mscleanslate

I wish I could tell you that the interview the other day went fabulously and that I am once again gainfully employed. Alas, such is not the case (as you might have figured out from the county clock on the sidebar).

I’m not sure what went wrong. I really thought that things, while a tad weird, went ok.  I met with someone who works in the office but not really for the company I’d be working for. The interviewer was an outside consultant who had no HR experience and seemingly no interview experience.  I did the best I could given the situation to try and sell myself as an excellent candidate for the position but have heard nothing which I am guessing means that they are no longer interested in me. I was told by the interviewer that I should hear, likely that day, from my initial contact person.  Well, it’s the end of the week and… nothing.

Ok, so… gotta move on.  But really, how hard would it have been for the initial contact to shoot me an email saying “you know, we’ve decided to go a different direction”.  So, yes, I am disappointed and feel confused about what went wrong.

I have also found a trend on applications that I am not enjoying.  Applications asking for graduation dates which makes it pretty easy for them to decide that you are too old for them to consider hiring. Not impressed, folks.  Age discrimination is allegedly illegal. And yet, they find “weasel” ways around it.. like asking the year you graduated from high school.

Also, I was contacted by an agency that said they were going to send me an email and then I heard NOTHING from them. Again, just tell me you aren’t interested so we can both move on. Hrumph.

I should get to bed now, it’s going on 2:30AM and I think my insomnia is considering giving me a break and letting me sleep…

I have an interview tomorrow. I had a phone interview with this company last week and tomorrow will be Round One of the face-to-face interviews.  Other than a couple of rejections and a couple of dead ends, there hasn’t been much forward progress, so I am looking forward to this but, of course, have some trepidation, as I always do, going into a situation where I am uncertain of the outcome.

I am thinking a great deal about appearance related things. I have put a clear coat of polish on my nails and I am agonizing over what to wear, what do do about makeup and the like.  I am just not very good at the feminine arts as I have generally regarded them as a waste of time over the years.  I know that not being the pretty one has cost me a job more than once. And I got one job because the boss’s wife was a jealous woman and the boss wanted to “hire someone so unattractive that (my wife) could not complain about her”.

So, think good thoughts in my direction as I head off to the interview tomorrow!  I’ll let you know if I make it to Round 2 or if this will be “Game Over”… at least for this position.

When I am not working, I try to manage my time well. I know that I must devote time to the job search but I also know that sitting in front of a computer 10+ hours a day with no break will do me no favors physically.

I try to do my hardcore search activities Monday, Wednesday and Friday and then Tuesday and Thursday I use to do errands, work on housework and attempt to keep myself from becoming a completely worthless lump.  That doesn’t mean I don’t do any searching on Tuesday & Thursday, just that I diversify my activities more on those days.

I’ve already reached the point that I have no idea what day it is. I try to mostly take weekends off from the search only because getting burned out and being “at work” all of the time is not healthy.  It’s not healthy when you are working for an employer and it’s not healthy when you are “freelancing” (or searching for a new job).

So, I am keeping quite busy. I have an errand to run outside of the house tomorrow, not far from home.  I think I will try to get in a workout tomorrow, as well.  I’ve gone from walking 5000+ steps a day to around a  thousand and feel like I need to be more active.  And I have a bunch of shredding I need to do (I save it for “down time” and haven’t gotten to it for quite some time…. way past due!)

It feels weird that it is Sunday night and I am not mentally planning my workweek. I have things on my personal agenda for the week, to be sure, but it’s weird that I won’t have to get up in the morning and I won’t have to worry about the things that I normally worry about on a weekday.

The problem I have with being off work (aside from the lack of a paycheck) is that I need to have a great deal of self-discipline to use my time well and to get things accomplished. So many shiny distractions.  But, I have worked as a contract employee enough that I am sortve used to having to have an office mindset even while at home.

Still, I feel a certain lack of purpose when I am not working and I am more than a little worried about a number of small things and worried that I am going to have a big fight over unemployment (because even though they TOLD me I was being laid off, this would certainly not be the first time that someone I worked for was less than truthful). And I am hoping that I will get a good reference from them, but if there is a kerfuffle about unemployment, that will definitely make things weird.

Well, I have a few things to get done before bed, so I’d best get to doing them. Goodnight!

About five minutes to 5PM this afternoon, the bossman called me into his office and I was pink slipped.  Budget stuff… Lack of work…  A familiar tune to me (sadly).  

People will tell you that they like working with numbers because numbers don’t lie.  Well, I don’t know what numbers they are working with but I assure you that numbers DO lie….or at least they are not clear, straightforward representations of the truth.  There are RULES to numbers and you have to work within the rules and even then, sometimes, the numbers are not what they seem to be. They are not a straightforward representation of the real picture. And for someone who is not a native number wrangler (and I am NOT a native number wrangler, I eye numbers very warily) the world of finance remains somewhat a mystery to me.  Oh sure, for a year and a half I have been making things work but I seldom understand how or why what I do works.  Often, I know what the desired outcome is… all I need to do is get the numbers available to represent the answer I know is expected.  It’s not ALWAYS that easy, but there are times that it is and I just have to figure out what goes where in the occasion to produce the desired outcome.  I am getting a little better at being able to look at a spreadsheet and figure out what I need to fix in order to produce the desired outcome.  Sometimes I don’t get it at all.  Those are the worst because then I have to go ask the boss questions and she IS a native number wrangler (no, I don’t understand why someone who is good with numbers hired me to work with the numbers when there are SO many other things about the business that would suit my talents better. *sigh

That said, I stay with the job because I am still learning things and don’t get yelled at too much.  I do wish sometimes that I could record interactions so that when I am told to do something a particular way and then 2 months later when I’m asked why I am doing something a certain way and, by the way, that way is all wrong, I could pull out the recording of being told to do it that way.  Oh well, every job has it’s flaws, right?

Nothing overly interesting happening on the work front lately, which is why I’ve not posted. I have, however, started taking mass transit to work. For me, this is a train ride and a bus ride. I’ve been fortunate enough to get a ride to the train station in the mornings and home from the station at night, which has made the whole thing infinitely more tolerable.

The train part of the journey has actually been fine. I don’t know if the train is still a novelty to me which is why I don’t mind it or if it is because it usually moves along pretty quickly so I don’t have time to be annoyed. The bus part of the trip is arduous on the best days. Monday it was pretty awful because a bus was late and all of the people who would normally take the earlier bus PLUS all the people who would normally take the bus that I ride, ALL packed into the bus. The bus I usually ride usually has no empty seats. With two busloads of people packed in, there were people standing in the aisle from the very front of the bus to the very back of the bus. Fortunately, everyone had a pretty “we’re all in the same boat, so let’s make the best of it” attitude about it, which made things nicer/easier. It always helps when people aren’t surly about situations. We all (eventually) got where we were going but it is not an experience I hope to have to endure again (but I am sure that I will… because buses are late all the time, it’s just the way mass transit works).

Since I had something I needed to do after work tonight, I took the car today. I stopped for coffee this morning….because I could. It was lovely. No one coughing on me, no people talking loudly on their cell phones, just me and the morning radio show guys. I got to work a little early, even. I was surprised that there was no one parked in what had been “my” spot, back when I was driving every day.

I’m off work tomorrow, which means I have a long weekend. It will be glorious to not have to answer to the beck and call of an alarm in the morning. I have a mile-long to do list and we will see what I actually end up getting done. If you celebrate Easter, I hope that you have a lovely Easter.

Just when you think you have things figured out, something weird happens. A friend of mine interviewed for a job about a month ago and didn’t hear from the company and assumed that the opportunity was no longer available (a reasonable assumption)… So imagine friend’s surprise when the phone rings today and the company wants to do a second interview! Follow-up on this will be done (friend is traveling for business right now but company expressed interest in following up when availability is more readily known).

Have you ever registered for a seminar that turned out to not be what you thought it would be? That was my experience today. It wasn’t a BAD seminar, it was just not what was expected and it’s a little annoying when the seminar leader gets surly when you have information to share with the class after they’ve asked for questions. I also find the process of being a VIP member and being asked for identification a little maddening. Most of the time being a VIP means you don’t have to be bothered with proving that you are not the riff raff. Oh well.

I need to figure out something to do about my footwear. The shoes I wear on a daily basis are just not really suitable, but dress shoes are not appropriate, either. Need to find some sort of happy medium.

The rest of the week will be busy. I need to go grocery shopping after work tomorrow night as I have an obligation on Thursday night. I suppose that I could wait until Friday but just getting it over with tomorrow would be better.

Tired and sore tonight. Should try to get to bed early. Won’t happen, but I should try.

As is usual when you have a week that is a day short of a full work week, this past week seemed very long. And the next three weeks are going to be absolute insanity as I have classes and other things going on so I have three 3-day weeks in a row coming up and there is no reduction in workload so I will be incredibly busy (and likely incredibly stressed out).

I had every intent of finishing up the 1099’s this week (you have to put a 1096 “cover sheet” on them and mail them to the Infernal Revenue Service (spelling intentional)). However, there are still people who have not responded to my urgent requests for W-9 forms (that I have been bugging them about for 2 months now) and without the information I can’t finish up what I need to finish up. I am, as you might imagine, somewhat less than pleased.

I hope to get back here at some point or points during the next three weeks, but if I don’t it is only because I am insanely busy and I will then have to come back and write a long post catching you up!