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.