Begging for Revenge

A couple of days ago I got a message on my phone from a woman I had interviewed with a couple of weeks ago. She was just calling to say that I had been 'shortlisted' for the job-once again- and that she would make her decision in a weeks time. This after she promised at the time of the interview that she would have a response for me by the end of that week. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me start with the interview. It was for yet another PA/Admin job. Firstly this woman calls herself the CEO, but later disclosed that the office consisted of only one person- her. Being the Chief Executive Officer of nobody is a new one. Doesn't the word 'executive' allude to some kind of hierarchy? Madness. So she proceeded, unsurprisingly to regale me with a list of questions (read directly from the paper in front of her) that were clearly downloaded from the Internet. I am not joking when I say that I have answered those exact questions in that precise sequence in at least one other interview before. It seems that these people Google 'job interview questions' and print out the first thing that comes up. The typical question on this kind of interview is: "Tell me about a situation in which you worked on a project but did not achieve the result you expected and how did you deal with that?" at which I began to rack my brains for an arbitrary story that vaguely fitted the guidelines of the question. She literally did not deviate for one second from the sheet of paper. I can only assume she is the kind of person that likes to keep thinking to a minimum at all times. Just when I though the excruciating monotony of the interview was over she has the audacity to ask me to complete 'a few tasks' for her to assess my competency including compiling a faux newsletter and correcting the grammar of a document in red pen! I spent the next hour fantasizing about storming out of there in a rage but really I just did the tasks. She looked shocked at the end when I had managed to make two columns on a Word document and slot in a couple of pictures. That was my que to leave. A week later she called to ask me if I wouldn't mind taking the job as a half day position, knowing full well that I need a full time job to support myself. I said flat no. Now I am just hoping she will agonise over the decision for another week and offer me the job just so I can say HELL NO and that I had been offered something much for lucrative. Small mercies.

My situation is this: I have now been unemployed for close to three months. This after completing a temporary job of seven months. The job was admin based and not very challenging but if was comfortable and very fun at times. But I must now contemplate the all too familiar territory that is unemployment, and so far, there has not been a dull moment. The first interview I had was a very promising government job. This is more or less where the focus of my studies was. It was one of the most intelligent interviews have had and I found myself responding to good questions with good answers. That however was two month ago and although the correspondence since has been positive, it has remained correspondence...hope is fading that that will eve come through. The job would require relocation to a different city where I don’t have any friends or acquaintances so with each e-mail from the HR woman there, I experience a wave of excitement (at the prospect of my first professional job) and dread (at moving from a familiar and fabulous coastal city to a landlocked dustbowl whose main attraction is its vast malls). The pros and cons list is the most loaded one I have done.

I went on another interview recently for an admin job at an asset management firm. The guy contacted me through a Hotmail account and used bad texting language in his e-mail. Naturally my vivid imagination and excessive viewing of the crime channel (a symptom of unemployment) kicked into gear and I was convinced that this was a human trafficking ring luring unsuspecting girls like me into their trap! Thank god for google once again... I found out it was a legitimate company. I wasn’t really interested but my mother, among others, tends to advise going to every interview “just for the experience” or “just to check it out” so I went. The interview was fairly standard stuff until the guy asked me what I like to do in my spare time. I mentioned reading etc (why do they need to know this?! What is the relevance?!) he responded with this charm: “until a couple of years ago I didn’t read books- why read a book if you can watch the movie?”. Then he went on about some crime fiction author that he had discovered but the interview was over as far as I was concerned. I am no literary genius but the fact that a seemingly successful man wasn’t ashamed to admit that he didn’t read a book until his mid-forties is a very bad sign. It made me wonder whether an inexperienced graduate like myself was asking too much to have a boss that was someone to look up to or to learn from? A good friend of mine once told me to judge a job by whether I aspired to be in the boss’ shoes at some point in the future. That struck me as very sound advice but am I being to optimistic?

Nevertheless, that became one of the many interviews for which I never received a response of any kind. Despite very positive comments at the end of the interview and a promise of a response the following week, I never heard from him again. No loss really, but if I could get up early and make myself presentable, drive there and spend an hour in answering this man’s inane questions, the least he could do was send me a one-liner e-mail saying I didn’t get the job. I guess there won’t be any closure on that one.

Welcome!

This is my blog about the up and downs of the job searching process. The blog name stems from the nickname that my friend and I have for the careers section in our local newspaper. We have both consulted it religiously in times of unemployment but tend to come across listings for jobs like ‘polony maker’ in abundant quantities and find ourselves wondering just how many polony specialists one city needs? Hence the nickname we give to the career section in the paper and indeed the search for jobs in general. It also serves as a very weak pun for this crazy time of my life when I literally don’t know where I will be or what I will be doing a year, a month or even a week from now. So welcome to the Polony Times and here’s hoping that I will have some clarity on my future soon.