this guy; apparently, it's something to do with the brotherhood of techno-geeks. I know the secret handshake, so this is working out like magic. Or maybe it has to do with this mysterious air of confidence that I have no idea where it came from, but it's there nonetheless, making this interview so much more comfortable.

"Okay," he says as we start to close out the interview, "you'll probably hear from HR... later today, tomorrow, Friday... sometime soon."

"Okay, thanks," I say with a smile, give him the requisite Firm Handshake�, and leave.

On the way home I'm thinking, oh, geez. Software support. Whiny users. The pay generally sucks. This is software that's pretty seasonal, so this is temp work. Do I really want to do this?

When I got home the message on my answering machine from my student loan financier wondering why I hadn't sent a payment yet (yes, I've been rationing my money) answered that for me.


The phone rings right after 8:00 PM. I'm sitting at Gillian looking through my image collections for photos for this other site I'm working on and trying to watch "Star Trek: Voyager".

"Michael!" It's Moogie.

"Yeah?"

"Telephone!"

"Who is it? I'm trying to watch Star Trek."

"It's about a job."

I roll my eyes. Who's calling me at this time of night to talk about a job? And why is she yelling, is this a barn or something?

I go down the hall, and it's somebody talking to the answering machine. She disturbed me for this?

After "Voyager" I checked the message. They wanted me to come to a training class Thursday night, just call and confirm, and I got the job.

I guess I'm committed.


I ought to be committed. Committed for going to the training class in this weather.

The forecast for Thursday was thunderstorms and cold weather. They weren't lying, either. I left home at 4:00 to go to my training class at 6:00 PM. 6:00 is not a happy time to have to be in that part of town when I have to cross so much of Houston to get there.

I don't like to drive in traffic as it is, and in weather? No thanks. I was coming around the Loop and took the Meyerland exit when I saw that everybody was stopping when curving onto the West Loop. I'll just take Post Oak north through the Galleria area, and connect up with Post Oak North, I figured.

Idiot, idiot, idiot.

So I wander up South Rice (which goes nowhere near Rice, I wonder why it's called Rice Boulevard, or they named after the same person in Houston history, like the Cullens, et al? No idea). I cut across Westheimer to Post Oak. I turn onto Post Oak.

I sit in gridlock for 45 minutes.

I start to curve off to the right.

I see the West Loop.

I realize that Post Oak doesn't turn into North Post Oak.

I sit in gridlock for another 45 minutes trying to get back onto the service road of the West Loop.

Two hours. It took me two hours in traffic Hell to get to this place. To make it worse, I finally realized that they'd never told me how much I was getting paid. Hmm.

At least it was nice to hear all of "All Things Considered".


I wander into the lobby and am presented with yet more paperwork to fill out. I oblige, as there is only one other person there, a woman about my age with a few acne scars, a big briefcase-looking thing that she's using as a purse, and indeterminate heritage although she's definitely got at least one parent from the Orient. Yup, we're all geeks here, I think to myself.

6:00 comes and goes. At 6:05 the next of our number comes in, and fills out his paperwork. It turns out that he works in the next office park over. Even more humorously, it's the same place I worked those six years ago. He wants to trade war stories. I couldn't be less interested, I don't want the nightmares

6:15. 6:30. 6:40. The fourth never shows. Brilliant!

This skinny guy with long hair and a quasi-beard-goatee-thing comes out to tell us that he'll be training us and he's about to take us back, the guy who hasn't shown is just going to have to catch up. He reminds me a lot of Marcus, the Ranger attach� on Babylon 5, except not as muscular for sure. However, they both think they're comedians. (I don't bring up the similarity, though, because he probably knows B5 by heart, too; his humor is based off obscure technology and media references, which makes him passe to geeks and opaque to normals.)

Finally, when they're about to take us back anyway, he comes in. They shove a clipboard of paperwork in his hands and we go back to "the pit," where the actual support goes on.

They need to put up some wall decorations and get some acoustic tile for the ceilings, it's too loud in there. It looks like a laid back place, and nobody seems terribly busy (it's early in the season, I take it).

The training is relatively fast paced, and not very difficult; this is one of those jobs where once you do the same thing twice, it's all second-nature; a couple days into it and you know what you're doing. A trained monkey could do the work, just like when I did tech support for an ISP, but a monkey can't occasionally pull an obscure solution out of his ass because he'd been there with another product, which is why they need us. This is cake.

He hands out manuals and a CD-R with the software burned on it (a paltry few megabytes, to be sure). He wants us to put it on our machines at home and play with it, and read the manuals. I haven't, although I may this weekend (I don't want to start on regular status until Monday, I have too much to wrap up over the weekend, since this is rather sudden).

Still, nobody knows what we're getting paid. This bothers me.


So, for at least a while I have work, since this is a temp gig. I'll work evenings, and I can keep looking for something more in line with what I want to do (and probably more lucrative). My confidence in the interview was pretty inspiring, actually; these pills are good for something after all, huh?

I feel kind of good that I didn't really start effectively looking until Sunday, and I am working already. That's a decent feeling.

The drive bothers me, though. Also, I wonder when the hours are. I have no idea, and as far as anybody can tell, neither do they.

I've got a pile of stuff to finish up in my Copious Free Time, now. This is going to interfere with me seeing Gurugrrl, and really interfere with seeing Crafty and others.

This place keeps calling leaving a message for me to call them back about being their network admin (where do I learn about Novell in a hurry?). I don't know if I should even give it a shot, or what. I mean, this job I have now is a temp job, so I don't feel bad about walking in and telling them I found something else. The trick is that I look at the site of this place that keeps calling me, and it looks like it's definitely a suit-oriented atmosphere. The same old conflicting doubts come into play.

I guess I'll just have to roll the dice and see what hits.

restlessmind


Ancient history:
2013-03-01"You'll be stone dead in a moment!"
2007-08-07I covet fuck you money
2007-07-16My own long, dark tea-time of the soul
2007-07-11My internet experience is lacking
2007-07-10Coincidence



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