I found it sort of poetic that, now that I have a job, I got up this morning and found an email waiting for me from the university -- rejecting me for the position I'd interviewed and had done the presentation for.
"It was meant to be," Daisy said.
It's fine, really. As good of an interview/presentation as I gave, it's not like I expected to be offered the university position. I'm sure, eventually, that if I want to get back into academia, I'll have the chance. For now, however? I have to focus on the hand I've been dealt, and that means accepting and working the job that I was offered, and for the moment I am perfectly happy with doing that.
I also think it's somewhat amusing that I expected this, and bought those new shoes for said job a few days before I actually got it.
"When it comes to the training," I asked Daisy tonight on her lunch hour, "am I allowed to wear what I want, or is it all the same sort of 'business casual' that I'd have to wear every day when I'm there normally?"
"It's the business casual," she said, looking at me as if I was nuts. "They'll send you home from training if you walk in there wearing shorts and a t-shirt. And if you get sent home during training, you generally get fired."
I looked down at myself. I was wearing a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. Looks like I'm going to have to put away a lot of that stuff soon.
"Well, I'm glad I took out all of my collared shirts and polos now," I said. "I figured I'd wear the same sorts of stuff I wore to my interviews, like the purple shirt I wore last week and all of the nice pants Dad gave me -- stuff like that."
"Yeah," she said. "That's fine. Shirts with collars, slacks, dressier shoes. No ties necessary; nobody there wears ties."
So, basically the same outfits I wore when I was on the main campus as a professor and wanted to look somewhat impressive. Okay.
This is good, as I don't know where any of my ties are. They're boxed away with the rest of my clothing that I won't need until winter; I only unpacked the stuff that I knew I'd wear over the summer...which was basically my t-shirts and button-up shirts, shorts, and my sandals. Oh, and underwear, of course.
I know roughly what my work schedule will be once I start the job, barring any unforeseen changes, and it seems reasonable and decent enough. It's actually (honestly) the best schedule I could ask for, and I hope it remains that once I actually start. I'm not going to mention it here for fear that I may jinx things. Because yeah, even though I am an educated man in his thirties, I still get somewhat superstitious about things like that.
Daisy and I long ago had a long discussion about what would happen once I got a job, especially a job that was stable and full-time work, and it boiled down to what we could and would do with our finances. I told her that first and foremost, our priority was paying the monthly household bills (obviously) which will be made much, much easier with two incomes. The second priority was to pay down our credit cards -- all of them -- as much as we could. We've been doing this now, yes, but we're still using said cards more than we're paying them off, and once I start bringing in another paycheck every payday, we won't have to worry about that as much.
The third priority we discussed was to finally get the table and chairs we need (as we will now be able to afford them) and get a larger television for the living room. My TV was fine for the small living room I had in Newton; 22 inches was perfectly fine for that place. Here? With a living room probably three times the size of that one? Yeeeeeah, not so much. We need something bigger and easier to see/hear from across the room.
The last priority is to get me a newer car. That's a big priority, yes, and it's the most expensive of all (obviously). We've discussed it, and I've even had discussions with Dad about vehicles, as Daisy's parents recently got a new, really nice SUV. However, the car has to be the last priority as it's currently infinitely more important that we pay down our credit cards first and can sock away money into our savings account once or twice a month. Well, unless the Monte Carlo dies sometime soon, anyway.
However, a lot of this has to be done, well, rather quickly. Why? Because once November rolls around, my year of student loan forbearance will be up. And with this job, I'm pretty sure I'll make more than it takes to qualify for it again. That means said forbearance will end, and I'll immediately have to start paying off monthly student loan bills. Which, obviously, I don't want to have to do right after I've started a job, but it's relatively unavoidable. So we have to do a lot of this stuff within the next few months while we can still afford to do it. We'll be a two-income household, yes, but paying student loans will take more than 1/3 of my monthly pay, I'm guessing. And if I recall correctly, forbearance goes by the yearly salary, not monthly. I cannot remember for certain, though. I'm sure I'll find out in November when it comes looming again. Daisy isn't immune to this either; while she has less to pay back in loans than I do, she's also on forbearance right now, as she applied for it a month or two after I did so that we could save money for the wedding and the move. Hers will have to be re-upped or ended eventually as well.
On the plus side? For the moment, for a while, we'll be one of those DINK families. You know, dual income, no kids. And that's exciting.
I'll find out more about the job and the schedule stuff in the next few days/weeks, I would imagine. I'm guessing they'll send out an itinerary for their new hires that will detail where they're supposed to be and when. Then again, they may just do that when one arrives for training, so who knows.
In other news, I did get to take out the Monte Carlo last night and drive it around as I'd needed to do, but the reason I did/had to wasn't a good one.
Daisy's car headlights no longer work.
No, we don't know why.
I will say this: one of them works -- the passenger side lower parking light. None of the other lights come on at all. To drive at night, she has to drive around with her high beams on (which do work) if she wants to see at all, and apparently the switch for that isn't working correctly either, as she has to hold it to keep them on instead of just hitting the switch and having them stay on. We found this out last night when she was off work and wanted to go out to pick up a few things from Walmart. We got halfway down the street before I asked, "Hon, are your lights on?"
Well, they were turned on, but they weren't working. Turn signals and hazard lights work fine, but the actual normal headlights don't. So we turned around and came home, and we took my car out. The Monte Carlo has a lot of problems and it's old, yes, but at least its damned headlights work. All of them.
When we got home she researched the problem and found out that it's fairly common, apparently -- and it could be a fuse (or several fuses) or a larger problem, such as the lights' control board (or something like that). She set up an appointment for in the morning with an auto shop that her parents and sister have used before, and we're taking it in. They also honor her extended warranty as well, which is one of the reasons she chose that place.
We don't know how much it will be to fix it. It could be a cheap fix or it could be hundreds of dollars...dollars that we don't exactly have right now. Well, we do, but we can't afford to blow all of them on the car's headlights, of all things. This is a new problem, as well; the lights were fine two or three nights ago. It's only now that they're not working correctly. Here's hoping it's something simple and cheap like fuses. Seriously.
"Well, they'll be able to tell you what it is within five seconds once they plug the computer into it," I said. "Then we'll know."
I'm going with her to the auto shop this morning to take it in; the techs there told her they'd try to fix it while we were there, but it's possible that they may need to keep it for the day. If that's the case they'll give us a ride home and I'll take her back there later to pick it up (or, conversely, take her to work tonight and pick her up in the morning if it's not done by the time her shift starts this evening). Obviously this isn't ideal for anyone involved, so we're hoping it's something simple they can fix while we're there this morning. Going by my own gut, if even one of the lights is on normally (and yes, one is), my instincts tell me it's a fuse issue. But that's just me; I could be wrong. Daisy's car is a lot newer than mine is, which is why having any problems with it whatsoever is somewhat disconcerting. It's not like either of us abuse her car -- we don't even speed in it, and she gets the oil and filters changed regularly. Hell, we just did that last week. But sometimes these things happen, I suppose, and they have to be dealt with.
"I know it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things," I told her last night, "but I know that it sucks and I know I'd be stressed out if it happened to my car. I just want you to know I understand that frustration, love."
Daisy isn't the kind of person to get stressed out about many things, let alone something so small and otherwise insignificant. She and I are very different people in that regard, as even the small things stress me out and make me twitch -- especially things that involve money and/or vehicles.
So, I suppose, we'll see what happens this morning. She also accidentally left her purse here over her lunch hour -- which has her license, wallet, and everything else in it -- so here's hoping she doesn't get pulled over on her way home this morning from work...
Thursday, July 24, 2014
New Horizons, Part I
Warning: nerdspeak ahead for most of this post, but the subject does change and I give out important news further down, so stick with me.
Last night, after at least two years of not doing it, I finally upgraded my computer from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS. In doing so, the goddamned thing crashed and the upgrade failed.
Look, I have a good computer, and I do love my Linux, but there's a lot of shit Ubuntu has done over the last several years that I really don't like, and every time I update/upgrade my OS I have to dick around with it for a good two or three hours afterwards to get all of my settings back to where they were. If I can, anyway. An upgrade from an old OS to a newer version generally disables about half of the customizations I've made over the years, as well as a good chunk of the special programs I've installed and modified (such as for gaming and for storage). This also includes the user interface, which I have to change/disable every single time I do anything. Ubuntu's default GUI is a terrible, tablet-like interface called Unity, which is difficult to navigate through, doesn't have a taskbar, and everything is done in panels. Ugh. I much prefer the GNOME 2 interface, which is the classic Linux desktop experience and the GUI that I used on every version of Linux I've ever had on my machines:
To use that classic desktop, you have to go in and specially/manually add it after every system upgrade (if it's available for your specific system, of course, which it usually is). Otherwise you're stuck using Unity. The screenshot above is a good representation of what it looks like, though that photo is a much older version of what I'm currently running.
Anyway.
I was able to download and initialize the upgrade fine, and it installed correctly, but then at the end it told me "the upgrade has been performed successfully, but there were errors." Okay, what the fuck does that mean?
At the end of any system upgrade, of course, you're prompted to restart to finish the upgrade. At least on Linux, anyhow; I don't know how it works on Mac or Windows machines, since I haven't used either one in almost ten years now. So I restarted. It brought me, as always, to the login screen. I typed in my password as always, and hit enter. Nothing happened.
Well, something happened, and that something was that the screen would go to the blank 12.04 splash screen (remember, I had just upgraded to 14.04, so that 12.04 splash screen should've been gone) ...and then it would just sit there. I could move the mouse around, but there was nothing to click on. It just sat there. I restarted several times, tried to login as a guest, tried to login under a different GUI, and nothing. Sometimes when I changed things, it would just lock up and freeze, others it would basically reset and take me back to the login screen, as if it didn't want me to do anything at all.
Okay, so whatever those errors were, they'd locked me out of my own computer.
I got out my laptop and booted it up, convinced that I'd have to download and burn a fresh image of the OS itself to install it manually, which would wipe my desktop's entire HD. This I did not want to do, obviously, as even though I'd backed up all of my data, all of my custom settings would be wiped and I'd have to go back out and get every program all over again, set them up, and reconfigure them. This was not something I wanted to do, as that takes hours and hours of tedious work.
At about this time, Daisy came home from a night out with her best friend, right at the time where I was at my most stressed and frazzled about the damn computer not wanting to just work. I very calmly and lovingly told her that I'd be out in a while, and that I needed some time/concentration to fix the damned thing, and she understood, gave me a kiss, and let me work in the dark of our computer room like some sort of mad scientist.
I downloaded the installation image and made a bootable flash drive with it, and burned an extra copy onto a blank DVD as backup -- which was a task in itself because it took me nearly an hour to find my spindle of blank DVDs after the move.
When I booted it (with the flash drive first), it gave me the option to reinstall my installation, which basically translates to repairing all of the broken bits and letting it completely redo itself. Which is what I did. An hour later I had a perfectly functioning desktop computer again, with the upgrade leaving most of my configurations and the like alone. This is a very good thing. I installed the GNOME 2 interface again, and my computer is back to normal -- faster, prettier, and completely up-to-date. There were, of course, some programs I had to re-add or re-install (Skype, Google Chrome, Dropbox, etc), but eh, it wasn't bad.
So, that's done. That was part one of my plans for "stuff I need to do around the house but haven't gotten to yet." And then Daisy and I went to bed.
Daisy, as an aside, is on a strange schedule right now. Yesterday morning, really early, she went to help Mama renew her visa. As I mentioned here in the past, Daisy's mother is a Canadian citizen, but a permanent resident here in the states (as she's been living here for longer than I've been alive, and is married to an American). Because of that, Daisy and both of her sisters have full dual citizenship in both countries (and two of their combined six children do as well). However, since Mama isn't an American citizen, she periodically has to go to immigration and renew everything...despite the fact that yes, she has been living here forever and she is married to an American. It's a very stressful -- and according to Mama, somewhat degrading/dehumanizing -- experience, so Daisy accompanied her. It went well, apparently.
However, and here's the part I alluded to at the beginning of the post, when I got up this afternoon I had a message waiting for me from Daisy that said I had missed a call on my cell phone. This in itself is slightly amusing, because most of the time at our place, the phone gets zero reception whatsoever. It'll show me the little receiver symbol with a line through it, will say "searching" because it can't find a network that's even somewhat compatible with my phone, and it'll search and search until it drains the battery and it dies. So really, I was surprised it received a call at all.
I looked at the number and it was a local number, and I knew from the prefix that it was from Daisy's company. Aha. Finally.
I checked my email and found that one of the HR people had sent me a message asking if I was still interested in the position I'd applied/interviewed for, and if so to give her a call. Note that this was a completely different HR person than the one I'd been calling/emailing (I later found out that this one was an intern), so I logged into Google Talk and called back -- which led to me being officially offered the position and given a start date for training: August 18.
I have a job. Well, technically, anyway.
The training period lasts two weeks, Monday through Friday each week, usually from 8AM-5PM. It'll start on the 18th and then my real start date, provided I start the full position immediately after the training ends, will be on Tuesday, September 2. The position pays quite well -- it's the same job Daisy had before she formally got her promotion (so I know the salary) and it's full time.
I gave the lady on the phone my birthdate and SSN for background check info (which, of course, will turn up completely clean) and she gave me the location I need to be at on the morning of the 18th -- it's the building in which I originally interviewed. Daisy later told me that's where they do all the processing of forms (like payroll and tax forms) and then they give you another address to go to for the actual training most of the time. I would imagine that I'll more than likely train in Daisy's building, as that's where I'll be working, but I'm not sure -- so don't hold me to that. The company has numerous locations all around the city, and at least six or seven different buildings at those locations. I'm fine either way, obviously; you give me a job and I'll go do what you tell me to do wherever you tell me to do it.
Now, some of you may be thinking something along the lines of why did you accept it immediately instead of waiting to hear about the university position? Well, my answer to that is fairly simple: I knew I had a much better shot at this than at the university gig, this is full-time and stable with a yearly salary that I already know, and aside from knowing several of the people I'll eventually work with, I also know that it's very close to my home and that it's a job that I'll be able to do within an office and with no travel involved. Why wait for a job like the one at the university that may be fun, but isn't stable and involves a lot of things that I'm not necessarily the right person for?
I hung up the phone and breathed a big sigh of relief. The long, desperate hunt for a job was finally over, and not only was it over, but I still had almost a month of vacation-like time where I could decompress, relax, and finally enjoy my downtime without being constantly stressed about money and survival issues. A little less than a month before I start is fine; we'll survive and pay all of the bills and rent with what we have now with no issue.
More details will become available as I get them, of course; I got another email a while later from the HR lady asking one last quick question of who'd referred me -- I told her, of course, that was my wife. When an employee referral comes into question, the employee who did the referring gets a bonus for the reference.
"Yeah," Daisy said, "...after you have worked there for six months."
"I have to work there for six months before you get your bonus?"
"Yep."
"Well, shit."
I don't think that will be a problem, however. We'll need the money. It's also not until after that six-month point before I'll be able to become eligible for a promotion or position change within the company, so even if I don't like the job I'm doing, I'm still locked into it for at least that long.
Last night, after at least two years of not doing it, I finally upgraded my computer from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS. In doing so, the goddamned thing crashed and the upgrade failed.
Look, I have a good computer, and I do love my Linux, but there's a lot of shit Ubuntu has done over the last several years that I really don't like, and every time I update/upgrade my OS I have to dick around with it for a good two or three hours afterwards to get all of my settings back to where they were. If I can, anyway. An upgrade from an old OS to a newer version generally disables about half of the customizations I've made over the years, as well as a good chunk of the special programs I've installed and modified (such as for gaming and for storage). This also includes the user interface, which I have to change/disable every single time I do anything. Ubuntu's default GUI is a terrible, tablet-like interface called Unity, which is difficult to navigate through, doesn't have a taskbar, and everything is done in panels. Ugh. I much prefer the GNOME 2 interface, which is the classic Linux desktop experience and the GUI that I used on every version of Linux I've ever had on my machines:
To use that classic desktop, you have to go in and specially/manually add it after every system upgrade (if it's available for your specific system, of course, which it usually is). Otherwise you're stuck using Unity. The screenshot above is a good representation of what it looks like, though that photo is a much older version of what I'm currently running.
Anyway.
I was able to download and initialize the upgrade fine, and it installed correctly, but then at the end it told me "the upgrade has been performed successfully, but there were errors." Okay, what the fuck does that mean?
At the end of any system upgrade, of course, you're prompted to restart to finish the upgrade. At least on Linux, anyhow; I don't know how it works on Mac or Windows machines, since I haven't used either one in almost ten years now. So I restarted. It brought me, as always, to the login screen. I typed in my password as always, and hit enter. Nothing happened.
Well, something happened, and that something was that the screen would go to the blank 12.04 splash screen (remember, I had just upgraded to 14.04, so that 12.04 splash screen should've been gone) ...and then it would just sit there. I could move the mouse around, but there was nothing to click on. It just sat there. I restarted several times, tried to login as a guest, tried to login under a different GUI, and nothing. Sometimes when I changed things, it would just lock up and freeze, others it would basically reset and take me back to the login screen, as if it didn't want me to do anything at all.
Okay, so whatever those errors were, they'd locked me out of my own computer.
I got out my laptop and booted it up, convinced that I'd have to download and burn a fresh image of the OS itself to install it manually, which would wipe my desktop's entire HD. This I did not want to do, obviously, as even though I'd backed up all of my data, all of my custom settings would be wiped and I'd have to go back out and get every program all over again, set them up, and reconfigure them. This was not something I wanted to do, as that takes hours and hours of tedious work.
At about this time, Daisy came home from a night out with her best friend, right at the time where I was at my most stressed and frazzled about the damn computer not wanting to just work. I very calmly and lovingly told her that I'd be out in a while, and that I needed some time/concentration to fix the damned thing, and she understood, gave me a kiss, and let me work in the dark of our computer room like some sort of mad scientist.
I downloaded the installation image and made a bootable flash drive with it, and burned an extra copy onto a blank DVD as backup -- which was a task in itself because it took me nearly an hour to find my spindle of blank DVDs after the move.
When I booted it (with the flash drive first), it gave me the option to reinstall my installation, which basically translates to repairing all of the broken bits and letting it completely redo itself. Which is what I did. An hour later I had a perfectly functioning desktop computer again, with the upgrade leaving most of my configurations and the like alone. This is a very good thing. I installed the GNOME 2 interface again, and my computer is back to normal -- faster, prettier, and completely up-to-date. There were, of course, some programs I had to re-add or re-install (Skype, Google Chrome, Dropbox, etc), but eh, it wasn't bad.
So, that's done. That was part one of my plans for "stuff I need to do around the house but haven't gotten to yet." And then Daisy and I went to bed.
Daisy, as an aside, is on a strange schedule right now. Yesterday morning, really early, she went to help Mama renew her visa. As I mentioned here in the past, Daisy's mother is a Canadian citizen, but a permanent resident here in the states (as she's been living here for longer than I've been alive, and is married to an American). Because of that, Daisy and both of her sisters have full dual citizenship in both countries (and two of their combined six children do as well). However, since Mama isn't an American citizen, she periodically has to go to immigration and renew everything...despite the fact that yes, she has been living here forever and she is married to an American. It's a very stressful -- and according to Mama, somewhat degrading/dehumanizing -- experience, so Daisy accompanied her. It went well, apparently.
However, and here's the part I alluded to at the beginning of the post, when I got up this afternoon I had a message waiting for me from Daisy that said I had missed a call on my cell phone. This in itself is slightly amusing, because most of the time at our place, the phone gets zero reception whatsoever. It'll show me the little receiver symbol with a line through it, will say "searching" because it can't find a network that's even somewhat compatible with my phone, and it'll search and search until it drains the battery and it dies. So really, I was surprised it received a call at all.
I looked at the number and it was a local number, and I knew from the prefix that it was from Daisy's company. Aha. Finally.
I checked my email and found that one of the HR people had sent me a message asking if I was still interested in the position I'd applied/interviewed for, and if so to give her a call. Note that this was a completely different HR person than the one I'd been calling/emailing (I later found out that this one was an intern), so I logged into Google Talk and called back -- which led to me being officially offered the position and given a start date for training: August 18.
I have a job. Well, technically, anyway.
The training period lasts two weeks, Monday through Friday each week, usually from 8AM-5PM. It'll start on the 18th and then my real start date, provided I start the full position immediately after the training ends, will be on Tuesday, September 2. The position pays quite well -- it's the same job Daisy had before she formally got her promotion (so I know the salary) and it's full time.
I gave the lady on the phone my birthdate and SSN for background check info (which, of course, will turn up completely clean) and she gave me the location I need to be at on the morning of the 18th -- it's the building in which I originally interviewed. Daisy later told me that's where they do all the processing of forms (like payroll and tax forms) and then they give you another address to go to for the actual training most of the time. I would imagine that I'll more than likely train in Daisy's building, as that's where I'll be working, but I'm not sure -- so don't hold me to that. The company has numerous locations all around the city, and at least six or seven different buildings at those locations. I'm fine either way, obviously; you give me a job and I'll go do what you tell me to do wherever you tell me to do it.
Now, some of you may be thinking something along the lines of why did you accept it immediately instead of waiting to hear about the university position? Well, my answer to that is fairly simple: I knew I had a much better shot at this than at the university gig, this is full-time and stable with a yearly salary that I already know, and aside from knowing several of the people I'll eventually work with, I also know that it's very close to my home and that it's a job that I'll be able to do within an office and with no travel involved. Why wait for a job like the one at the university that may be fun, but isn't stable and involves a lot of things that I'm not necessarily the right person for?
I hung up the phone and breathed a big sigh of relief. The long, desperate hunt for a job was finally over, and not only was it over, but I still had almost a month of vacation-like time where I could decompress, relax, and finally enjoy my downtime without being constantly stressed about money and survival issues. A little less than a month before I start is fine; we'll survive and pay all of the bills and rent with what we have now with no issue.
More details will become available as I get them, of course; I got another email a while later from the HR lady asking one last quick question of who'd referred me -- I told her, of course, that was my wife. When an employee referral comes into question, the employee who did the referring gets a bonus for the reference.
"Yeah," Daisy said, "...after you have worked there for six months."
"I have to work there for six months before you get your bonus?"
"Yep."
"Well, shit."
I don't think that will be a problem, however. We'll need the money. It's also not until after that six-month point before I'll be able to become eligible for a promotion or position change within the company, so even if I don't like the job I'm doing, I'm still locked into it for at least that long.
Monday, July 21, 2014
Replies and Expectations, Part IV
After a dinner of sandwiches with the parents, Daisy and I went to one of the large Walmarts here in town to get necessities for the next week or two (read: things we can't go without for more than a week or two, max), and I found and purchased a new pair of dress shoes on clearance for $25.
Why did I purchase a new pair of dress shoes on clearance for $25? Well, the conversation went something like this:
Me: [producing two pairs of shoes, one laced and one slip-on] Which one of these would work for [company job]?
Her: Either one, really.
Me: Okay, well, which one do you like more? They're both the same size and same price.
Her: Well, one's brown and one's black. The black is more versatile, but it doesn't have laces.
Me: I don't necessarily care about versatility as I never match my clothing anyway. Which one?
Her: I don't know, babe, pick one.
Me: ...
Her: Would you like shoes without laces? Have you tried them on?
Me: I'm wearing flip-flops. I'm not sticking my bare feet into shoes to try them on.
Her: They have those hose sock things, don't they?
Me: ...eww.
As an aside, the sock things wouldn't matter, since I only wear thick boot socks with any actual shoes I wear. I still wouldn't get an accurate fit.
Me: I'm not trying them on, love; I know my shoe size.
Her: [getting frustrated] Then just get whichever ones you want, but the laced ones look better. What about these ones? [picks up shoes that aren't leather, look more cheaply made, and cost over $10 more] These ones look like a sneaker and a dress shoe combined, and they're Dr. Scholls.
Me: [more frustrated than she is] I don't get it. 95% of the job is all done on the phone and the computer. Why the fuck would [company] care about what is on my feet?
As a second aside, Daisy's company is rather strict about the dress code, which is basically business casual. That includes policies like no jeans, no shorts, no shirts without collars, and semi-formal footwear -- no sneakers or sandals, not even dress sandals for the ladies. The only dress shoes I have are the ones I was married in, which are incredibly uncomfortable to wear for more than a few hours at a time, and a pair of brown dress shoes Daisy's father gave me -- which have the same problem. If I eventually end up working for said company, I need a pair of shoes which won't destroy my feet if I have to wear them forty hours per week.
Me: [continued frustration] I really, really just wish I could wear my sneakers, which are infinitely more comfortable than any of these damned things.
Her: Again, honey, if you're going to get some, pick whichever shoes you want. But if you get them without trying them on and hate them, that's on you. Just tell me you'll return them if that happens.
Me: Of course. [looks at shoes in box] I'm going to go see if I can find the laced ones in my size [13; I have big feet] in black.
And I did search, and I did find them. And those are the ones I purchased. And they fit (and feel) really good on my feet. But this is an example of most conversations we have while shopping -- a small window into married life and shopping with one's spouse, so to speak.
Daisy has stated on numerous occasions that she hates shopping with me. In contrast, as I don't get out much, it's one of my favorite things to do with her.
It is also very rare that I purchase any sort of clothing or shoes for myself; I haven't bought a new pair of shoes, aside from a new pair of sandals here and there to replace ones which have worn out and/or broken, in several years. I have at least two or three pairs of sneakers that I bought on clearance (including a pair of Chuck Taylors) that have sat in bags/boxes packed away in closets, never worn. I can't wear sneakers at Daisy's company, however, and I more than likely won't be able to wear them if I end up working at the university. In the summer, and really anytime past high temperatures above 60 degrees, I will wear nothing but sandals or flip-flops no matter where I go or what I do until it is too cold to wear them anymore. The only exception to that thus far has been the wedding and both interviews I've gone to this summer. I buy clothing even more rarely, as I donated a ton of it to charity upon my move up here, will be donating even more soon as the summer becomes fall and I take that opportunity to lighten my wardrobe as much as possible, and received probably thirty pairs of pants and shorts from Daisy's father when he lost weight and his former ones were too large for him. Suffice it to say that it will be several years before I have to buy pants again. Any pants. So, ahem, buying a new pair of shoes, especially dressy shoes, is an indulgence as well as a treat.
Anyway.
I still haven't heard anything from either place, of course, in regards to employment. I have been emailed several times, however, to be rejected for other positions I've applied for at other places, which does nothing more than fuel my general misanthropy in life. In fact, I'm pretty sure "general misanthropy" is my true calling in life. But I can't get paid for that.
We don't really have any plans for the remainder of Daisy's days off this week; there are family issues and events to attend to, and I'm still waiting on calls or emails from potential employers. In the meantime, I plan to (finally) upgrade my computer to the newest version of Ubuntu, as I now have a workaround fix for the desktop/interface issues that kept me from upgrading before, and before that (obviously) I'm going to hook up my portable hard drive and back up all of my files in case the damn thing crashes while it's upgrading. It'll take a while, so in the meantime I will have other stuff to do in and around the house that doesn't involve the computer -- such as cleaning and cooking and taking care of the finances and bills which come in. I've been doing well with that thus far, keeping track of all of our money and paying bills as they come in either electronically or with checks from both our joint account as well as my own. Yet again, however, for the fifth or sixth time in a row I have forgotten to purchase stamps while I've been out, which frustrates me to no end -- especially since I do need them so badly. 95% of our bills are indeed now paid online anyway, however, and the ones that aren't have already been paid for the month, so we've got a while before we have to deal with those again.
As for the Thank-You notes, by the middle of last week I had sent out all of the ones I have to all of the recipients I had on my list who I did not otherwise thank personally. The rest of them are on Daisy to sort out, write out, and mail whenever she gets the chance to do so, as they're all people she knows or to her relatives.
There are other tasks to be done, of course; I need to get my car out and drive it around some at some point, as it's been sitting in the parking lot here for well over a month and I haven't touched it. However, it's going to be really hot this week (projected highs are near 100 today, with an expected heat index of around 110-115, and the forecast for the rest of the week isn't much better), and as my car is black with black leather interior, driving it during the daytime if I can possibly avoid it is completely out of the question if I don't want to burn alive. I'm sure I'll have some reason to take it out/down the street to Walmart or someplace within the next few days, given I can do it at night and have the energy to do it.
And also so I don't lose my parking spot, which would drive me nuts.
As you know, I'm a very particular person. I park in a particular spot so that I can always see my car.
Ahem. Anyway.
I've been up all night. I am not tired in the least. While Daisy sleeps so that she can do the aforementioned family stuff later today, I cannot. That's not to say that I haven't been sleeping well -- honestly, I have slept fine the past few nights once I have been able to go to sleep...it's just been weird hours. I do generally get a good eight or so hours of sleep, however. So I have that going for me, at least.
Why did I purchase a new pair of dress shoes on clearance for $25? Well, the conversation went something like this:
Me: [producing two pairs of shoes, one laced and one slip-on] Which one of these would work for [company job]?
Her: Either one, really.
Me: Okay, well, which one do you like more? They're both the same size and same price.
Her: Well, one's brown and one's black. The black is more versatile, but it doesn't have laces.
Me: I don't necessarily care about versatility as I never match my clothing anyway. Which one?
Her: I don't know, babe, pick one.
Me: ...
Her: Would you like shoes without laces? Have you tried them on?
Me: I'm wearing flip-flops. I'm not sticking my bare feet into shoes to try them on.
Her: They have those hose sock things, don't they?
Me: ...eww.
As an aside, the sock things wouldn't matter, since I only wear thick boot socks with any actual shoes I wear. I still wouldn't get an accurate fit.
Me: I'm not trying them on, love; I know my shoe size.
Her: [getting frustrated] Then just get whichever ones you want, but the laced ones look better. What about these ones? [picks up shoes that aren't leather, look more cheaply made, and cost over $10 more] These ones look like a sneaker and a dress shoe combined, and they're Dr. Scholls.
Me: [more frustrated than she is] I don't get it. 95% of the job is all done on the phone and the computer. Why the fuck would [company] care about what is on my feet?
As a second aside, Daisy's company is rather strict about the dress code, which is basically business casual. That includes policies like no jeans, no shorts, no shirts without collars, and semi-formal footwear -- no sneakers or sandals, not even dress sandals for the ladies. The only dress shoes I have are the ones I was married in, which are incredibly uncomfortable to wear for more than a few hours at a time, and a pair of brown dress shoes Daisy's father gave me -- which have the same problem. If I eventually end up working for said company, I need a pair of shoes which won't destroy my feet if I have to wear them forty hours per week.
Me: [continued frustration] I really, really just wish I could wear my sneakers, which are infinitely more comfortable than any of these damned things.
Her: Again, honey, if you're going to get some, pick whichever shoes you want. But if you get them without trying them on and hate them, that's on you. Just tell me you'll return them if that happens.
Me: Of course. [looks at shoes in box] I'm going to go see if I can find the laced ones in my size [13; I have big feet] in black.
And I did search, and I did find them. And those are the ones I purchased. And they fit (and feel) really good on my feet. But this is an example of most conversations we have while shopping -- a small window into married life and shopping with one's spouse, so to speak.
Daisy has stated on numerous occasions that she hates shopping with me. In contrast, as I don't get out much, it's one of my favorite things to do with her.
It is also very rare that I purchase any sort of clothing or shoes for myself; I haven't bought a new pair of shoes, aside from a new pair of sandals here and there to replace ones which have worn out and/or broken, in several years. I have at least two or three pairs of sneakers that I bought on clearance (including a pair of Chuck Taylors) that have sat in bags/boxes packed away in closets, never worn. I can't wear sneakers at Daisy's company, however, and I more than likely won't be able to wear them if I end up working at the university. In the summer, and really anytime past high temperatures above 60 degrees, I will wear nothing but sandals or flip-flops no matter where I go or what I do until it is too cold to wear them anymore. The only exception to that thus far has been the wedding and both interviews I've gone to this summer. I buy clothing even more rarely, as I donated a ton of it to charity upon my move up here, will be donating even more soon as the summer becomes fall and I take that opportunity to lighten my wardrobe as much as possible, and received probably thirty pairs of pants and shorts from Daisy's father when he lost weight and his former ones were too large for him. Suffice it to say that it will be several years before I have to buy pants again. Any pants. So, ahem, buying a new pair of shoes, especially dressy shoes, is an indulgence as well as a treat.
Anyway.
I still haven't heard anything from either place, of course, in regards to employment. I have been emailed several times, however, to be rejected for other positions I've applied for at other places, which does nothing more than fuel my general misanthropy in life. In fact, I'm pretty sure "general misanthropy" is my true calling in life. But I can't get paid for that.
We don't really have any plans for the remainder of Daisy's days off this week; there are family issues and events to attend to, and I'm still waiting on calls or emails from potential employers. In the meantime, I plan to (finally) upgrade my computer to the newest version of Ubuntu, as I now have a workaround fix for the desktop/interface issues that kept me from upgrading before, and before that (obviously) I'm going to hook up my portable hard drive and back up all of my files in case the damn thing crashes while it's upgrading. It'll take a while, so in the meantime I will have other stuff to do in and around the house that doesn't involve the computer -- such as cleaning and cooking and taking care of the finances and bills which come in. I've been doing well with that thus far, keeping track of all of our money and paying bills as they come in either electronically or with checks from both our joint account as well as my own. Yet again, however, for the fifth or sixth time in a row I have forgotten to purchase stamps while I've been out, which frustrates me to no end -- especially since I do need them so badly. 95% of our bills are indeed now paid online anyway, however, and the ones that aren't have already been paid for the month, so we've got a while before we have to deal with those again.
As for the Thank-You notes, by the middle of last week I had sent out all of the ones I have to all of the recipients I had on my list who I did not otherwise thank personally. The rest of them are on Daisy to sort out, write out, and mail whenever she gets the chance to do so, as they're all people she knows or to her relatives.
There are other tasks to be done, of course; I need to get my car out and drive it around some at some point, as it's been sitting in the parking lot here for well over a month and I haven't touched it. However, it's going to be really hot this week (projected highs are near 100 today, with an expected heat index of around 110-115, and the forecast for the rest of the week isn't much better), and as my car is black with black leather interior, driving it during the daytime if I can possibly avoid it is completely out of the question if I don't want to burn alive. I'm sure I'll have some reason to take it out/down the street to Walmart or someplace within the next few days, given I can do it at night and have the energy to do it.
And also so I don't lose my parking spot, which would drive me nuts.
As you know, I'm a very particular person. I park in a particular spot so that I can always see my car.
Ahem. Anyway.
I've been up all night. I am not tired in the least. While Daisy sleeps so that she can do the aforementioned family stuff later today, I cannot. That's not to say that I haven't been sleeping well -- honestly, I have slept fine the past few nights once I have been able to go to sleep...it's just been weird hours. I do generally get a good eight or so hours of sleep, however. So I have that going for me, at least.
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Replies and Expectations, Part III
continued from the last post...
All I wanted to do on Thursday morning, well after I'd gotten dressed and had prepped myself for the interview, was sleep. Maybe you folks know this and have dealt with it before, but when you can't sleep for hours on end, and then finally fall asleep only to be jolted out of it an hour or two later, you can't function. All you want to do is go back to sleep. If you can't or are otherwise not allowed to go back to sleep? Well, tough shit, you have to face the day feeling like death for the first hour or three that you're once more awake, until (if you're me, anyway) you can get enough caffeine and nicotine into your bloodstream to be mobile and a semi-productive member of society.
Daisy, the sweetheart of a wife that she is, offered to drive me to the interview (as she went to the university and therefore knew where it was and where the buildings were that I needed to be in), even after working a full overnight shift. She did this knowing full well that the interview would take two hours -- I was told it would -- and that for those two hours she'd be left to her own devices to sleep in the car, wander the campus, etc. She did this without question or complaint, and when I offered to go by myself she waved me off, as she said she knew that driving in rush hour traffic and trying to find the place to go, on a campus on which I'd never before set foot, would stress the hell out of me.
She's right, of course, but I could've managed.
Anyway.
The interview was fine. Overall, I mean.
It did indeed last two hours (a little over two hours, actually), and the ladies who interviewed me were really nice, open and easy to talk to, and very understanding about my need to reschedule (I did not, of course, tell them the real reason why I rescheduled). The meat-and-potatoes of it is that the position is full-time while it lasts, and its duration is six months from the day it starts, whenever that may be. I'd be replacing two women who are going on maternity leave at the same time -- but they're only hiring one person. Those two women's duties would be split half-and-half between me and the rest of the office staff, and time/work would be balanced out. The position also entails a lot of erratic hours and locales, including such things as going to career day festivals on Saturdays and Sundays, some of which could be up to sixty miles away or more.
This, of course, didn't fill me with a lot of want for the position. I mean, driving to a high school or community college here in town and running a booth for a few hours on a weekday is one thing. Driving sixty or more miles away to do the same thing on a Saturday or Sunday is quite another...especially in the winter.
But, a 50/50 shot at those sorts of things? Eh, those aren't bad odds. I also made sure to play up the fact that my car is falling apart and has 233,000 miles on it, because that may have helped in any other situation...until I was told that they also use rental cars for the longer trips. Shit.
Okay, well, that's not too bad. Still.
The interview consisted of three parts -- the first was a sit-down conference room session with the ladies who'd interviewed me on the phone. They asked several questions which were similar to the ones I'd been asked on the phone, and then several new ones. Again, I could tell they were impressed by my answers, and the answers to some of those questions seemed to mildly shock them by how on-the-ball and, ahem, intelligent I was in casual conversation. At least that's the impression I got, anyhow.
From that point I was very quickly ushered into a larger conference room with what had to be an eighty-inch television screen hooked up to a computer. It was on this screen that I would be giving my presentation. I'd told them before that all I needed was a computer with which to login to my email, as I'd emailed it to myself. Well, yes, this room did have that...hooked up to the massive screen, which in turn was displayed to a room full of probably twenty-ish people, none of which had interviewed me before (aside from the aforementioned three ladies, I mean).
What. The shit.
I was told I was going to give the presentation to the interviewers and a chancellor, not an audience -- and definitely not an audience of which I had no clue who they were -- actual college students, vice-presidents, chancellors, other staff? Who knows. I wasn't told. I do know that the children of at least two of the admissions staff members were there...children who were college-aged, of course. But I wasn't expecting a full room of people. At all. Hoo boy.
I put on my game face, brought up the presentation, and went through it. I did the best I could, of course, and I could tell that it was impressing most of them -- which sort of surprised me, after all, since I knew little about the university, its programs, or really anything else, and had made it pretty vague in several places because of that.
When it was over, there was the ten-minute question-and-answer session...during which I answered what questions I could under what was, I'm certain now, extreme duress (but didn't appear that way on the surface), everyone seemed satisfied, and we dismissed.
Again, people seemed impressed -- I want to stress that. I wasn't getting weird looks or confused stares or anything of that sort, but nods of understanding and smiles, and when I asked the interviewing ladies afterwards if that was the sort of presentation they were looking for, they told me that it was and that I hit all the bases they were looking for. So that's good, at least.
The final part of the interview was afterwards -- a walk across campus to have a one-on-one interview with the university's vice chancellor. During the walk, which was led by the lady clearly in charge of the entire interview process and not the one who I'd been emailing/talking to on the phone prior, we had a rather loose, interesting conversation about the job itself and about the prospects of it.
"We can't really get people to interview for these temp positions," she said, "because people find out it's a temp position and they're no longer interested. I mean, it's a good job, but most people want something permanent, you know?"
"Oh, I understand that," I said. "But, does being hired even in a temp position like this make them eligible for internal-only university job postings?"
"Absolutely," she said.
"So how many of the folks you've hired on as temps -- playing the odds here, of course -- have turned their position into a full hire after the temp time period ends? Or, barring that, how many have been 'installed' into other open positions upon the end of their temp services?"
"Quite a few of them," she replied. "That's not necessarily the case with the position you're interviewing for, since it's the maternity leave thing, but we've had temps who in the past have gone on to work in numerous departments around the university as soon as they've finished. One of them works in academic advising now, another went somewhere else..." she trailed off.
"So, basically, it's a 'once you're in, you're in' scenario?"
"A lot of the time, yes," she said.
This was a big question I'd had since the beginning, as you know -- since it seemed like an awful lot of work, time spent, and calories burnt to have what amounted to three or four different, separate interviews for a temporary job. I understand that part of the job is being the "face of the university" at events and the like, but come on, it's not that complicated. The job at its core is little more than a traveling salesman. Go places, sell the university, leave.
After the walk across campus, I was interviewed for about half an hour by the vice chancellor -- who was very nice and kind, of course, but the kind of woman you could tell was deathly serious and all-business about her job and about the people she was interviewing. And, of course, I got the always-asked so why aren't you still teaching somewhere? question that everybody in every interview asks me.
I had to give my standard response of there's no teaching jobs available, and if there are, they don't hire anyone without four degrees and ten publications, and if they do, they won't pay a living wage, and as a married man I can't live on or support the wife on $12,000 a year anymore, etc etc.
She gave me a novel idea, though, and that was sending an email to the Department of English chairpersons at the universities and small colleges around the area (including this one) and making a direct inquiry on whether there were teaching positions available, adjunct or otherwise. I've done that with my former university, obviously, and one of the smaller schools up here, but I figured that all of the larger schools would have some sort of employment portal and/or online system I'd have to go through, as I tended to see adjunct instructor positions posted all the time on job boards from many different schools.
Anyway. I think it went well with the vice chancellor. She explained to me some of the deeper details of the position and informed me that there were four people interviewing for the position -- all of them were interviewing this week, and by the end of next week they'd be contacting the candidates to let them know yes or no. As I was one of four, that's a 25% chance I'll be asked to be hired. I also confirmed that a large number of temporary employees do indeed continue within the university somewhere almost immediately when their temporary contract expires.
That 25% figure, however, brought me back to a conversation I'd had with Daisy earlier that morning:
"If they offer you the job on the spot, are you going to take it?" she asked.
"No," I replied flatly. "It's not my ideal position, which you know, and it's temporary. I'm still waiting on [company] to get back to me, since that's apparently in the works as well. And that job is a full-time desk job that wouldn't require me to drive all around the tri-state area and is quite literally three minutes from home."
By the time the interview was over, I probably would have taken the job if they'd offered it to me on the spot. And therein lies the conundrum.
Look, it's not a bad job. At least not from what I learned about it during the interview process. Is it travel? Yes. Is it at times going to be inconvenient and/or difficult? Also yes. Will I have to make myself look ultra-presentable almost every day, including (probably) wearing a tie and button-down shirts? More than likely. But the pay is good while it lasts, the people I'd be working with seem extremely nice (as well as extremely competent) and I'd be in academia again. Not teaching, no, but in academia.
Driving back home, I told Daisy the entire story of the interview (or, well, the Reader's Digest version, anyway). It's a lucrative opportunity; I won't lie. But it's not a forever thing, it will end in six months, and there is the rather large possibility that when it does end, I'll be stuck right back where I was before -- where I am now, jobless and searching. I can take risks, yes, and were I still single and living on my own I would absolutely jump at the chance to work a job like this even for six months. But I'm not anymore. I have a responsibility now not only to myself, but to my wife and to our bills and other monthly expenses. I've been a damn good employee at every job I've worked, but even with that I'm not sure it justifies the risk of once more being unemployed in six months, because it's not like they can guarantee I'll get some other position within the university after that point.
On the other hand, there's the job with Daisy's company, with the wheels still in motion for it, and me waiting to hear if they're actually going to hire me and when. When I got home from the interview I called the HR guy and left a message on his machine in the office, basically repeating everything I'd said in my email to him several days prior. That's all I can do, really; if they want to hire me, they'll offer me a job there. If they don't, then they won't.
"I'm open to advice here on what to do," I told Daisy, "if both places offer me positions."
She suggested I take whichever one offers me the job first, and if I don't like it, to quit and take the other one -- a heavy implication being that she doesn't think I'd like working for her company at all. And I probably wouldn't. But it would be stable and more convenient.
I did the math; working the university position for six months would pay me more, even after taxes, than I made all of last year. Doing the math for the job with Daisy's company for a full year pays a little more, but it's a negligible amount.
I don't know, folks. I really don't know. Neither job is my ideal career, obviously, but it will provide us with money, money with which we could do the stuff we need to do around the house -- such as pay off our credit cards more easily and eventually get a table and chairs, a larger TV, and a newer car for me. I long ago resigned myself to the fact that whatever job I get now will not be an ideal one, but something I have to do in order to continue paying bills and supporting the household. So, to a large extent, any job I choose to take (if anyone offers me one anyhow) is the lesser of two evils, with the greater evil being that we can't support ourselves.
All I wanted to do on Thursday morning, well after I'd gotten dressed and had prepped myself for the interview, was sleep. Maybe you folks know this and have dealt with it before, but when you can't sleep for hours on end, and then finally fall asleep only to be jolted out of it an hour or two later, you can't function. All you want to do is go back to sleep. If you can't or are otherwise not allowed to go back to sleep? Well, tough shit, you have to face the day feeling like death for the first hour or three that you're once more awake, until (if you're me, anyway) you can get enough caffeine and nicotine into your bloodstream to be mobile and a semi-productive member of society.
Daisy, the sweetheart of a wife that she is, offered to drive me to the interview (as she went to the university and therefore knew where it was and where the buildings were that I needed to be in), even after working a full overnight shift. She did this knowing full well that the interview would take two hours -- I was told it would -- and that for those two hours she'd be left to her own devices to sleep in the car, wander the campus, etc. She did this without question or complaint, and when I offered to go by myself she waved me off, as she said she knew that driving in rush hour traffic and trying to find the place to go, on a campus on which I'd never before set foot, would stress the hell out of me.
She's right, of course, but I could've managed.
Anyway.
The interview was fine. Overall, I mean.
It did indeed last two hours (a little over two hours, actually), and the ladies who interviewed me were really nice, open and easy to talk to, and very understanding about my need to reschedule (I did not, of course, tell them the real reason why I rescheduled). The meat-and-potatoes of it is that the position is full-time while it lasts, and its duration is six months from the day it starts, whenever that may be. I'd be replacing two women who are going on maternity leave at the same time -- but they're only hiring one person. Those two women's duties would be split half-and-half between me and the rest of the office staff, and time/work would be balanced out. The position also entails a lot of erratic hours and locales, including such things as going to career day festivals on Saturdays and Sundays, some of which could be up to sixty miles away or more.
This, of course, didn't fill me with a lot of want for the position. I mean, driving to a high school or community college here in town and running a booth for a few hours on a weekday is one thing. Driving sixty or more miles away to do the same thing on a Saturday or Sunday is quite another...especially in the winter.
But, a 50/50 shot at those sorts of things? Eh, those aren't bad odds. I also made sure to play up the fact that my car is falling apart and has 233,000 miles on it, because that may have helped in any other situation...until I was told that they also use rental cars for the longer trips. Shit.
Okay, well, that's not too bad. Still.
The interview consisted of three parts -- the first was a sit-down conference room session with the ladies who'd interviewed me on the phone. They asked several questions which were similar to the ones I'd been asked on the phone, and then several new ones. Again, I could tell they were impressed by my answers, and the answers to some of those questions seemed to mildly shock them by how on-the-ball and, ahem, intelligent I was in casual conversation. At least that's the impression I got, anyhow.
From that point I was very quickly ushered into a larger conference room with what had to be an eighty-inch television screen hooked up to a computer. It was on this screen that I would be giving my presentation. I'd told them before that all I needed was a computer with which to login to my email, as I'd emailed it to myself. Well, yes, this room did have that...hooked up to the massive screen, which in turn was displayed to a room full of probably twenty-ish people, none of which had interviewed me before (aside from the aforementioned three ladies, I mean).
What. The shit.
I was told I was going to give the presentation to the interviewers and a chancellor, not an audience -- and definitely not an audience of which I had no clue who they were -- actual college students, vice-presidents, chancellors, other staff? Who knows. I wasn't told. I do know that the children of at least two of the admissions staff members were there...children who were college-aged, of course. But I wasn't expecting a full room of people. At all. Hoo boy.
I put on my game face, brought up the presentation, and went through it. I did the best I could, of course, and I could tell that it was impressing most of them -- which sort of surprised me, after all, since I knew little about the university, its programs, or really anything else, and had made it pretty vague in several places because of that.
When it was over, there was the ten-minute question-and-answer session...during which I answered what questions I could under what was, I'm certain now, extreme duress (but didn't appear that way on the surface), everyone seemed satisfied, and we dismissed.
Again, people seemed impressed -- I want to stress that. I wasn't getting weird looks or confused stares or anything of that sort, but nods of understanding and smiles, and when I asked the interviewing ladies afterwards if that was the sort of presentation they were looking for, they told me that it was and that I hit all the bases they were looking for. So that's good, at least.
The final part of the interview was afterwards -- a walk across campus to have a one-on-one interview with the university's vice chancellor. During the walk, which was led by the lady clearly in charge of the entire interview process and not the one who I'd been emailing/talking to on the phone prior, we had a rather loose, interesting conversation about the job itself and about the prospects of it.
"We can't really get people to interview for these temp positions," she said, "because people find out it's a temp position and they're no longer interested. I mean, it's a good job, but most people want something permanent, you know?"
"Oh, I understand that," I said. "But, does being hired even in a temp position like this make them eligible for internal-only university job postings?"
"Absolutely," she said.
"So how many of the folks you've hired on as temps -- playing the odds here, of course -- have turned their position into a full hire after the temp time period ends? Or, barring that, how many have been 'installed' into other open positions upon the end of their temp services?"
"Quite a few of them," she replied. "That's not necessarily the case with the position you're interviewing for, since it's the maternity leave thing, but we've had temps who in the past have gone on to work in numerous departments around the university as soon as they've finished. One of them works in academic advising now, another went somewhere else..." she trailed off.
"So, basically, it's a 'once you're in, you're in' scenario?"
"A lot of the time, yes," she said.
This was a big question I'd had since the beginning, as you know -- since it seemed like an awful lot of work, time spent, and calories burnt to have what amounted to three or four different, separate interviews for a temporary job. I understand that part of the job is being the "face of the university" at events and the like, but come on, it's not that complicated. The job at its core is little more than a traveling salesman. Go places, sell the university, leave.
After the walk across campus, I was interviewed for about half an hour by the vice chancellor -- who was very nice and kind, of course, but the kind of woman you could tell was deathly serious and all-business about her job and about the people she was interviewing. And, of course, I got the always-asked so why aren't you still teaching somewhere? question that everybody in every interview asks me.
I had to give my standard response of there's no teaching jobs available, and if there are, they don't hire anyone without four degrees and ten publications, and if they do, they won't pay a living wage, and as a married man I can't live on or support the wife on $12,000 a year anymore, etc etc.
She gave me a novel idea, though, and that was sending an email to the Department of English chairpersons at the universities and small colleges around the area (including this one) and making a direct inquiry on whether there were teaching positions available, adjunct or otherwise. I've done that with my former university, obviously, and one of the smaller schools up here, but I figured that all of the larger schools would have some sort of employment portal and/or online system I'd have to go through, as I tended to see adjunct instructor positions posted all the time on job boards from many different schools.
Anyway. I think it went well with the vice chancellor. She explained to me some of the deeper details of the position and informed me that there were four people interviewing for the position -- all of them were interviewing this week, and by the end of next week they'd be contacting the candidates to let them know yes or no. As I was one of four, that's a 25% chance I'll be asked to be hired. I also confirmed that a large number of temporary employees do indeed continue within the university somewhere almost immediately when their temporary contract expires.
That 25% figure, however, brought me back to a conversation I'd had with Daisy earlier that morning:
"If they offer you the job on the spot, are you going to take it?" she asked.
"No," I replied flatly. "It's not my ideal position, which you know, and it's temporary. I'm still waiting on [company] to get back to me, since that's apparently in the works as well. And that job is a full-time desk job that wouldn't require me to drive all around the tri-state area and is quite literally three minutes from home."
By the time the interview was over, I probably would have taken the job if they'd offered it to me on the spot. And therein lies the conundrum.
Look, it's not a bad job. At least not from what I learned about it during the interview process. Is it travel? Yes. Is it at times going to be inconvenient and/or difficult? Also yes. Will I have to make myself look ultra-presentable almost every day, including (probably) wearing a tie and button-down shirts? More than likely. But the pay is good while it lasts, the people I'd be working with seem extremely nice (as well as extremely competent) and I'd be in academia again. Not teaching, no, but in academia.
Driving back home, I told Daisy the entire story of the interview (or, well, the Reader's Digest version, anyway). It's a lucrative opportunity; I won't lie. But it's not a forever thing, it will end in six months, and there is the rather large possibility that when it does end, I'll be stuck right back where I was before -- where I am now, jobless and searching. I can take risks, yes, and were I still single and living on my own I would absolutely jump at the chance to work a job like this even for six months. But I'm not anymore. I have a responsibility now not only to myself, but to my wife and to our bills and other monthly expenses. I've been a damn good employee at every job I've worked, but even with that I'm not sure it justifies the risk of once more being unemployed in six months, because it's not like they can guarantee I'll get some other position within the university after that point.
On the other hand, there's the job with Daisy's company, with the wheels still in motion for it, and me waiting to hear if they're actually going to hire me and when. When I got home from the interview I called the HR guy and left a message on his machine in the office, basically repeating everything I'd said in my email to him several days prior. That's all I can do, really; if they want to hire me, they'll offer me a job there. If they don't, then they won't.
"I'm open to advice here on what to do," I told Daisy, "if both places offer me positions."
She suggested I take whichever one offers me the job first, and if I don't like it, to quit and take the other one -- a heavy implication being that she doesn't think I'd like working for her company at all. And I probably wouldn't. But it would be stable and more convenient.
I did the math; working the university position for six months would pay me more, even after taxes, than I made all of last year. Doing the math for the job with Daisy's company for a full year pays a little more, but it's a negligible amount.
I don't know, folks. I really don't know. Neither job is my ideal career, obviously, but it will provide us with money, money with which we could do the stuff we need to do around the house -- such as pay off our credit cards more easily and eventually get a table and chairs, a larger TV, and a newer car for me. I long ago resigned myself to the fact that whatever job I get now will not be an ideal one, but something I have to do in order to continue paying bills and supporting the household. So, to a large extent, any job I choose to take (if anyone offers me one anyhow) is the lesser of two evils, with the greater evil being that we can't support ourselves.
Saturday, July 19, 2014
Replies and Expectations, Part II
continued from the last post...
Upon getting up on Tuesday, I knew that there was no way -- no way whatsoever -- that I would ever be ready for the presentation on Wednesday morning. Daisy and I barely get any time to ourselves anyway, even on her days off, because there's always something else to be done. On Sunday morning, she had to work really late and then we went over to the parents'. On Monday, we went to her sister's place for fourteen hours. Tuesday was her last day off for the week, and silly me, I actually wanted to spend some downtime with my wife. And, y'know, actually get some downtime.
Some of you may be saying "Brandon, you don't have a job, so all of your life right now is downtime." That's not the case at all. There's a lot of stuff I do in and around the house, and I keep near-constantly busy with it. I don't like being bored, so I always find something to do. And, of course, there's applying for new jobs for hours on end every several days as well. I do work. It's just not the type of work that involves sitting in an office or standing in front of a classroom anymore.
Anyway.
The interview/presentation at the university, as you probably know, was scheduled for Wednesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon I knew that there was no way, realistically, that was going to happen and still give me a decent shot at getting the job. As I am honorable to my last breath (see my previous post), I emailed the lady in charge of the interviews to tell her that I would be unable to make it in on Wednesday morning, and asked if I could reschedule. I knew that if I didn't reschedule, there's no way I would be able to give any sort of presentation unless said presentation was me saying "hey, I don't have any slides or charts for you, but I can stand up here and talk to you about shit."
The other reason I requested a reschedule was because I hadn't heard anything from Daisy's company on Monday, so I was doubly expecting something on Tuesday. Daisy and I had other errands to run on Tuesday (including another short trip over to her parents' to pick up some herbs from the garden) and actually wanted to spend some time together, so my plan was to buy a little time for all of that stuff and to take care of everything I could within that timeframe.
My request for a rescheduled interview was granted -- for Thursday (read: yesterday) morning instead of Wednesday. That meant I'd have to put together the presentation from scratch in the span of what at the time was about 36 hours, including normal sleeping/eating/Daisy time as well. So I began my work.
I want to step back from the situation here once more and mention that I wasn't exactly enthused with the details of the university job; as I told you before, it entails a lot of travel and basically being the face of the university to prospective incoming students. While I can do that, and more than likely do that easily, that's a job more suited to Daisy (who told me that this position is basically her dream job). As you folks know, I'm not exactly a social person, and that goes double for when I am forced to drive around to lots of places and slap that fake smile on my face. But...there's a lot I will do and a lot I will put up with for a steady, incredibly-well-paying (for the duration of the position, anyway) paycheck that will help us pay the bills and get us out of credit card debt.
The problem with putting together the presentation wasn't making the presentation itself -- that I can do easily with LibreOffice (the standard Linux office suite) -- but in knowing what the presentation needed to cover. My directions on creating the presentation had been incredibly vague; they were, in fact, one word: admissions. The word admissions could mean a lot of different things, and I wasn't sure in what capacity they wanted me to focus on the most, especially with the rather vague literature I'd been sent -- a few brochures, a campus map, and a directory of programs the university had to offer. However, the position was in the office of, and working for, undergraduate admissions -- new students choosing the university as their education destination. With that in mind, I decided to focus my presentation on playing up the highlights of the university with the intended audience being those new prospective students. If I were a freshman, what would I like to know about the school? Its programs? The city of Omaha? What about its extracurricular activities, tuition, sports, Greek life, etc? So that was what I focused on.
Mind you, I know next to fucking nothing about this university.
Yes, my wife went there and got her Bachelor's degree there. Yes, it's the university here in town, and it's the "smaller version" of the big, important university in Lincoln. Yes, I know the sports they offer and what their mascot is...but aside from that? I don't know anything about it. I've only lived in the city of Omaha for two months. I don't even know my way around the city on my own. Sure, I can tell you where three different Walmarts are, and I could tell you where to get the best pizza in town (it's still Night Flight, duh), but other than that? I know nothing about the city aside from statistics. Daisy has been living here for over ten years and still needs her GPS to get from point A to point B most of the time, especially if point B is in a neighborhood or section of town that she/we never go to often or at all.
So in making the presentation it wasn't so much that I couldn't do it quickly, but that I needed to focus on what to cover, in what order, and how I could get the information for that stuff from the brochures/booklets they gave me as well as the university's website -- which I was encouraged to use liberally. I've made many presentations before; I had to do them not only in undergrad, but I had to make complex, lengthy (hour-long, 40-slides-ish) presentations for my high-level lit classes in graduate school. This was a presentation that would last fifteen minutes, so my guess was that it would be...oh, ten slides or so. With a beginning and end slide, so really, eight slides worth of material to cover in fifteen minutes. That's not bad, right?
It took me three hours to make the first four slides. I was shot. And remember, the first slide is a "cover slide." Groan. My brain was fried by the time I went to bed on Tuesday night, with the understanding that I would come back to it once I was awake on Wednesday and finish the rest of it.
In the midst of this, I'd still not received a call from Daisy's company or the HR guy who was supposed to get back to me, and I sent him an email detailing not only the job posting number, but requesting any information he had on it and hoping he'd give me an update -- as I knew I'd been recommended for hire by several people at that point. It went unanswered and again, ignored. Upon going back to work on Wednesday night, Daisy brought up the frustrations about this in her weekly meeting with her coworkers, and I was given directions to call the HR guy on Thursday -- if I didn't get him, leave a message and the supervisors/managers who worked with Daisy would get on him about it. Okay, I thought, that's fine.
Wednesday was slow and tiresome.
I haven't been sleeping well; I've been sleeping, when I do sleep, very erratic hours that don't lend themselves much to productivity during daylight. If I want to spend time with Daisy during the week at all, I almost have to (roughly) be on her same sleeping schedule and pattern. That's been very difficult as of late, and I've found myself sleeping for short stretches before I'm awakened by the cats, the need to pee, the need to eat something, daylight, kids screaming outside, people slamming doors or stomping upstairs/downstairs, etc. So, I'll sleep for a few hours at most before something like that happens, get up and deal with it, and then go to sleep (usually somewhere else, like on one of the couches) for a few hours more. Repeat until I can't sleep anymore or my back hurts.
Part of this is due to my allergies, which have gone insane over the course of the past two weeks or so -- enough to give me a low-level sinus infection at almost all times. My allergies will be fine for two or three days and not bother me at all, and then wham, I am smacked down by them big time for another two or three days. Again, repeat this cycle over and over and you have my life. Nebraska is a much different allergy environment than Kansas was, even though geographically it's only about 200 miles away from where I lived before. Its weather patterns are different, its temperatures/wind directions/barometric pressures are all different, and it's wreaking havoc on my body and its tolerances for these things -- which also isn't helped when I spend a few hours every day outside on the porch, as I don't smoke in the house.
Anyway.
As Daisy went back to work on Wednesday night and the interview/presentation was on Thursday morning, I dove into finishing it almost as soon as she left for work. When I started it, I had five slides complete, including the cover slide. When I finished enough to call it "done" or "done enough," it was eight hours later and I had twelve slides total. It was 3AM. I had my alarm set for 5 not only because I needed to be able to be awake enough to go to the interview, but because Daisy would be getting home shortly thereafter.
Sleep did not come. I made food and tried to tire myself out with a full stomach -- didn't work. I tried to watch Netflix until my eyes were heavy. This worked marginally until I was able to turn it off and actually rest a little. The rest was broken at 5, obviously, when my alarm went off. I hit snooze, and then a few minutes later was reawakened by Daisy's key in the door.
Upon getting up on Tuesday, I knew that there was no way -- no way whatsoever -- that I would ever be ready for the presentation on Wednesday morning. Daisy and I barely get any time to ourselves anyway, even on her days off, because there's always something else to be done. On Sunday morning, she had to work really late and then we went over to the parents'. On Monday, we went to her sister's place for fourteen hours. Tuesday was her last day off for the week, and silly me, I actually wanted to spend some downtime with my wife. And, y'know, actually get some downtime.
Some of you may be saying "Brandon, you don't have a job, so all of your life right now is downtime." That's not the case at all. There's a lot of stuff I do in and around the house, and I keep near-constantly busy with it. I don't like being bored, so I always find something to do. And, of course, there's applying for new jobs for hours on end every several days as well. I do work. It's just not the type of work that involves sitting in an office or standing in front of a classroom anymore.
Anyway.
The interview/presentation at the university, as you probably know, was scheduled for Wednesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon I knew that there was no way, realistically, that was going to happen and still give me a decent shot at getting the job. As I am honorable to my last breath (see my previous post), I emailed the lady in charge of the interviews to tell her that I would be unable to make it in on Wednesday morning, and asked if I could reschedule. I knew that if I didn't reschedule, there's no way I would be able to give any sort of presentation unless said presentation was me saying "hey, I don't have any slides or charts for you, but I can stand up here and talk to you about shit."
The other reason I requested a reschedule was because I hadn't heard anything from Daisy's company on Monday, so I was doubly expecting something on Tuesday. Daisy and I had other errands to run on Tuesday (including another short trip over to her parents' to pick up some herbs from the garden) and actually wanted to spend some time together, so my plan was to buy a little time for all of that stuff and to take care of everything I could within that timeframe.
My request for a rescheduled interview was granted -- for Thursday (read: yesterday) morning instead of Wednesday. That meant I'd have to put together the presentation from scratch in the span of what at the time was about 36 hours, including normal sleeping/eating/Daisy time as well. So I began my work.
I want to step back from the situation here once more and mention that I wasn't exactly enthused with the details of the university job; as I told you before, it entails a lot of travel and basically being the face of the university to prospective incoming students. While I can do that, and more than likely do that easily, that's a job more suited to Daisy (who told me that this position is basically her dream job). As you folks know, I'm not exactly a social person, and that goes double for when I am forced to drive around to lots of places and slap that fake smile on my face. But...there's a lot I will do and a lot I will put up with for a steady, incredibly-well-paying (for the duration of the position, anyway) paycheck that will help us pay the bills and get us out of credit card debt.
The problem with putting together the presentation wasn't making the presentation itself -- that I can do easily with LibreOffice (the standard Linux office suite) -- but in knowing what the presentation needed to cover. My directions on creating the presentation had been incredibly vague; they were, in fact, one word: admissions. The word admissions could mean a lot of different things, and I wasn't sure in what capacity they wanted me to focus on the most, especially with the rather vague literature I'd been sent -- a few brochures, a campus map, and a directory of programs the university had to offer. However, the position was in the office of, and working for, undergraduate admissions -- new students choosing the university as their education destination. With that in mind, I decided to focus my presentation on playing up the highlights of the university with the intended audience being those new prospective students. If I were a freshman, what would I like to know about the school? Its programs? The city of Omaha? What about its extracurricular activities, tuition, sports, Greek life, etc? So that was what I focused on.
Mind you, I know next to fucking nothing about this university.
Yes, my wife went there and got her Bachelor's degree there. Yes, it's the university here in town, and it's the "smaller version" of the big, important university in Lincoln. Yes, I know the sports they offer and what their mascot is...but aside from that? I don't know anything about it. I've only lived in the city of Omaha for two months. I don't even know my way around the city on my own. Sure, I can tell you where three different Walmarts are, and I could tell you where to get the best pizza in town (it's still Night Flight, duh), but other than that? I know nothing about the city aside from statistics. Daisy has been living here for over ten years and still needs her GPS to get from point A to point B most of the time, especially if point B is in a neighborhood or section of town that she/we never go to often or at all.
So in making the presentation it wasn't so much that I couldn't do it quickly, but that I needed to focus on what to cover, in what order, and how I could get the information for that stuff from the brochures/booklets they gave me as well as the university's website -- which I was encouraged to use liberally. I've made many presentations before; I had to do them not only in undergrad, but I had to make complex, lengthy (hour-long, 40-slides-ish) presentations for my high-level lit classes in graduate school. This was a presentation that would last fifteen minutes, so my guess was that it would be...oh, ten slides or so. With a beginning and end slide, so really, eight slides worth of material to cover in fifteen minutes. That's not bad, right?
It took me three hours to make the first four slides. I was shot. And remember, the first slide is a "cover slide." Groan. My brain was fried by the time I went to bed on Tuesday night, with the understanding that I would come back to it once I was awake on Wednesday and finish the rest of it.
In the midst of this, I'd still not received a call from Daisy's company or the HR guy who was supposed to get back to me, and I sent him an email detailing not only the job posting number, but requesting any information he had on it and hoping he'd give me an update -- as I knew I'd been recommended for hire by several people at that point. It went unanswered and again, ignored. Upon going back to work on Wednesday night, Daisy brought up the frustrations about this in her weekly meeting with her coworkers, and I was given directions to call the HR guy on Thursday -- if I didn't get him, leave a message and the supervisors/managers who worked with Daisy would get on him about it. Okay, I thought, that's fine.
Wednesday was slow and tiresome.
I haven't been sleeping well; I've been sleeping, when I do sleep, very erratic hours that don't lend themselves much to productivity during daylight. If I want to spend time with Daisy during the week at all, I almost have to (roughly) be on her same sleeping schedule and pattern. That's been very difficult as of late, and I've found myself sleeping for short stretches before I'm awakened by the cats, the need to pee, the need to eat something, daylight, kids screaming outside, people slamming doors or stomping upstairs/downstairs, etc. So, I'll sleep for a few hours at most before something like that happens, get up and deal with it, and then go to sleep (usually somewhere else, like on one of the couches) for a few hours more. Repeat until I can't sleep anymore or my back hurts.
Part of this is due to my allergies, which have gone insane over the course of the past two weeks or so -- enough to give me a low-level sinus infection at almost all times. My allergies will be fine for two or three days and not bother me at all, and then wham, I am smacked down by them big time for another two or three days. Again, repeat this cycle over and over and you have my life. Nebraska is a much different allergy environment than Kansas was, even though geographically it's only about 200 miles away from where I lived before. Its weather patterns are different, its temperatures/wind directions/barometric pressures are all different, and it's wreaking havoc on my body and its tolerances for these things -- which also isn't helped when I spend a few hours every day outside on the porch, as I don't smoke in the house.
Anyway.
As Daisy went back to work on Wednesday night and the interview/presentation was on Thursday morning, I dove into finishing it almost as soon as she left for work. When I started it, I had five slides complete, including the cover slide. When I finished enough to call it "done" or "done enough," it was eight hours later and I had twelve slides total. It was 3AM. I had my alarm set for 5 not only because I needed to be able to be awake enough to go to the interview, but because Daisy would be getting home shortly thereafter.
Sleep did not come. I made food and tried to tire myself out with a full stomach -- didn't work. I tried to watch Netflix until my eyes were heavy. This worked marginally until I was able to turn it off and actually rest a little. The rest was broken at 5, obviously, when my alarm went off. I hit snooze, and then a few minutes later was reawakened by Daisy's key in the door.
Friday, July 18, 2014
Replies and Expectations, Part I
I consider myself a pretty patient man on most fronts, though it is well-known to most of you at this point that I don't like (or want) to be. I don't like waiting on things (or for) people that I shouldn't have to wait on. I have, apparently, an unrealistic expectation that if someone has a job to do, that person should do their job to the best of their ability at all times. This is the philosophy I've always had in everything I've done. When I was a college student, I was the best college student I could be. When I was a cashier and stocker at four different grocery store chains, I was the best cashier or stocker I could be -- no, the pay wasn't the best, but I still had a job to do, and I did it. When I was a college professor, I was the best professor I could be, even if it meant going above and beyond the call of duty and sacrificing social time or sleep. As a husband, I try to be the best husband I can be to Daisy -- and that includes doing everything I can around the house to balance the workload and contribute as much as I can to our marriage and living space, as well as continue to foster a positive environment of open communication in our relationship.
It's about being honorable.
Everything I have done is not because it's been expected of me or because I'll be punished if I don't do it (translation: I won't), but because it was the right thing to do in those given situations. Yeah, I could've flunked out of college if I'd not cared about it. No, I didn't have to go to graduate school. Yeah, I could've gotten away with doing less than half of the work I actually did for my students when I was a GTA as well as when I was a professor, and if I really didn't want to, I wouldn't do anything around the house now and let Daisy take care of it all. But that's not who I am. I have a very strong sense of honor, responsibility, and accountability for my actions or inactions. It's not like lives are in the balance, or anything like that, but that drive is at the core of my being as a human.
So, when I observe people who have certain important responsibilities not by choice, but because it's part of what they do for a living, and to a large portion of the people who they deal with, that is who they are -- yes, I get angry and irritated when they don't do their jobs. Especially when, in not doing their jobs, they inconvenience or otherwise discount/ignore me. I am not a fan of incompetence, and I am not a fan of people who don't follow orders and/or don't respond to questions that need to have answers. It gives off the sense that I are beneath them and not worth their time -- and believe me, as I have told Daisy in the past, nobody is allowed to make me feel inferior, or treat me as such, when I know in many ways I am indeed a better and more intelligent person than they are. I have always been a leader, not a follower -- while I can be a follower in certain situations where there is a true leader present, one who I can respect and admire, that shit changes really fast when said leader reveals him/herself to be a fucking idiot. Any of you who were around for the first incarnation of this blog 5-7 years ago remember that, as I wrote about my experiences working in the grocery store in Missouri.
Daisy has told me at times that I have a sense of entitlement about some things, and that is very true to an extent -- yes, I do have a sense of entitlement in some cases, but it's not the false, "give it to me because I deserve it because I said so" entitlement. No, any entitlement I feel about anything is completely justified. For example, if I apply for a teaching position at a university, and I meet the minimum qualifications plus have another degree and years of experience above what's even asked for in the "preferred" section of the job description, yes, I feel entitled to an interview. I see no difference in this compared to as if I'd bought an expensive electronic device that broke under warranty and I requested a replacement or a refund. I want to take what's rightfully mine, what I qualify for, and what I should have. That's not false entitlement, that's a reasonable expectation for a reasonable outcome. No, I may not get the job, but I do feel entitled to a shot at it if I've applied and my qualifications reach/surpass what they're looking for. Unreasonable expectations would be if, say, I applied for a teaching position that required a PHD as well as at least ten publications and ten years of teaching experience (none of which I have), and demanded an interview anyway.
Anyhow, I'm being long-winded and am belaboring the point.
I was told last week that I had been recommended for hire at Daisy's company by at least three managers/supervisors (Daisy herself, one of her fellow supervisors, and the guy who interviewed me) and could have received up to two more glowing recommendations from others within the company who have met and/or otherwise know me as a candidate for the position there. I was also told that my application was being "pulled" in order for them to file the paperwork to get me hired, and I should hear back from the HR people sometime quite soon. I covered most of this in my last post.
Whether that actually happened is beyond me, honestly, as it's now Wednesday and I have heard nothing from anyone at the company, when I was expecting something by Monday or at least by yesterday. Still nothing. Daisy's fellow manager who recommended me has done all he can do, though he has been monitoring the situation (he hasn't heard anything yet, as she checked with him last night). It's all in the hands of HR now, and the HR person who originally recruited me and vetted me for interview waaaaaay back in April (or even late March, I can't remember) has now mysteriously become unreachable, when previously he would reply to every email I sent within five minutes of sending it.
Daisy has also told me there were many people who called multiple times, over and over, before they were eventually hired. I interviewed for the position there five weeks ago now, and have requested updates on my application status at least three times -- requests which have apparently fallen on proverbial deaf ears. My application status on their website simply says "applied," but doesn't give me any updates past that (as many other employment portals do). So, truly, I'm in the dark about this.
Here's the problem. As mentioned before, I knew I had some decisions to make here -- my interview/presentation with the university was scheduled for today, and part of the weekend was to be spent putting together that presentation, as you know. However, I didn't want to plot out a ton of time and put a ton of work into that presentation for an interview on Wednesday if I got a call on Monday from Daisy's company offering me a job -- it would've been wasted effort, calories burned for no reason, as I would've immediately taken the job at Daisy's company and canceled the interview at the university.
Before you say anything, yes, I would love to work in academia again -- but the university job is a temporary position that ends in a few months, and requires much more work, effort, travel, and fake smiles compared to a full-time, non-temp job of sitting at a desk in a climate-controlled, comfortable office at a computer...which is basically what I do here at home. And the pay is pretty much the same.
As an aside, Daisy told me that she thought her job may be too stressful for me. I told her there's a lot of stress and bullshit I can overlook when a sizable paycheck every two weeks is involved, and this is completely true. If I do get the job at her company I will start at over $10k a year more than I've ever made at any job. To put that into perspective, I made $12,000 last year as a professor. Before taxes.
Anyway, I'd planned to use Saturday night to make the presentation, but I was really fatigued and was feeling sick and lethargic all evening, so I went to bed early. Daisy had to work overtime that night and didn't get home until really late in the morning, not getting to bed until 11AM -- which was when I got up.
Okay, I thought, so we'll go have dinner with the parents on Sunday night as per the usual, and then I'll come home and work on it then. The presentation only has to be fifteen minutes in length, roughly, and there's time at the end for a Q&A session. I find the whole "Q&A session" a fairly laughable concept, as the only stuff I know about the university here is from what little Daisy has told me about her college years and the sparse information in the packet they sent me.
When we went to dinner at the parents', it was brought up that the parents were going to visit Daisy's sister the next day (a road trip about two hours north of Omaha, close to the South Dakota border), as it was the fourth birthday of Daisy's sister's oldest boy. We were asked if we wanted to come with them -- a day trip consisting of leaving fairly early in the morning, driving up there, spending the day with Daisy's sister and the kids until our brother-in-law came home from work, eating dinner and doing the birthday stuff, and then coming back.
"You can go," I told Daisy, "but I don't want to."
This led to Daisy getting upset with me -- despite the many reasons I gave for not wanting to spend all day traveling and around children, the least of which being that I had a presentation to research and create -- I recanted and told her that if it was that important to her, I'd go.
Let's step back here for a moment and fully admit something -- yes, I could've made the presentation at any point over the course of the week prior after I'd received the information from the university. This is true. So, yes, it's totally my fault that I'd put it off for as long as I had. However, one of the reasons I had done so, as mentioned before, was because I was waiting on Daisy's company to contact me with a job offer, since those wheels were already turning. That call, at the earliest, was expected to be on Monday -- when we'd be gone at Daisy's sister's place, a place where I wasn't sure I'd have any cell phone signal whatsoever to receive said call.
As an aside, I did have cell phone signal up there, but it wasn't T-Mobile service and it didn't matter, because I received no calls anyway.
So, since everything was agreed upon and we were going, we left the parents' place, went immediately to get a birthday present for the kid, and then came home and went to bed. The parents wanted to leave at 10AM or before, which meant that if I wanted to be functional throughout the day at all, I had to get up around 7 or so. Which I did, and we went, and it was fun -- but it was also tiring. We were gone for fourteen hours, the entirety of Monday from morning until close to midnight, and I was completely exhausted by the time we got home. There would be no presentation-making that night -- I had to sleep. I had to sleep a lot.
It's about being honorable.
Everything I have done is not because it's been expected of me or because I'll be punished if I don't do it (translation: I won't), but because it was the right thing to do in those given situations. Yeah, I could've flunked out of college if I'd not cared about it. No, I didn't have to go to graduate school. Yeah, I could've gotten away with doing less than half of the work I actually did for my students when I was a GTA as well as when I was a professor, and if I really didn't want to, I wouldn't do anything around the house now and let Daisy take care of it all. But that's not who I am. I have a very strong sense of honor, responsibility, and accountability for my actions or inactions. It's not like lives are in the balance, or anything like that, but that drive is at the core of my being as a human.
So, when I observe people who have certain important responsibilities not by choice, but because it's part of what they do for a living, and to a large portion of the people who they deal with, that is who they are -- yes, I get angry and irritated when they don't do their jobs. Especially when, in not doing their jobs, they inconvenience or otherwise discount/ignore me. I am not a fan of incompetence, and I am not a fan of people who don't follow orders and/or don't respond to questions that need to have answers. It gives off the sense that I are beneath them and not worth their time -- and believe me, as I have told Daisy in the past, nobody is allowed to make me feel inferior, or treat me as such, when I know in many ways I am indeed a better and more intelligent person than they are. I have always been a leader, not a follower -- while I can be a follower in certain situations where there is a true leader present, one who I can respect and admire, that shit changes really fast when said leader reveals him/herself to be a fucking idiot. Any of you who were around for the first incarnation of this blog 5-7 years ago remember that, as I wrote about my experiences working in the grocery store in Missouri.
Daisy has told me at times that I have a sense of entitlement about some things, and that is very true to an extent -- yes, I do have a sense of entitlement in some cases, but it's not the false, "give it to me because I deserve it because I said so" entitlement. No, any entitlement I feel about anything is completely justified. For example, if I apply for a teaching position at a university, and I meet the minimum qualifications plus have another degree and years of experience above what's even asked for in the "preferred" section of the job description, yes, I feel entitled to an interview. I see no difference in this compared to as if I'd bought an expensive electronic device that broke under warranty and I requested a replacement or a refund. I want to take what's rightfully mine, what I qualify for, and what I should have. That's not false entitlement, that's a reasonable expectation for a reasonable outcome. No, I may not get the job, but I do feel entitled to a shot at it if I've applied and my qualifications reach/surpass what they're looking for. Unreasonable expectations would be if, say, I applied for a teaching position that required a PHD as well as at least ten publications and ten years of teaching experience (none of which I have), and demanded an interview anyway.
Anyhow, I'm being long-winded and am belaboring the point.
I was told last week that I had been recommended for hire at Daisy's company by at least three managers/supervisors (Daisy herself, one of her fellow supervisors, and the guy who interviewed me) and could have received up to two more glowing recommendations from others within the company who have met and/or otherwise know me as a candidate for the position there. I was also told that my application was being "pulled" in order for them to file the paperwork to get me hired, and I should hear back from the HR people sometime quite soon. I covered most of this in my last post.
Whether that actually happened is beyond me, honestly, as it's now Wednesday and I have heard nothing from anyone at the company, when I was expecting something by Monday or at least by yesterday. Still nothing. Daisy's fellow manager who recommended me has done all he can do, though he has been monitoring the situation (he hasn't heard anything yet, as she checked with him last night). It's all in the hands of HR now, and the HR person who originally recruited me and vetted me for interview waaaaaay back in April (or even late March, I can't remember) has now mysteriously become unreachable, when previously he would reply to every email I sent within five minutes of sending it.
Daisy has also told me there were many people who called multiple times, over and over, before they were eventually hired. I interviewed for the position there five weeks ago now, and have requested updates on my application status at least three times -- requests which have apparently fallen on proverbial deaf ears. My application status on their website simply says "applied," but doesn't give me any updates past that (as many other employment portals do). So, truly, I'm in the dark about this.
Here's the problem. As mentioned before, I knew I had some decisions to make here -- my interview/presentation with the university was scheduled for today, and part of the weekend was to be spent putting together that presentation, as you know. However, I didn't want to plot out a ton of time and put a ton of work into that presentation for an interview on Wednesday if I got a call on Monday from Daisy's company offering me a job -- it would've been wasted effort, calories burned for no reason, as I would've immediately taken the job at Daisy's company and canceled the interview at the university.
Before you say anything, yes, I would love to work in academia again -- but the university job is a temporary position that ends in a few months, and requires much more work, effort, travel, and fake smiles compared to a full-time, non-temp job of sitting at a desk in a climate-controlled, comfortable office at a computer...which is basically what I do here at home. And the pay is pretty much the same.
As an aside, Daisy told me that she thought her job may be too stressful for me. I told her there's a lot of stress and bullshit I can overlook when a sizable paycheck every two weeks is involved, and this is completely true. If I do get the job at her company I will start at over $10k a year more than I've ever made at any job. To put that into perspective, I made $12,000 last year as a professor. Before taxes.
Anyway, I'd planned to use Saturday night to make the presentation, but I was really fatigued and was feeling sick and lethargic all evening, so I went to bed early. Daisy had to work overtime that night and didn't get home until really late in the morning, not getting to bed until 11AM -- which was when I got up.
Okay, I thought, so we'll go have dinner with the parents on Sunday night as per the usual, and then I'll come home and work on it then. The presentation only has to be fifteen minutes in length, roughly, and there's time at the end for a Q&A session. I find the whole "Q&A session" a fairly laughable concept, as the only stuff I know about the university here is from what little Daisy has told me about her college years and the sparse information in the packet they sent me.
When we went to dinner at the parents', it was brought up that the parents were going to visit Daisy's sister the next day (a road trip about two hours north of Omaha, close to the South Dakota border), as it was the fourth birthday of Daisy's sister's oldest boy. We were asked if we wanted to come with them -- a day trip consisting of leaving fairly early in the morning, driving up there, spending the day with Daisy's sister and the kids until our brother-in-law came home from work, eating dinner and doing the birthday stuff, and then coming back.
"You can go," I told Daisy, "but I don't want to."
This led to Daisy getting upset with me -- despite the many reasons I gave for not wanting to spend all day traveling and around children, the least of which being that I had a presentation to research and create -- I recanted and told her that if it was that important to her, I'd go.
Let's step back here for a moment and fully admit something -- yes, I could've made the presentation at any point over the course of the week prior after I'd received the information from the university. This is true. So, yes, it's totally my fault that I'd put it off for as long as I had. However, one of the reasons I had done so, as mentioned before, was because I was waiting on Daisy's company to contact me with a job offer, since those wheels were already turning. That call, at the earliest, was expected to be on Monday -- when we'd be gone at Daisy's sister's place, a place where I wasn't sure I'd have any cell phone signal whatsoever to receive said call.
As an aside, I did have cell phone signal up there, but it wasn't T-Mobile service and it didn't matter, because I received no calls anyway.
So, since everything was agreed upon and we were going, we left the parents' place, went immediately to get a birthday present for the kid, and then came home and went to bed. The parents wanted to leave at 10AM or before, which meant that if I wanted to be functional throughout the day at all, I had to get up around 7 or so. Which I did, and we went, and it was fun -- but it was also tiring. We were gone for fourteen hours, the entirety of Monday from morning until close to midnight, and I was completely exhausted by the time we got home. There would be no presentation-making that night -- I had to sleep. I had to sleep a lot.
Sunday, July 13, 2014
Promotions, Part II
Now, with the previous being said in my last post there's also been another new development with Daisy's company -- and not just with her promotion.
As I mentioned before, Daisy and I went to a July 4th party thrown by one of the other managers on her shift (who, I suppose, she is now equal to with her new promotion? I think?). It was a good opportunity not only to get out of the house, but for me to meet some of the people she works with and works for, and to have some fun at the same time.
You know me if you've been reading this blog for a while -- I am not a social person by most stretches of the imagination. I am exceedingly friendly and outgoing when in social situations, yes, but I am not an inherently outgoing and social person on my own. As I said before, I'm the guy who likes to listen to a lot of podcasts, play his 2DS, drink coffee and smoke outside on the porch, dick around on the computer, sleep, and watch Netflix. That's who I am; that's what I do for fun.
Still, the party was very nice and was actually really fun, but its overall importance was the networking aspects of it. I'm fairly certain that Daisy's appearance at the party, along with my own, helped secure her promotion. I'm also fairly certain that my appearance there with her, as well as some good-natured subtle prodding at work after the party, is what got my ball picked back up within the company.
Let me explain.
At the party itself, one of Daisy's managers mentioned to her that he was going to check into what happened to my application and query about why I was never called back. After all, I did two interviews with the company, as you probably know, and it's not like I'm an idiot -- I'm a former college professor, for fuck's sake. I took this as a good sign.
A few days later, my name was apparently brought up again, and was once more pushed forward and offered up to the hiring managers or what-have-you.
Last night, Daisy told me that said manager had asked my application to be pulled (read: "hire this person now") and that I should hear something in a few days. With Daisy included, I now have recommendations from three different managers (one of whom works on dayshift, but who is a good friend of ours) and possibly a fourth. I was informed through her that I should hear something in the next few days at the most.
"They won't contact me until Monday at least," I said. "They won't do it during the weekend, right?"
"Nope," she said. "None of those people work on weekends."
"Well, this puts me in a rather difficult situation," I told her. "If they call me and offer me the job at [company], I'm going to take it...but unless they do that before Wednesday, I have to go on with my life as per the usual, which entails reading all of that literature and making that presentation for [university]."
"I don't know when the next training classes start," Daisy said. "I think they said the 16th or 17th?"
"That's Wednesday or Thursday," I said.
Obviously, if I get called with a job offer on Monday or Tuesday, I'm going to take it and will call/email to cancel the interview I have with the university on Wednesday. If I don't hear anything from them by Tuesday night, then I'll be going on the interview at the university as was originally planned, as that's the smartest thing to do right now -- stay the course and all that, even if the course may be changing soon.
In the meantime I will more than likely have to make that presentation one way or another (probably in PowerPoint) with the cutoff date/time being Tuesday night at the latest; I've decided that if I hear nothing from Daisy's company on Monday, then Monday night I will sit down and start on it, and if I don't finish it then I'll finish it on Tuesday sometime. This does cut into available family/relaxation time, however; when Daisy's off (Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights) we have our own plans, as it's the only real time we get to spend together that isn't interrupted by her job, sleep schedule, or other obligations and weekly errands/tasks. In that sense I'm giving myself a bit of a window of opportunity one way or the other for one job or the other -- because, believe me, I'd be really pissed off if I spent hours making this presentation for the university, then five minutes after I finished I received a call from Daisy's company that tells me I'm hired. I'm not going to burn the calories and time on the presentation if I don't have to. I have episodes of Mad Men to watch.
In other news, I have slowly been making my way through the list of people to send Thank-You cards to; yesterday I got my new address labels and stamp in the mail, so I no longer have to be irritated writing in our address over and over on any and all envelopes I'll send out in the future, at least for the foreseeable future anyway. There are 280 address labels and the stamp, so I'm set for a long time. I don't know how long it'll take me to go through 280 labels, but I'm guessing it'll take a while. The most mail I send out at any given time of year for the past two years has been for my graduation announcements, our wedding "save the date" announcements, and Christmas cards -- and I barely send any Christmas cards anymore. Now that Daisy and I are married, Christmas cards (probably with an adorable Christmas photo of us with the cats) are basically mandatory now, so we'll be sending a ton of them from this year forward.
Mainly because I want an adorable Christmas photo of us and the cats.
Ahem. Anyway.
So I have maybe five or six more people to send notes to before I'm done with everyone I have addresses for. Daisy will have to take over at that point, as I don't know addresses for anyone on her side of the family or her friends.
"I'll sit down and write them out while I'm off this week," she said.
There are a lot of things we say we'll do when she's off work; only approximately 10% of those things get done. Ever. That's not Daisy's fault, of course; there's just a lot more stuff to do than we have time for. Hence why it's taking so long to organize this place and why we still haven't gone through about 80% of the wedding gifts yet. For example, Daisy worked three hours of overtime this morning, and didn't even get to sleep until about four hours ago...when I was just waking up. When stuff like that happens, it throws a wrench into any plans we'd have or make. Neither of us can help that -- we just have to roll with the proverbial punches.
So that's how things stand right now. Once Daisy gets up, we'll go over to the parents' for our customary Sunday dinner-and-family time, dodging the thunderstorms the 90-degree day is throwing our way this evening.
As I mentioned before, Daisy and I went to a July 4th party thrown by one of the other managers on her shift (who, I suppose, she is now equal to with her new promotion? I think?). It was a good opportunity not only to get out of the house, but for me to meet some of the people she works with and works for, and to have some fun at the same time.
You know me if you've been reading this blog for a while -- I am not a social person by most stretches of the imagination. I am exceedingly friendly and outgoing when in social situations, yes, but I am not an inherently outgoing and social person on my own. As I said before, I'm the guy who likes to listen to a lot of podcasts, play his 2DS, drink coffee and smoke outside on the porch, dick around on the computer, sleep, and watch Netflix. That's who I am; that's what I do for fun.
Still, the party was very nice and was actually really fun, but its overall importance was the networking aspects of it. I'm fairly certain that Daisy's appearance at the party, along with my own, helped secure her promotion. I'm also fairly certain that my appearance there with her, as well as some good-natured subtle prodding at work after the party, is what got my ball picked back up within the company.
Let me explain.
At the party itself, one of Daisy's managers mentioned to her that he was going to check into what happened to my application and query about why I was never called back. After all, I did two interviews with the company, as you probably know, and it's not like I'm an idiot -- I'm a former college professor, for fuck's sake. I took this as a good sign.
A few days later, my name was apparently brought up again, and was once more pushed forward and offered up to the hiring managers or what-have-you.
Last night, Daisy told me that said manager had asked my application to be pulled (read: "hire this person now") and that I should hear something in a few days. With Daisy included, I now have recommendations from three different managers (one of whom works on dayshift, but who is a good friend of ours) and possibly a fourth. I was informed through her that I should hear something in the next few days at the most.
"They won't contact me until Monday at least," I said. "They won't do it during the weekend, right?"
"Nope," she said. "None of those people work on weekends."
"Well, this puts me in a rather difficult situation," I told her. "If they call me and offer me the job at [company], I'm going to take it...but unless they do that before Wednesday, I have to go on with my life as per the usual, which entails reading all of that literature and making that presentation for [university]."
"I don't know when the next training classes start," Daisy said. "I think they said the 16th or 17th?"
"That's Wednesday or Thursday," I said.
Obviously, if I get called with a job offer on Monday or Tuesday, I'm going to take it and will call/email to cancel the interview I have with the university on Wednesday. If I don't hear anything from them by Tuesday night, then I'll be going on the interview at the university as was originally planned, as that's the smartest thing to do right now -- stay the course and all that, even if the course may be changing soon.
In the meantime I will more than likely have to make that presentation one way or another (probably in PowerPoint) with the cutoff date/time being Tuesday night at the latest; I've decided that if I hear nothing from Daisy's company on Monday, then Monday night I will sit down and start on it, and if I don't finish it then I'll finish it on Tuesday sometime. This does cut into available family/relaxation time, however; when Daisy's off (Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights) we have our own plans, as it's the only real time we get to spend together that isn't interrupted by her job, sleep schedule, or other obligations and weekly errands/tasks. In that sense I'm giving myself a bit of a window of opportunity one way or the other for one job or the other -- because, believe me, I'd be really pissed off if I spent hours making this presentation for the university, then five minutes after I finished I received a call from Daisy's company that tells me I'm hired. I'm not going to burn the calories and time on the presentation if I don't have to. I have episodes of Mad Men to watch.
In other news, I have slowly been making my way through the list of people to send Thank-You cards to; yesterday I got my new address labels and stamp in the mail, so I no longer have to be irritated writing in our address over and over on any and all envelopes I'll send out in the future, at least for the foreseeable future anyway. There are 280 address labels and the stamp, so I'm set for a long time. I don't know how long it'll take me to go through 280 labels, but I'm guessing it'll take a while. The most mail I send out at any given time of year for the past two years has been for my graduation announcements, our wedding "save the date" announcements, and Christmas cards -- and I barely send any Christmas cards anymore. Now that Daisy and I are married, Christmas cards (probably with an adorable Christmas photo of us with the cats) are basically mandatory now, so we'll be sending a ton of them from this year forward.
Mainly because I want an adorable Christmas photo of us and the cats.
Ahem. Anyway.
So I have maybe five or six more people to send notes to before I'm done with everyone I have addresses for. Daisy will have to take over at that point, as I don't know addresses for anyone on her side of the family or her friends.
"I'll sit down and write them out while I'm off this week," she said.
There are a lot of things we say we'll do when she's off work; only approximately 10% of those things get done. Ever. That's not Daisy's fault, of course; there's just a lot more stuff to do than we have time for. Hence why it's taking so long to organize this place and why we still haven't gone through about 80% of the wedding gifts yet. For example, Daisy worked three hours of overtime this morning, and didn't even get to sleep until about four hours ago...when I was just waking up. When stuff like that happens, it throws a wrench into any plans we'd have or make. Neither of us can help that -- we just have to roll with the proverbial punches.
So that's how things stand right now. Once Daisy gets up, we'll go over to the parents' for our customary Sunday dinner-and-family time, dodging the thunderstorms the 90-degree day is throwing our way this evening.
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Promotions, Part I
Yesterday morning, Daisy was supposed to have a third interview with a company she'd applied to work at. She'd had two other ones before -- one phone interview and one in-person interview -- and this third one was supposed to be another phone interview. Why? Don't ask me; I personally think that's a bit of overkill.
Anyway, the phone interview was supposed to be at 8AM. 8AM came and went, and there was no call. "Maybe I thought they said 8, but they really said 9," Daisy said. So she waited up some more. 9AM came and went, and still no call.
"Are you sure they were supposed to call you, instead of you calling them?" I asked. She nodded.
So there was no third interview with these people. After 9AM, she silenced her phone and went to bed -- she had to, as last night was her first night back to work for the week, and that meant she had to sleep through the day. Either they forgot to call/schedule it, or they otherwise no longer cared about her as a viable candidate. I do think it was rather shitty, though, to leave Daisy hanging without telling her anything. That's poor form. She hadn't missed any calls when she woke up, either, which meant that they hadn't attempted to call all day.
This doesn't really matter now, though.
Last night, after waiting for almost three months to find out, Daisy was finally officially promoted by her company to the position she's been doing on an interim basis since long before we were married. The promotion carries a higher salary on the upside, yes, but also has the drawback of her being "on call" 24/7, even when she's off work and/or on vacation. They'll issue her a special cell phone that she'll need to keep on and charged at all times, apparently. When will she get this cell phone? She doesn't know, and she's so not going to bring it up with them until she has to, for obvious reasons.
Other than that, though? Well, she's still doing the same job she's been doing, so nothing else has really changed (or will change). She just gets paid a bit more for it now than she did before. Of course, we're both happy about this, at least to a certain extent, especially since I am still currently unemployed.
I got my literature in the mail yesterday for my interview at the university next week. Inside the envelope was a bunch of info about the university itself as well as a parking pass, instructional letter, and itinerary for the interview itself -- consisting of meeting times, discussion times, presentation/Q&A times, and my dismissal-from-campus time. I read through it briefly, the entire time thinking, again, this is a lot of burned calories and effort for a temporary position, it really is.
"So you got your promotion tonight," I said to Daisy. "Has there been any mention whatsoever of why they haven't called me back after two interviews there?"
As you may recall, and as I've written about here before, ever since my interviews with Daisy's company, nobody has gotten back to me about anything. Either they completely dropped the ball on me, they hired a bunch of other people without telling me or Daisy that the positions have been filled, or they (for some reason) thought I was too stupid to do the job...the latter of which I don't assume to be the case, since I have two degrees and gave what, in my mind, was a damn decent interview. No, it wasn't the best interview in the world, but it was still good. It's not like I did or said anything that would've fucked up my chances.
"No, I didn't have the chance to ask yet," she said.
I also have the advantage of having gone to the company July 4th party with Daisy last week, so I got to meet several other workers and two other managers/supervisors Daisy works with. It's not like they don't know who I am, but it's also not them who do the hiring.
"If they did call you and want to offer you the job, would you rather work at [her company] or at [the university]?"
"Psh," I said. "There with you. No question. The university job entails going to other schools and colleges and talking to people, being the face of undergraduate admissions, which means I actually have to be active and go out and drive around and put on a fake smile and all that. I want an office job where I sit at a desk in front of a computer for my shift, take a smoke break when I want or need to, and then come home when it's done."
Plus, and I'll remind you readers this for posterity's sake -- the university position is temporary, and I'm not going to take a temp job over a sure thing. If there's one thing I do know about Daisy's company, it's that as long as you can do the work, don't make waves, and don't break the rules...it's stable, steady employment in an industry that's not going away anytime soon, employment with a company that's been growing exponentially since the late 80s. If the university were offering me a teaching position with full benefits and/or the possibility of tenure, it would be different. It's not.
So, with six days before this huge presentation/interview thing, I'm actually sort of hoping that someone else calls me back and offers me a job somewhere, or at least offers me an interview that would lead to a job, just so I have an excuse not to make up this mock presentation and go through with this interview for a job that I really don't want to do -- especially now that I see what it entails a little more clearly. I just don't think I'm the right person for this position, honestly, and now it feels like I'm so far in that I should just bite the bullet and grit my teeth through this interview even though I don't want to.
It's not just now that I've felt like this, either. I've been feeling more and more like this for the past week or so, and it's just...well, frustrating. Even if I were to get the job, and even if I were to actually like the job, it ends in a few months (since it's a temp position) and I'm stuck where I am now once more. I'm not sure I should sacrifice other opportunities of continuing work to jump on a temporary position even if it's offered to me -- especially if between now and the interview I get some calls and requests for other interviews/positions. So I'm sort of stuck, torn on what to do even now.
Still, here's the thing -- no matter what happens, no matter whether this big important interview goes good or bad -- if I have to do it, it's still only two hours out of my life. It's a drop in the bucket of time spent, so to speak. Who knows whether they'll want me or not, and who knows how many other candidates they have that they're interviewing in the same way.
"You mean you didn't ask how many other people they're interviewing?" Daisy asked me over the weekend.
"...no, I didn't," I said. "I figured that would've been in slightly bad taste."
"Why?" she asked, with a surprised look on her face.
"Well, I mean...who asks that?"
"A lot of people."
I've never asked that question about any job I've interviewed for. Ever. Again, I consider it poor etiquette at best, and bad taste at worst, to ask how many other people are fighting for the job. Maybe that's just me, but it's just not something that crosses my mind when I'm in an interview.
But one thing did cross my mind after this discussion... what if I'm literally the only one?
I mean, that's possible at least. I doubt it, but it's possible. Then I began to think about all of the pomp-and-circumstance of the interview process again. Would they do that if they had a bunch of candidates lined up? Would they set up two-hour interviews with parking passes, literature, itineraries, and presentations for ten candidates? Five? Three, even?
I don't know. The university up here operates a hell of a lot differently than the ones I've worked for in the past. Who knows, frankly, how they do things, or how they make their decisions and do their screening processes? I certainly don't. I only know that Daisy went to and graduated from there, and that I have one friend working there in a different department. But that's it. I'm in a whole different ballpark up here when it comes to this place. Ahem, so to speak.
Anyway, the phone interview was supposed to be at 8AM. 8AM came and went, and there was no call. "Maybe I thought they said 8, but they really said 9," Daisy said. So she waited up some more. 9AM came and went, and still no call.
"Are you sure they were supposed to call you, instead of you calling them?" I asked. She nodded.
So there was no third interview with these people. After 9AM, she silenced her phone and went to bed -- she had to, as last night was her first night back to work for the week, and that meant she had to sleep through the day. Either they forgot to call/schedule it, or they otherwise no longer cared about her as a viable candidate. I do think it was rather shitty, though, to leave Daisy hanging without telling her anything. That's poor form. She hadn't missed any calls when she woke up, either, which meant that they hadn't attempted to call all day.
This doesn't really matter now, though.
Last night, after waiting for almost three months to find out, Daisy was finally officially promoted by her company to the position she's been doing on an interim basis since long before we were married. The promotion carries a higher salary on the upside, yes, but also has the drawback of her being "on call" 24/7, even when she's off work and/or on vacation. They'll issue her a special cell phone that she'll need to keep on and charged at all times, apparently. When will she get this cell phone? She doesn't know, and she's so not going to bring it up with them until she has to, for obvious reasons.
Other than that, though? Well, she's still doing the same job she's been doing, so nothing else has really changed (or will change). She just gets paid a bit more for it now than she did before. Of course, we're both happy about this, at least to a certain extent, especially since I am still currently unemployed.
I got my literature in the mail yesterday for my interview at the university next week. Inside the envelope was a bunch of info about the university itself as well as a parking pass, instructional letter, and itinerary for the interview itself -- consisting of meeting times, discussion times, presentation/Q&A times, and my dismissal-from-campus time. I read through it briefly, the entire time thinking, again, this is a lot of burned calories and effort for a temporary position, it really is.
"So you got your promotion tonight," I said to Daisy. "Has there been any mention whatsoever of why they haven't called me back after two interviews there?"
As you may recall, and as I've written about here before, ever since my interviews with Daisy's company, nobody has gotten back to me about anything. Either they completely dropped the ball on me, they hired a bunch of other people without telling me or Daisy that the positions have been filled, or they (for some reason) thought I was too stupid to do the job...the latter of which I don't assume to be the case, since I have two degrees and gave what, in my mind, was a damn decent interview. No, it wasn't the best interview in the world, but it was still good. It's not like I did or said anything that would've fucked up my chances.
"No, I didn't have the chance to ask yet," she said.
I also have the advantage of having gone to the company July 4th party with Daisy last week, so I got to meet several other workers and two other managers/supervisors Daisy works with. It's not like they don't know who I am, but it's also not them who do the hiring.
"If they did call you and want to offer you the job, would you rather work at [her company] or at [the university]?"
"Psh," I said. "There with you. No question. The university job entails going to other schools and colleges and talking to people, being the face of undergraduate admissions, which means I actually have to be active and go out and drive around and put on a fake smile and all that. I want an office job where I sit at a desk in front of a computer for my shift, take a smoke break when I want or need to, and then come home when it's done."
Plus, and I'll remind you readers this for posterity's sake -- the university position is temporary, and I'm not going to take a temp job over a sure thing. If there's one thing I do know about Daisy's company, it's that as long as you can do the work, don't make waves, and don't break the rules...it's stable, steady employment in an industry that's not going away anytime soon, employment with a company that's been growing exponentially since the late 80s. If the university were offering me a teaching position with full benefits and/or the possibility of tenure, it would be different. It's not.
So, with six days before this huge presentation/interview thing, I'm actually sort of hoping that someone else calls me back and offers me a job somewhere, or at least offers me an interview that would lead to a job, just so I have an excuse not to make up this mock presentation and go through with this interview for a job that I really don't want to do -- especially now that I see what it entails a little more clearly. I just don't think I'm the right person for this position, honestly, and now it feels like I'm so far in that I should just bite the bullet and grit my teeth through this interview even though I don't want to.
It's not just now that I've felt like this, either. I've been feeling more and more like this for the past week or so, and it's just...well, frustrating. Even if I were to get the job, and even if I were to actually like the job, it ends in a few months (since it's a temp position) and I'm stuck where I am now once more. I'm not sure I should sacrifice other opportunities of continuing work to jump on a temporary position even if it's offered to me -- especially if between now and the interview I get some calls and requests for other interviews/positions. So I'm sort of stuck, torn on what to do even now.
Still, here's the thing -- no matter what happens, no matter whether this big important interview goes good or bad -- if I have to do it, it's still only two hours out of my life. It's a drop in the bucket of time spent, so to speak. Who knows whether they'll want me or not, and who knows how many other candidates they have that they're interviewing in the same way.
"You mean you didn't ask how many other people they're interviewing?" Daisy asked me over the weekend.
"...no, I didn't," I said. "I figured that would've been in slightly bad taste."
"Why?" she asked, with a surprised look on her face.
"Well, I mean...who asks that?"
"A lot of people."
I've never asked that question about any job I've interviewed for. Ever. Again, I consider it poor etiquette at best, and bad taste at worst, to ask how many other people are fighting for the job. Maybe that's just me, but it's just not something that crosses my mind when I'm in an interview.
But one thing did cross my mind after this discussion... what if I'm literally the only one?
I mean, that's possible at least. I doubt it, but it's possible. Then I began to think about all of the pomp-and-circumstance of the interview process again. Would they do that if they had a bunch of candidates lined up? Would they set up two-hour interviews with parking passes, literature, itineraries, and presentations for ten candidates? Five? Three, even?
I don't know. The university up here operates a hell of a lot differently than the ones I've worked for in the past. Who knows, frankly, how they do things, or how they make their decisions and do their screening processes? I certainly don't. I only know that Daisy went to and graduated from there, and that I have one friend working there in a different department. But that's it. I'm in a whole different ballpark up here when it comes to this place. Ahem, so to speak.
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Happily Ever After, Part II
I fully realize I don't write here as much as I should, and honestly I have no real/good excuse for it.
In the days since my last post, a lot has been going on in Brandon-and-Daisy-world. We are now -- slowly, mind you -- getting the house in order and getting things taken care of and put away. Daisy set up her new bookcase last night (which opened up part of the living room/dining room a bit more), and in the next several days we will hopefully clean up the stuff that needs to be cleaned up and put away so that it's not a burden to walk through several rooms of the house.
No, we've not yet gone through and catalogued the wedding gifts, but I have already begun the long process of mailing out the Thank-You notes to everyone I have addresses for and wrote down that they sent or gave. So far I've sent out close to ten of them, with many more coming in the next few days/weeks. Daisy has a good fifteen or more to write out to her own friends and family, and I have another ten or so myself. I've been sending them out in volleys of three or four at a time, but we're running low on stamps, so we will have to get more of those before we can send out the rest of them. I had some cards left over from my graduation last year, so I used those first -- but after they ran out, I had to order another set of 100 cards/envelopes from Amazon, which I've been using since. I mentioned this in my last post here last week.
Here's the problem, though -- in addition to not having stamps, I also didn't have address labels. I still don't.
While I tend to be pretty laid-back about a lot of things in life (and I'm sure some of you will find it highly amusing that I say this), there are some little things -- and I do mean little things -- that drive me batshit nuts. And one of those little things is not having return address labels for envelopes and bills and the like that I need to mail out. When I lived in Kansas, this was never a problem -- I always donated about (on average, anyway) $100 a year to the DAV. It's the only charity I donate to, and as I've written here in the past, I am very passionate about my support of veterans. My grandfather was in the Navy and was at Pearl Harbor. Daisy's father, as well as one of my uncles, was in Vietnam. My officemate at the university for three years was an Iraq War veteran, and some of my best students over the years have been veterans. I may not always be incredibly patriotic in my own thoughts and views, but I support the hell out of anyone who has fought for our country. So, because of this, I donated to (and continually donate to -- the last check I wrote them was in May) the DAV. Because I was a regular donor, one of the things the organization did to show their thanks was to send adhesive address labels in all colors and patterns about three times a year, about 100 labels or so each time. Over the years I lived in Kansas, I collected thousands of these address labels, as I kept them and used them on everything I stuck in the mail. I had a huge stack of them, a pile probably two inches high.
Once I moved out of the house in Kansas, however, every one of them became useless and obsolete -- because it's not like that was my address anymore. I shredded almost all of them, saving only the many sets of letter seal stickers that also came with them. I mean, I couldn't use them once they were outdated. So I found myself living in a new place in Omaha, with a new address, and no address labels to put on my mail -- I had to write in my return address every time like some sort of caveman.
Again, little things like this drive me nuts. I tend to send a rather high volume of mail, more than most people do these days. And while yes, I do pay 90% of my/our bills online now, there are a few that have to be paid by mail because there's no online option. With the large number of Thank-You cards we're sending out now as well, I started getting really twitchy about needing to write in my address every damn time. I don't know if the DAV has any presence in Nebraska, or if there's some sort of law that prevents solicitation by mail here or something, but when I sent my last donation check to them back in May, I included my change of address on the form where indicated. They very quickly cashed the check, and...I've heard nothing from them since. I've been living here in Omaha almost two months now, and I haven't received anything new in the mail from them. I at least expected a July 4th donation drive or something like that, but never got anything. So I had no new address labels.
It finally drove me nuts enough to where last week I did something about it. I went to a website called Vistaprint, which I'd heard advertised on a few podcasts I listen to, and custom designed and ordered 280 address labels. I also got a custom self-inking stamp as well. I used a coupon code and it got about $10 or more taken off my order. They shipped yesterday and should be here by Friday. I used my own credit card for them, not our joint account money.
Daisy thought I was insane, by the way. She said I could get special paper and print my own address labels...and while I can, I can't do that on a laser printer (which is what I have) -- it would have to be an inkjet. I haven't owned an inkjet printer in fifteen years, and even when I did, the ink was so expensive that I couldn't afford it. My laser printer, on the other hand? Yeah, the toner cartridge in it has lasted over two years, and that's with a lot of printing I did as a grad student and professor.
So yeah, that's my mindset when it comes to essential items.
"I'll write in the addresses for you on envelopes if it bothers you that much," Daisy said, "but if it's really that important to you, okay."
"It is," I said, twitching internally at the thought of going without them.
It wasn't expensive, really; I'll probably go back to them sometime in the future as they do all sorts of custom stuff like that -- for example, business cards. I'll need business cards at some point, I'm sure. Daisy's initial reaction, however, made me glad that I didn't order a second set of labels with both of our names on them...which I did consider briefly.
Speaking of both names...while Daisy's last name is changed almost everywhere else at this point, the one place she's not gotten it changed is with the social security office. She will also have to get a new passport as well, as we plan to go to Nova Scotia next summer. While Daisy does have full dual citizenship in both the US and Canada (Mama was born there and she has permanent resident status here in the US), that doesn't mean she doesn't need a passport to travel between the two countries. I myself have never had a passport, as I've never left the states, so we'd (ideally) like to get both of them done at the same time...and it takes a while to do it. It also costs a good bit of money to do it. To be able to change her name in these last places, Daisy needs her birth certificate or a certified copy of it. The parents aren't sure where that is (though it's more than likely in the house somewhere) and if we had to go with a certified copy, well, that may be more difficult than it seems or should be, since Daisy was born in Vermont and moved out of state shortly thereafter.
"I'm not sure you couldn't get a new social security card online somehow," I told her. "One would think that they would've streamlined the process and put a form for it online at this point."
I mean, people get married every day, right? Her name's already changed everywhere else, including on her new driver's license, so...
We'll have to see what happens. Dad looked for the birth certificate last night but couldn't find it, and I would imagine it'll turn up eventually if it's in the house.
Anyway, changing gears yet again...
Since my phone interview with the university here a week ago -- in which the lady told me she was going to mail me official literature to study and help prepare for my presentation I have to give -- I haven't gotten anything in the mail yet. I know at least some mail is more than likely being slowed by the July 4th holiday, but with a little more than a week left before I have to give this presentation (that I will need to spend some considerable time working on, I'd imagine) I'm beginning to get a bit nervous. She told me to let her know if it hadn't arrived in a week or so, and that date would be on Wednesday (read: tomorrow).
We haven't yet gotten our wedding photos in the mail from our photographer, either. She did send them once, but apparently they got returned to her because she put the wrong address on them. Daisy verified the address here with her last week, and she said she'd resend them. It's a disc anyway, not a huge stack of photos. As soon as we get those, I'll post a few of them here. You can go back to the wedding recap posts if you want to see one or two of them, as I was able to see a few of them early.
Today we don't have much planned; Daisy went to bed about an hour ago with a migraine (or the beginnings of one), due to a sinus headache. We were planning to go to the gym together, since we have a free gym here at our apartment complex, but during play wrestling tonight she tore off a large chunk of her toenail and it now hurts for her to walk a lot. We were also planning to go take care of the remaining grocery shopping together (she went out yesterday afternoon with Mama, and picked up some stuff on the way home), but that may be put on hold and/or I may be doing a fair amount of it myself in the coming days due to her toe. In the meantime? Life is the status quo, I suppose.
In the days since my last post, a lot has been going on in Brandon-and-Daisy-world. We are now -- slowly, mind you -- getting the house in order and getting things taken care of and put away. Daisy set up her new bookcase last night (which opened up part of the living room/dining room a bit more), and in the next several days we will hopefully clean up the stuff that needs to be cleaned up and put away so that it's not a burden to walk through several rooms of the house.
No, we've not yet gone through and catalogued the wedding gifts, but I have already begun the long process of mailing out the Thank-You notes to everyone I have addresses for and wrote down that they sent or gave. So far I've sent out close to ten of them, with many more coming in the next few days/weeks. Daisy has a good fifteen or more to write out to her own friends and family, and I have another ten or so myself. I've been sending them out in volleys of three or four at a time, but we're running low on stamps, so we will have to get more of those before we can send out the rest of them. I had some cards left over from my graduation last year, so I used those first -- but after they ran out, I had to order another set of 100 cards/envelopes from Amazon, which I've been using since. I mentioned this in my last post here last week.
Here's the problem, though -- in addition to not having stamps, I also didn't have address labels. I still don't.
While I tend to be pretty laid-back about a lot of things in life (and I'm sure some of you will find it highly amusing that I say this), there are some little things -- and I do mean little things -- that drive me batshit nuts. And one of those little things is not having return address labels for envelopes and bills and the like that I need to mail out. When I lived in Kansas, this was never a problem -- I always donated about (on average, anyway) $100 a year to the DAV. It's the only charity I donate to, and as I've written here in the past, I am very passionate about my support of veterans. My grandfather was in the Navy and was at Pearl Harbor. Daisy's father, as well as one of my uncles, was in Vietnam. My officemate at the university for three years was an Iraq War veteran, and some of my best students over the years have been veterans. I may not always be incredibly patriotic in my own thoughts and views, but I support the hell out of anyone who has fought for our country. So, because of this, I donated to (and continually donate to -- the last check I wrote them was in May) the DAV. Because I was a regular donor, one of the things the organization did to show their thanks was to send adhesive address labels in all colors and patterns about three times a year, about 100 labels or so each time. Over the years I lived in Kansas, I collected thousands of these address labels, as I kept them and used them on everything I stuck in the mail. I had a huge stack of them, a pile probably two inches high.
Once I moved out of the house in Kansas, however, every one of them became useless and obsolete -- because it's not like that was my address anymore. I shredded almost all of them, saving only the many sets of letter seal stickers that also came with them. I mean, I couldn't use them once they were outdated. So I found myself living in a new place in Omaha, with a new address, and no address labels to put on my mail -- I had to write in my return address every time like some sort of caveman.
Again, little things like this drive me nuts. I tend to send a rather high volume of mail, more than most people do these days. And while yes, I do pay 90% of my/our bills online now, there are a few that have to be paid by mail because there's no online option. With the large number of Thank-You cards we're sending out now as well, I started getting really twitchy about needing to write in my address every damn time. I don't know if the DAV has any presence in Nebraska, or if there's some sort of law that prevents solicitation by mail here or something, but when I sent my last donation check to them back in May, I included my change of address on the form where indicated. They very quickly cashed the check, and...I've heard nothing from them since. I've been living here in Omaha almost two months now, and I haven't received anything new in the mail from them. I at least expected a July 4th donation drive or something like that, but never got anything. So I had no new address labels.
It finally drove me nuts enough to where last week I did something about it. I went to a website called Vistaprint, which I'd heard advertised on a few podcasts I listen to, and custom designed and ordered 280 address labels. I also got a custom self-inking stamp as well. I used a coupon code and it got about $10 or more taken off my order. They shipped yesterday and should be here by Friday. I used my own credit card for them, not our joint account money.
Daisy thought I was insane, by the way. She said I could get special paper and print my own address labels...and while I can, I can't do that on a laser printer (which is what I have) -- it would have to be an inkjet. I haven't owned an inkjet printer in fifteen years, and even when I did, the ink was so expensive that I couldn't afford it. My laser printer, on the other hand? Yeah, the toner cartridge in it has lasted over two years, and that's with a lot of printing I did as a grad student and professor.
So yeah, that's my mindset when it comes to essential items.
"I'll write in the addresses for you on envelopes if it bothers you that much," Daisy said, "but if it's really that important to you, okay."
"It is," I said, twitching internally at the thought of going without them.
It wasn't expensive, really; I'll probably go back to them sometime in the future as they do all sorts of custom stuff like that -- for example, business cards. I'll need business cards at some point, I'm sure. Daisy's initial reaction, however, made me glad that I didn't order a second set of labels with both of our names on them...which I did consider briefly.
Speaking of both names...while Daisy's last name is changed almost everywhere else at this point, the one place she's not gotten it changed is with the social security office. She will also have to get a new passport as well, as we plan to go to Nova Scotia next summer. While Daisy does have full dual citizenship in both the US and Canada (Mama was born there and she has permanent resident status here in the US), that doesn't mean she doesn't need a passport to travel between the two countries. I myself have never had a passport, as I've never left the states, so we'd (ideally) like to get both of them done at the same time...and it takes a while to do it. It also costs a good bit of money to do it. To be able to change her name in these last places, Daisy needs her birth certificate or a certified copy of it. The parents aren't sure where that is (though it's more than likely in the house somewhere) and if we had to go with a certified copy, well, that may be more difficult than it seems or should be, since Daisy was born in Vermont and moved out of state shortly thereafter.
"I'm not sure you couldn't get a new social security card online somehow," I told her. "One would think that they would've streamlined the process and put a form for it online at this point."
I mean, people get married every day, right? Her name's already changed everywhere else, including on her new driver's license, so...
We'll have to see what happens. Dad looked for the birth certificate last night but couldn't find it, and I would imagine it'll turn up eventually if it's in the house.
Anyway, changing gears yet again...
Since my phone interview with the university here a week ago -- in which the lady told me she was going to mail me official literature to study and help prepare for my presentation I have to give -- I haven't gotten anything in the mail yet. I know at least some mail is more than likely being slowed by the July 4th holiday, but with a little more than a week left before I have to give this presentation (that I will need to spend some considerable time working on, I'd imagine) I'm beginning to get a bit nervous. She told me to let her know if it hadn't arrived in a week or so, and that date would be on Wednesday (read: tomorrow).
We haven't yet gotten our wedding photos in the mail from our photographer, either. She did send them once, but apparently they got returned to her because she put the wrong address on them. Daisy verified the address here with her last week, and she said she'd resend them. It's a disc anyway, not a huge stack of photos. As soon as we get those, I'll post a few of them here. You can go back to the wedding recap posts if you want to see one or two of them, as I was able to see a few of them early.
Today we don't have much planned; Daisy went to bed about an hour ago with a migraine (or the beginnings of one), due to a sinus headache. We were planning to go to the gym together, since we have a free gym here at our apartment complex, but during play wrestling tonight she tore off a large chunk of her toenail and it now hurts for her to walk a lot. We were also planning to go take care of the remaining grocery shopping together (she went out yesterday afternoon with Mama, and picked up some stuff on the way home), but that may be put on hold and/or I may be doing a fair amount of it myself in the coming days due to her toe. In the meantime? Life is the status quo, I suppose.
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Happily Ever After, Part I
Yesterday morning, I did a phone interview with the university here. It took about twenty-five minutes or so, and it was a conference call with three different women in the department of undergraduate admissions (where the job is, obviously). I pictured them all sitting around a table in a conference room with one of those triangular-shaped desktop conference call phones in the middle of it.
Yeah, one of these things.
Anyway.
It went exceedingly well -- probably the best phone interview I've ever had, to be honest with you. That's also interesting/amusing to me because I not only hate the telephone, but outright loathe it. I tend to be much more personable and can answer questions more fully and to the best of my ability not in a phone interview or an in-person interview, but in text. Duh. Because I'm a writer. It's in my blood. I'm incredibly socially awkward in most situations, and that awkwardness skyrockets even more when I'm in a high-stakes social situation -- such as, y'know, trying to secure employment in order to be able to continue to feed myself and my wife. While I'm fairly certain I gave a good interview at Daisy's company, the fact remains that they never contacted me again even after I asked them for an update, so maybe in their eyes they didn't think I was a worthwhile hire.
But, apparently, the ladies at the university thought so.
This afternoon, when Daisy got up and checked her phone, there was a message from the lead interviewer asking me to call her back. This was, oh, a little more than 24 hours after the phone interview yesterday morning, so I took that as a good sign.
I knew I'd impressed them, of course, from their reactions to my answers in the phone interview. After working in academia for years, believe me, I know what an academic administration wants to hear, and I know how to phrase what they want to hear in as diplomatic and professional a way as possible. If they ask you a specific question, you counter with an equally specific answer. The same is true in all interviews, of course (or at least it should be), but if you know exactly what your interviewers want to hear from you, it makes the process easier.
Anyway, I have an in-person interview at 8:30 AM on July 16. Why so far off? Well...that's because I have to study for it. It's not a simple interview by any stretch of the imagination, no -- I'm being put on trial, basically. A trial by fire.
The position (which has never fully been explained to me outside of the job posting for it on the website) involves recruiting, but specifically recruitment of new students. This means it's basically my job to sell seventeen-and-eighteen-year-olds on why they should choose the university for their continued education, play up its strong suits and good points while minimizing the bad (what bad there may be, anyway) and rationalizing it away. It may include campus tours -- small or large. It will more than likely include going to high schools and other colleges (like junior colleges and/or community colleges around the area) to run panels on "career day"-like functions or give assembly-like presentations. Basically, I'd become the face of the university to incoming undergraduate students, 8-5 Monday through Friday, until (apparently) December, when the position is scheduled to end. And yes, it will end -- it's a temporary position only. For this position, if I get it, I will be paid more per hour than Daisy is currently making at her own job.
And it's not going to be easy to get. I mentioned above that I'm being put on trial for this position, and that I have to study for it, and this is true -- the interview on July 16 runs from 8:30 to 10:30 in the morning. Yes, it's a two-hour interview. Some of that time will be spent in normal interview fashion, where I meet the people in charge of things, including at least one big-wig chancellor, yes, before the most important part of the interview: I am to give a fifteen-minute presentation as if it were a real presentation I'd give prospective incoming students. In it I will have to detail everything I covered above, and again, basically sell the university's strong suits to the students. PowerPoint can and probably will be involved. After the presentation, I assume I will be asked questions relating to the information presented, and I will have to answer those questions to the best of my ability -- that's why I'm being sent literature, handbooks, and other information I need so that I can study it and create this presentation, because everything about me getting or not getting the job depends on it.
Let's step back here for a second, shall we?
This is a position that -- even though it says it runs from July to December -- I'm not even interviewing for until (literally) halfway through July. It's a position that is temporary, a position that is full time while it's temporary, yes, but is still temporary. It is a position that pays a decent salary comparable to that of my wife's salary for the time that it exists, but it ends a little over four months after it begins, and that's being generous. Come Christmas, even if I get the position, I'll be out on my ass and they'll have someone else filling the role (I know why it's a temporary position, but that's private information I can't really share here). It doesn't matter what they pay, but it does matter that it's temporary. Now today was the third time I've been contacted about interviews for this job, and then found out that my third interview will be a two-hour affair including a long-form presentation that a university chancellor will be in attendance for.
This sounds a little more complex and important than a four-month temporary job, doesn't it?
Look, I don't know how the university here operates (nor will I pretend to), but when it comes to hiring, multiple-interview processes, and presentations being made by interviewees...that's the sort of stuff that most universities only do when tenured professors, deans, and other really-high-up administrators are looking to be hired, not low-ranking temps. This leads me to believe, logically, that they're not just looking for a simple temp, but a temp that can be moved to another permanent position once that temp position ends, like a temp-to-hire situation. I mean, I may be completely wrong of course, but otherwise it seems like a lot of wasted effort with little return on their investment to kick someone back to the curb after four months.
Maybe that's just me, though.
Anyway. The "literature" for the position was mailed to me this afternoon (according to the lady I talked to) and once I get it I'm supposed to be studying it and working on my presentation in two weeks. A lot can happen in two weeks, though. I have a lot of other applications in right now at various other jobs, industries, and universities around the Omaha metro area. That means I could receive a callback, interview, and an offer within that window of time before I could even do this presentation and interview thing with them. Will that happen? Probably not, but the fact remains that it's possible. It's not like I'm going to stop applying for new positions or following up on the ones I have applied for already, though.
"It sounds like an awful lot of work and too many hoops to have me jump through unless they're already dead-set on hiring me for this position anyway," I told Daisy tonight.
She shrugged. "It's not out of the question for some places to do this; it would be akin to an interviewer asking me 'okay, pretend I'm an angry customer on the phone with you. Go.' It's similar to that, just for a different job. They want to make sure you know what you're doing."
"Obviously," I replied, "but do you think they're asking all of their interviewees to do this? If they are, it seems like they're wasting a ton of in-the-office time to conduct interviews, if each one is two hours long like they tell me mine will be."
"[University] is really hard to get into," she said. "Everyone wants to work there; they're very competitive."
I just want to work there because I've been working in academia for almost five years now. I know what I'm doing when it comes to academia, and I know that an administrative position of any sort in academia (except, well, a temp position) would be incredibly stable and basically immune to most layoffs and/or other downsizing. If I could play off that temp experience into a full-time position with a comparable salary, Daisy and I will be pretty good, financially speaking. We'd make enough combined to where we could afford to start looking to buy our own home, make enough to where I could get a new (or newer) car.
"Look, we have one of three possible outcomes for the foreseeable future," I told her last night in bed. "One? I get a job with a salary comparable to yours. Two? You get a better job, one with a much higher salary than the one you have now, and it buys us more time and breathing space for me to find something that I would actually want and like to do. Three? Everything remains as it is now, and while we're not rolling in money, we're at least mostly stable for the time being until either one or two happen."
Daisy has an important job interview tomorrow morning after she gets home from work tonight, and she's somewhat nervous about it. The starting salary for said job is about 25% more than she makes now, and the higher-end salary is double or more. Yes, while the temp job I'm interviewing for would make us some good money for the short run, it will end. And that's even if I were to get it. The job she's interviewing for tomorrow includes possible travel as a liaison for the company, and it was heavily implied that said travel was all expenses paid. I just want Daisy to be happy in what she does, and I want us to be continually financially stable one way or another. For that to happen, something has to happen for one of us or both.
There is the fourth possible outcome that I didn't mention or list above, and that outcome would be for us both to get highly-paid positions doing what we'd like to do, with hers being something new as well. I call this the "snowball's chance in hell" possible outcome, as we'd have to be remarkably lucky for this to happen. For any of you who know me well, luck in job hunting (or much else) isn't exactly my strong suit.
So. Onward.
Tonight in the mail I received a letter from my former landlord in Newton. It was the final breakdown/accounting of the house after I'd lived there. Cleaning and repairs were taken out of the security deposit that had been paid upon moving in -- and it didn't cover it all. So, what I got in the mail was a bill for $140-something.
My first thought mirrored Daisy's sentiment on the situation as well -- that place was in pretty nasty shape, and though we did what we could, I'm lucky it wasn't more.
I wrote a check for the amount he'd billed me for out of our joint bank account and stuck it in the mail with a short letter wishing him well, as well as a proverbial mental shrug. It's done now; I lived there for five years, and yes, a fair amount of the place needed some considerable work. We cleaned what we could and we took care of everything that we could take care of within reason and within the time frame we had to work with, and yes, I'm lucky and glad that it wasn't more. But, it's not like I can do anything about it now; I no longer live there and that place, that town, that state -- it's all in my past. I've never returned to, and have rarely given a second thought to, any apartment or house I've lived before since moving out here to the midwest. That house served me well as a good bachelor pad and home base, but again, it's in the past now. My former landlord and his wife are good, kind people, and I believe it was that goodness and kindness that probably made him take things a little more leniently on me than they could have if the two of them hadn't liked me so much. So yes, I got off a little light (at least in my own eyes).
I'm beginning to get the hang of this "joint checking account" thing too. I sort of have to, as my own personal account is slowly emptying. I've paid three of my bills out of my own account in the past several days, and because of that I'm keeping an eye on it while I use our joint account to pay the household bills like the rent and water/trash. We're being cautious with money, which is good. I have my own debit card for that account and I have the checkbook for it (so that when checks must be used, I can just write them out, write them in a ledger, and send them off).
"Use it for whatever you want," Daisy told me. "It's our money. Just don't go and spend like $500 of it at once without telling me, or something like that."
I've written here before how it makes me uncomfortable to not be financially independent and responsible for myself. Yes, Daisy is my wife, and yes, legally and mentally/spiritually the money is ours, since both of our names are on the account. But again, I'm not working right now, and Daisy's the only one contributing funds into that account. I felt guilty last night when we went to get groceries and she paid for them, because even though it's our money that's used, more than half of the groceries and other commodities in the cart were for me and me alone (read: non-vegan things and cigarettes).
Again, yes, I realize that in a sort of half-hearted way, my mere presence has contributed to that bank account's balance, as the majority of the "extra" money in there was from wedding checks written out to both of us. Yes, that does ease my guilt a bit, but it doesn't ease it so much as to where I wouldn't feel extremely uncomfortable, say, going to Amazon and getting some stuff I needed/wanted off of my wish list(s), stuff that I've been needing or wanting for a while. I'm not going to do that. She wanted me to do that to get her something for her birthday, and I refused to do so -- I didn't want it to be like she was spending our money and/or money she earned from her job on her own birthday present, you know? Instead I used my Discover card on the night of her birthday to get her stuff she wanted and needed when we were out...as well as some pretty daisies, daisies that are currently still sitting in a vase on the desk in here in the computer room a week and a half later.
I am going to have to get used to it, though, whether I'm contributing to said account in the near future or otherwise. All of our bills will, quite soon, have to be paid out of that account -- as will any groceries I get for the household on nights where I have to run out and pick stuff up. Up until now, like I said, whatever bills I can pay from my own account, especially the stuff in my name, I've just been paying it directly from there. I'm slowly paying down the balance on my credit cards, and I haven't put gas in the Monte Carlo since the day I drove it up here in May because I so rarely take it out anywhere -- we usually take Daisy's car regardless of who's driving because my car has no air conditioning (and, well, it's summer). We've taken mine out a few times, but I can count on one hand how many. I actually need to get it out and drive it around a bit, run some errands or do shopping in it soon, just so that it doesn't sit in the parking lot and rot/rust.
In the meantime, while I've been at home I've been trying to accomplish a lot of different tasks. Two or three nights ago I sent off a volley of Thank-You notes to friends and family until I ran out of actual notes to send. I ordered a box of 100 of them off of Amazon (with my own money, of course) and they arrived yesterday -- so over the course of the next few days I can continue writing/mailing more of them out. I got 100 in the box because Daisy has a ton of people to write notes to as well. I'm the paranoid guy who thinks we're going to forget someone in our thankings, or that we'll forget said someone because we misplaced their gift(s) to us, or forgot to write down that someone's name in particular when going through them.
We still haven't done that, by the way. We'd planned to do it this week during Daisy's days off, but other things kept coming up. We wanted to go to the gym this afternoon, too. Daisy needs an oil change in her car. We did all of our shopping yesterday and last night, and we were pretty tired after that (it involved four stores, two trips home, and a trip to the parents' in-between for Canada Day). Daisy's days off go quickly, and we can never seem to get everything accomplished that we need to. To those ends, the house is still a mess of boxes and bags of clothing from Daisy's old bedroom at her parents' place, the wedding/bridal shower gifts have yet to be sorted, and the master bathroom still needs to be cleaned and scrubbed down like crazy (good thing that's Daisy's bathroom and I never use it). We did, however, finally assemble the new bed frame that Daisy ordered to replace my old one that broke into pieces upon the move, and we, ahem, installed the bed on top of it. It's very high off the floor once the mattress, box springs, and mattress pad are all on the frame -- it comes up to my waist. Because of that it's a completely new experience for me; my old wooden frame, with the padded leather headboard, was much lower to the ground -- it was only maybe six inches off the floor and the bed sat down inside the frame, not on top of it. The new frame is about eight or ten inches off the floor and everything sits on top of it, which makes the bed itself super-tall. It's going to take quite some time to get used to, I think. The cats find it interesting, though, as they now once more have someplace interesting (to them) to sleep under.
On that note...that's really all that's going on right now. Daisy works tomorrow night until midnight before she's off for the 24 hours of July 4th. We're going to a work party held by one of her managers for a little while in the evening, and will also be doing lunch beforehand with the parents (at least, that's the plan). She's working weird hours this week because of the 4th holiday, meaning she's going in at 4PM to make up time, and on the morning of the 5th will be staying later than usual. She gets paid for eight hours of a shift for the 4th (as it's a holiday), but as her normal shift is ten hours long, she's making up time here and there for the rest of the days she works this week.
Anyway.
It went exceedingly well -- probably the best phone interview I've ever had, to be honest with you. That's also interesting/amusing to me because I not only hate the telephone, but outright loathe it. I tend to be much more personable and can answer questions more fully and to the best of my ability not in a phone interview or an in-person interview, but in text. Duh. Because I'm a writer. It's in my blood. I'm incredibly socially awkward in most situations, and that awkwardness skyrockets even more when I'm in a high-stakes social situation -- such as, y'know, trying to secure employment in order to be able to continue to feed myself and my wife. While I'm fairly certain I gave a good interview at Daisy's company, the fact remains that they never contacted me again even after I asked them for an update, so maybe in their eyes they didn't think I was a worthwhile hire.
But, apparently, the ladies at the university thought so.
This afternoon, when Daisy got up and checked her phone, there was a message from the lead interviewer asking me to call her back. This was, oh, a little more than 24 hours after the phone interview yesterday morning, so I took that as a good sign.
I knew I'd impressed them, of course, from their reactions to my answers in the phone interview. After working in academia for years, believe me, I know what an academic administration wants to hear, and I know how to phrase what they want to hear in as diplomatic and professional a way as possible. If they ask you a specific question, you counter with an equally specific answer. The same is true in all interviews, of course (or at least it should be), but if you know exactly what your interviewers want to hear from you, it makes the process easier.
Anyway, I have an in-person interview at 8:30 AM on July 16. Why so far off? Well...that's because I have to study for it. It's not a simple interview by any stretch of the imagination, no -- I'm being put on trial, basically. A trial by fire.
The position (which has never fully been explained to me outside of the job posting for it on the website) involves recruiting, but specifically recruitment of new students. This means it's basically my job to sell seventeen-and-eighteen-year-olds on why they should choose the university for their continued education, play up its strong suits and good points while minimizing the bad (what bad there may be, anyway) and rationalizing it away. It may include campus tours -- small or large. It will more than likely include going to high schools and other colleges (like junior colleges and/or community colleges around the area) to run panels on "career day"-like functions or give assembly-like presentations. Basically, I'd become the face of the university to incoming undergraduate students, 8-5 Monday through Friday, until (apparently) December, when the position is scheduled to end. And yes, it will end -- it's a temporary position only. For this position, if I get it, I will be paid more per hour than Daisy is currently making at her own job.
And it's not going to be easy to get. I mentioned above that I'm being put on trial for this position, and that I have to study for it, and this is true -- the interview on July 16 runs from 8:30 to 10:30 in the morning. Yes, it's a two-hour interview. Some of that time will be spent in normal interview fashion, where I meet the people in charge of things, including at least one big-wig chancellor, yes, before the most important part of the interview: I am to give a fifteen-minute presentation as if it were a real presentation I'd give prospective incoming students. In it I will have to detail everything I covered above, and again, basically sell the university's strong suits to the students. PowerPoint can and probably will be involved. After the presentation, I assume I will be asked questions relating to the information presented, and I will have to answer those questions to the best of my ability -- that's why I'm being sent literature, handbooks, and other information I need so that I can study it and create this presentation, because everything about me getting or not getting the job depends on it.
Let's step back here for a second, shall we?
This is a position that -- even though it says it runs from July to December -- I'm not even interviewing for until (literally) halfway through July. It's a position that is temporary, a position that is full time while it's temporary, yes, but is still temporary. It is a position that pays a decent salary comparable to that of my wife's salary for the time that it exists, but it ends a little over four months after it begins, and that's being generous. Come Christmas, even if I get the position, I'll be out on my ass and they'll have someone else filling the role (I know why it's a temporary position, but that's private information I can't really share here). It doesn't matter what they pay, but it does matter that it's temporary. Now today was the third time I've been contacted about interviews for this job, and then found out that my third interview will be a two-hour affair including a long-form presentation that a university chancellor will be in attendance for.
This sounds a little more complex and important than a four-month temporary job, doesn't it?
Look, I don't know how the university here operates (nor will I pretend to), but when it comes to hiring, multiple-interview processes, and presentations being made by interviewees...that's the sort of stuff that most universities only do when tenured professors, deans, and other really-high-up administrators are looking to be hired, not low-ranking temps. This leads me to believe, logically, that they're not just looking for a simple temp, but a temp that can be moved to another permanent position once that temp position ends, like a temp-to-hire situation. I mean, I may be completely wrong of course, but otherwise it seems like a lot of wasted effort with little return on their investment to kick someone back to the curb after four months.
Maybe that's just me, though.
Anyway. The "literature" for the position was mailed to me this afternoon (according to the lady I talked to) and once I get it I'm supposed to be studying it and working on my presentation in two weeks. A lot can happen in two weeks, though. I have a lot of other applications in right now at various other jobs, industries, and universities around the Omaha metro area. That means I could receive a callback, interview, and an offer within that window of time before I could even do this presentation and interview thing with them. Will that happen? Probably not, but the fact remains that it's possible. It's not like I'm going to stop applying for new positions or following up on the ones I have applied for already, though.
"It sounds like an awful lot of work and too many hoops to have me jump through unless they're already dead-set on hiring me for this position anyway," I told Daisy tonight.
She shrugged. "It's not out of the question for some places to do this; it would be akin to an interviewer asking me 'okay, pretend I'm an angry customer on the phone with you. Go.' It's similar to that, just for a different job. They want to make sure you know what you're doing."
"Obviously," I replied, "but do you think they're asking all of their interviewees to do this? If they are, it seems like they're wasting a ton of in-the-office time to conduct interviews, if each one is two hours long like they tell me mine will be."
"[University] is really hard to get into," she said. "Everyone wants to work there; they're very competitive."
I just want to work there because I've been working in academia for almost five years now. I know what I'm doing when it comes to academia, and I know that an administrative position of any sort in academia (except, well, a temp position) would be incredibly stable and basically immune to most layoffs and/or other downsizing. If I could play off that temp experience into a full-time position with a comparable salary, Daisy and I will be pretty good, financially speaking. We'd make enough combined to where we could afford to start looking to buy our own home, make enough to where I could get a new (or newer) car.
"Look, we have one of three possible outcomes for the foreseeable future," I told her last night in bed. "One? I get a job with a salary comparable to yours. Two? You get a better job, one with a much higher salary than the one you have now, and it buys us more time and breathing space for me to find something that I would actually want and like to do. Three? Everything remains as it is now, and while we're not rolling in money, we're at least mostly stable for the time being until either one or two happen."
Daisy has an important job interview tomorrow morning after she gets home from work tonight, and she's somewhat nervous about it. The starting salary for said job is about 25% more than she makes now, and the higher-end salary is double or more. Yes, while the temp job I'm interviewing for would make us some good money for the short run, it will end. And that's even if I were to get it. The job she's interviewing for tomorrow includes possible travel as a liaison for the company, and it was heavily implied that said travel was all expenses paid. I just want Daisy to be happy in what she does, and I want us to be continually financially stable one way or another. For that to happen, something has to happen for one of us or both.
There is the fourth possible outcome that I didn't mention or list above, and that outcome would be for us both to get highly-paid positions doing what we'd like to do, with hers being something new as well. I call this the "snowball's chance in hell" possible outcome, as we'd have to be remarkably lucky for this to happen. For any of you who know me well, luck in job hunting (or much else) isn't exactly my strong suit.
So. Onward.
Tonight in the mail I received a letter from my former landlord in Newton. It was the final breakdown/accounting of the house after I'd lived there. Cleaning and repairs were taken out of the security deposit that had been paid upon moving in -- and it didn't cover it all. So, what I got in the mail was a bill for $140-something.
My first thought mirrored Daisy's sentiment on the situation as well -- that place was in pretty nasty shape, and though we did what we could, I'm lucky it wasn't more.
I wrote a check for the amount he'd billed me for out of our joint bank account and stuck it in the mail with a short letter wishing him well, as well as a proverbial mental shrug. It's done now; I lived there for five years, and yes, a fair amount of the place needed some considerable work. We cleaned what we could and we took care of everything that we could take care of within reason and within the time frame we had to work with, and yes, I'm lucky and glad that it wasn't more. But, it's not like I can do anything about it now; I no longer live there and that place, that town, that state -- it's all in my past. I've never returned to, and have rarely given a second thought to, any apartment or house I've lived before since moving out here to the midwest. That house served me well as a good bachelor pad and home base, but again, it's in the past now. My former landlord and his wife are good, kind people, and I believe it was that goodness and kindness that probably made him take things a little more leniently on me than they could have if the two of them hadn't liked me so much. So yes, I got off a little light (at least in my own eyes).
I'm beginning to get the hang of this "joint checking account" thing too. I sort of have to, as my own personal account is slowly emptying. I've paid three of my bills out of my own account in the past several days, and because of that I'm keeping an eye on it while I use our joint account to pay the household bills like the rent and water/trash. We're being cautious with money, which is good. I have my own debit card for that account and I have the checkbook for it (so that when checks must be used, I can just write them out, write them in a ledger, and send them off).
"Use it for whatever you want," Daisy told me. "It's our money. Just don't go and spend like $500 of it at once without telling me, or something like that."
I've written here before how it makes me uncomfortable to not be financially independent and responsible for myself. Yes, Daisy is my wife, and yes, legally and mentally/spiritually the money is ours, since both of our names are on the account. But again, I'm not working right now, and Daisy's the only one contributing funds into that account. I felt guilty last night when we went to get groceries and she paid for them, because even though it's our money that's used, more than half of the groceries and other commodities in the cart were for me and me alone (read: non-vegan things and cigarettes).
Again, yes, I realize that in a sort of half-hearted way, my mere presence has contributed to that bank account's balance, as the majority of the "extra" money in there was from wedding checks written out to both of us. Yes, that does ease my guilt a bit, but it doesn't ease it so much as to where I wouldn't feel extremely uncomfortable, say, going to Amazon and getting some stuff I needed/wanted off of my wish list(s), stuff that I've been needing or wanting for a while. I'm not going to do that. She wanted me to do that to get her something for her birthday, and I refused to do so -- I didn't want it to be like she was spending our money and/or money she earned from her job on her own birthday present, you know? Instead I used my Discover card on the night of her birthday to get her stuff she wanted and needed when we were out...as well as some pretty daisies, daisies that are currently still sitting in a vase on the desk in here in the computer room a week and a half later.
I am going to have to get used to it, though, whether I'm contributing to said account in the near future or otherwise. All of our bills will, quite soon, have to be paid out of that account -- as will any groceries I get for the household on nights where I have to run out and pick stuff up. Up until now, like I said, whatever bills I can pay from my own account, especially the stuff in my name, I've just been paying it directly from there. I'm slowly paying down the balance on my credit cards, and I haven't put gas in the Monte Carlo since the day I drove it up here in May because I so rarely take it out anywhere -- we usually take Daisy's car regardless of who's driving because my car has no air conditioning (and, well, it's summer). We've taken mine out a few times, but I can count on one hand how many. I actually need to get it out and drive it around a bit, run some errands or do shopping in it soon, just so that it doesn't sit in the parking lot and rot/rust.
In the meantime, while I've been at home I've been trying to accomplish a lot of different tasks. Two or three nights ago I sent off a volley of Thank-You notes to friends and family until I ran out of actual notes to send. I ordered a box of 100 of them off of Amazon (with my own money, of course) and they arrived yesterday -- so over the course of the next few days I can continue writing/mailing more of them out. I got 100 in the box because Daisy has a ton of people to write notes to as well. I'm the paranoid guy who thinks we're going to forget someone in our thankings, or that we'll forget said someone because we misplaced their gift(s) to us, or forgot to write down that someone's name in particular when going through them.
We still haven't done that, by the way. We'd planned to do it this week during Daisy's days off, but other things kept coming up. We wanted to go to the gym this afternoon, too. Daisy needs an oil change in her car. We did all of our shopping yesterday and last night, and we were pretty tired after that (it involved four stores, two trips home, and a trip to the parents' in-between for Canada Day). Daisy's days off go quickly, and we can never seem to get everything accomplished that we need to. To those ends, the house is still a mess of boxes and bags of clothing from Daisy's old bedroom at her parents' place, the wedding/bridal shower gifts have yet to be sorted, and the master bathroom still needs to be cleaned and scrubbed down like crazy (good thing that's Daisy's bathroom and I never use it). We did, however, finally assemble the new bed frame that Daisy ordered to replace my old one that broke into pieces upon the move, and we, ahem, installed the bed on top of it. It's very high off the floor once the mattress, box springs, and mattress pad are all on the frame -- it comes up to my waist. Because of that it's a completely new experience for me; my old wooden frame, with the padded leather headboard, was much lower to the ground -- it was only maybe six inches off the floor and the bed sat down inside the frame, not on top of it. The new frame is about eight or ten inches off the floor and everything sits on top of it, which makes the bed itself super-tall. It's going to take quite some time to get used to, I think. The cats find it interesting, though, as they now once more have someplace interesting (to them) to sleep under.
On that note...that's really all that's going on right now. Daisy works tomorrow night until midnight before she's off for the 24 hours of July 4th. We're going to a work party held by one of her managers for a little while in the evening, and will also be doing lunch beforehand with the parents (at least, that's the plan). She's working weird hours this week because of the 4th holiday, meaning she's going in at 4PM to make up time, and on the morning of the 5th will be staying later than usual. She gets paid for eight hours of a shift for the 4th (as it's a holiday), but as her normal shift is ten hours long, she's making up time here and there for the rest of the days she works this week.
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