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Looking for work is a full time job, or, When it rains, it pours?
21:00:00 on 2000-04-25
It's cool, I thought. You have two messages on the machine for when you get home.
I went in, and the receptionist asked me if I had filled out an application. I looked at her funny. It'd been a long time since I'd gone somewhere and they wanted an actual application form filled out, rather than just my resum� with some annotations in the margin about social security numbers and dates of birth or whatever. I was wondering if next I'd get a paper hat.
Nope - but she gave me a name tag. (Okay, so it was a visitors' badge.)
I was having the wrong attitude, borne of getting up too early for how late I'd stayed up.
I needed the job though, so I sat down on the group 'W' bench (more attitude) and put some of my trademark illegible scrawl on the application form, or at least all I could remember (here and there I couldn't remember an address, a phone number, a name... 'eh). After I finished I handed it back to the receptionist and she called upstairs for the woman I was interviewing with.
After a few minutes a lady in her mid-to-late forties who'd gotten in a losing fight with a peroxide bottle came down. I think she keyed in on my thoughts, but I said nothing about it; I greeted her and we walked to the lunchroom since they didn't have a conference room available.
Once we sat down I realized that the nervous sound in her voice was just her manner. So much for intuition, I thought to myself. She was a really nice lady, though, she lives about three miles from me, and so we had some shared experience right there.
She started to look at my resum� and told me a little bit about the job. It had a lot of presentation work in Powerpoint, and some Excel work (and my Excel is fairly weak - I can plug stuff in, build some formulas and graph things, but pulling data from databases or other worksheets? Forget it). I decided to just be honest with her since she was so nice and tell her that that was a little outside my area, and anyway, it was an entry-level position, which meant I probably couldn't afford to take it.
"Well, wait a minute, though." She got up and walked over to a message board on the wall of the lunchroom, over near the windows. I wondered what she was doing, but I decided to just let it go - she's the one doing the interview, after all, and I have nowhere pressing to be.
She came back with two sheets of paper that turned out to be postings on the vacancy board. One was extremely new, looking for a communications coordinator. Drafting marketing materials, technical writing, web content production, desktop publishing, several years' experience. "This sounds like it's you," she said. I looked it over, and I had to agree.
She told me that she'd take it over to the marketing department herself so they could consider me for that position, and then she started in trying to give me items to "sell" me, telling me about the benefits and tuition reimbursement (since she commented on how I had three-plus years towards two degrees) and flex time.
It was scary. She closed out the interview telling me she was "so sorry" she had "wasted [my] time" with this other position, but I told her it was no imposition, and I appreciated the opportunity to speak with her and her taking my resum� to the other department. (That sounds nasty, but that's not how she meant it - she meant it seriously, like she felt silly for calling me in for an entry-level position.)
I left with a whole new attitude. Weird how life is like that, huh?
I drove home down the Gulf Freeway to the Beltway and whizzed along towards home faster that I should be, probably, thinking that it didn't seem like such a bad place. It wasn't hard to get to. It wasn't in a great part of town, but nobody said I had to live there. Everybody seemed pretty friendly. Hmmm.
Once I got home and got comfortable, I sat down and opened up Word and started writing thank-you notes to the men I interviewed with the day before at the B2B company and put in snailmail.
I made sure to write one to her, too.
More people called me. One called, saying he was returning my call about employment. I only actually called one place, another clutch thing. It's an answering service. The benefits of working there? I can work part-time and nights/weekends to make a few bucks while I look for something else. What do I have to lose? I decided to put off calling them back until I called the others.
I called the next, a woman from "SomebodyAndSomebody" as I call them, because I couldn't understand what she said on the message she left. She said it the way that you say anything that is cumbersome, but you say it so often that it becomes second nature - it just becomes one word. One that I couldn't understand.
When I called she couldn't talk to me then, so she asked me to call her back tomorrow morning at 8:30 or 9:00 AM. Sigh. I don't even know what sort of position it's for.
Finally, I decided to check to see who the third message is from - it's from the guys who I interviewed with last Thursday, the consulting company. He wanted me to call him back before 5:00 PM, and it was 4:38 PM already. I called, and ended up having to leave a voice mail, but he called me back after just a couple minutes.
"Hi, Michael," the recruiter said. I bristled a little - he never did ask me if I preferred Mike or Michael. Sigh. "They looked at your resum�, and they're very interested. They would like to set an interview with you first thing in the morning."
That's quick.
So first thing tomorrow morning I'm going to Greenway Plaza to interview. My dance card stays filled, apparently. He said that he knows traffic coming from Pearland can be heavy sometimes, so once I get some time there under my belt they'll probably give me some slack to come in earlier or later, as long as I "get in the face time and do the work," so apparently it's long-term, and it's business casual to work there, something I was worried about. (Business casual isn't exciting to me, but I guess it's better than coat and tie, which I wouldn't accept, anyway.)
So now, at 7:30 PM, I am playing phone tag with the guy from the answering service now. I don't know why - I guess to cover my bases. Worst comes to worst, I go to work there a while. Work brings money, which is definitely something I need.
It's remarkable that I got up this morning, was going to be home at noon, and was going to work on Kirk's site. Rather, I'm running around doing everything except that, because I just don't have time to do it. I hope things settle down a little bit soon - I really want to get his site done and out the door.
Also, I was thinking about approaching Xander (who I need to call) with a proposition. I was thinking about asking him if he wanted to contact various organizations in his neck of the woods (the Hill Country, near enough Austin to say you're in the "Austin area," but not close enough to really go there a lot) and see if any of the companies there want any websites. I was thinking about offering him 20% of whatever people he refers pay, upon them paying me. It puts money in my pocket, puts some in his, and gets another site out there with my name on it. How can I lose?
(I need to call him, anyway - he never sent me a 1099 for my taxes.)
I showed up for my interview at the aviation company with low expectations and no intentions of taking any jobs, because I wasn't really excited about it - I looked back in my archive of sent resum�s and faxes and emails, and discovered it was for a clerical position, one of those "clutch" resum�s you send out just so you can have some modicum of income while you try to figure out your next move.
Sorry...
Ancient history:2013-03-01 "You'll be stone dead in a moment!" 2007-08-07 I covet fuck you money 2007-07-16 My own long, dark tea-time of the soul 2007-07-11 My internet experience is lacking 2007-07-10 Coincidence
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