February 25th, 2004 at 4:34 am
I’ve been feeling a bit down lately. All these job applications and so on without any major success is kind of depreciating. It’s a little frustraing I guess. Sitting around waiting for other people to do things makes my head boil. Generally I like to think I’m a reasonably patient person, but when all I’ve got to do is sit around on my broke arse applying for jobs it just feels like such a god-awful waste of perfectly good time. Like I said, frustrating. Still, I had another interview on Monday and I’ll hear about that sometime this week. Here’s hoping.
I’m not really big on sitting around twiddling my thumbs.
Maybe I should start working on another Bachelors degree, maybe something I’m actually interested in this time. Of course I’d probably have to pay fees up front because I’ve already done one on HECS. I’m not sure how the system works really, but if I managed to weasel some income from somewhere it’d probably be worth it. At least to keep my brain occupied some of the time. I’ve thought about doing some IT certifications or trying to sneak my way into a post-grad course or something, but I question the value of learning more about something I’d rather get out of. Certifications maybe, because it’s potentially a way to squeeze more money out of employers, but post-grad stuff in IT? Can’t see it happening anytime soon (and that’s even before we look at my academic record 
.
In a perfect world, I’d get a call this week saying they needed me for this job in Perth, I could give up on this garbage down here and actually occupy myself with something.
Boredom drives me nuts. The management apologises for the minimal entertainment value of this post.
February 17th, 2004 at 6:08 am
At least this week I’ve done a few odd things that were at least somewhat interesting. I’ve been doing a couple of half-days work here and there for my old man to cover for his assistant while she’s off on leave. It’s a few extra bucks for me, and it means things don’t collapse into a flaming heap at his work, so it’s a win-win situation. But I tell you, the office sure has gone downhill since I left. They’re now using International Roast and UHT Milk, oh how the mighty have fallen. It’s a horrible, horrible state of affairs, but somehow they endure, obviously with more intestinal fortitude than myself.
I spent my Valentines Day evening out with Doc and Smeg, going out to watch Big Fish, which was quite nice, but only after previously walking out of a kebab shop to find the area infested with vermin of the “big hairy rat” kind, although we all escaped relatively rabies-free (or at least with no more rabies than we previously had). After all of this, my Sunday entailed getting up at an ungodly hour and going out to meet some rider friends and go cavorting around some twisties behind the hills and down south-ways.
We headed off from Thomas road just after 8:30am whipping around the place until we stopped at North Dandallup for fuel. Then it was a quick punt up through Dwellingup and on to Quindanning where we stopped for an early lunch around 11ish. From there it was off again to stop at Williams for fuel, where a few of the fellas who wanted to make it back to Perth early turned back the way they came and the rest of us took off down the road along some lovely long sweepers to a stop at Collie. After zipping down the Collie hill, we took on the incredibly exciting =P south western highway and made our way up to stop back at Dandallup for a drink before we headed off back to wherever the buggery each of us came from. The weather never felt as hot as the forecast was predicting, which meant it was nice and dry, but not so hot as to melt the folks who came along in full leathers. I took a couple of pics here and there when we stopped that you can take a look at here if you’re that way inclined. There were roughly twenty-something of us all up. Of course I was thoroughly sweaty and knackered (thanks to a particular dip at the bottom of a downhill left-hander on the way into Collie. Ouch.) by about 4pm when I got back to crash at Glen and Katy’s, for which I am forever grateful, seeing as how riding back to Bunbury right after would’ve been real ugly.
I’ve been keeping up with the anti-unemployment drive as well with another 20 or so applications in this past week. A lot of the application periods ought to be ending shortly, so with any luck I’ll start to get a few bites, or at least some moderately useful criticism
February 11th, 2004 at 9:24 am
There is good news and there is bad news and varying quantities of each.
Friday I got a call about a job that I applied for in Perth through an IT contractor and they asked me if I could come to an interview on Monday morning after about 20 minutes of general phone-interviewness. The end of the story is that I didn’t get the job. That’s bad news in that I’m still unemployed, but it’s good news in that now I canopenly make fun of the ludicrous interview process in public with no fear of repercussions. So seeing as how I was going up to Perth on the Monday anyhow for a concert (more on that later), I landed myself at the building somewhere in central perth just shy of 9am. As I was walking into the building, a girl was standing at the elevator looking mildly tense. The elevator came, we both toddle in, and she hits the same floor button that I do, at which stage I wonder if maybe she’s here for an interview as well. The doors to the elevator open, we walk into the same office where a woman at the front desks asks if we’re here for “The interviews”, it turns out we both are, and have to go down a floor. So having no strong feelings one way or the other, we climb back into the elevator and go down. This time the elevator doors open to the sight of around a dozen or so folks milling around aimlessly and staring blankly at various wall panes and roof markings in the lobby. It was at this precise point that I became somewhat suspicious of the oncoming “interview” process, a feeling that it turned out was not unwarranted.
At 9am, a woman sticks her head out of an office and ushers the fifteen of us into a larger room with a number of tables set up into ‘groups’, you know, the kind the set the tables up into in primary school, facing each other. I begin to wonder how this thing is about to down. I have plenty of time to wonder as well, seeing as how the group of four women conducting the “interviews” were 20 minutes late. This is about the time where I begin to cynically stereotype a few of the people in the room, the kind of people that you always see whenever you watch job interviews… There’s the guy who looks otherwise neat, but hasn’t bothered shaving his one day facial hair growth in true I’m-here-because-I-need-my-dole-cheque fashion, there’s the guy or girl who immediately starts talking about the bender they had the previous night, the person who is completely unqualified and hasn’t worked in over a decade that looks like one of your grandparents but somehow made it to the interview process (possibly by smudging the first couple of digits of each date on their CV), the woman who all the other women disapprove of because she’s showing the most skin and of course, the guy who shows up everyone and rocks up in a three piece suit. While I’m musing about the imaginary lives of people while maintaining mindless smalltalk, things finally get underway, beginning with “Introductions”.
Now in a lot of situations I can understand and am quite happy to go along with getting to know other people, however, today I am in a room full of people I already subconsciously dislike and wish horrible things upon because they’ve got their eyes on my job. We’re told to spend two minutes a piece (timed with a buzzer no less) telling the other people at our table our names, interests, education & work history, what personally motivates us and why we want to work for the employer. At this point I have one eyebrow raised so highly that it actually ascends up above my hairline. As we’re ranting off, we get to Mr. Three Piece Suit, who was at my table. After telling us his name (which I didn’t bother to remember as we were issued with pre-scrawled nametags) and so on, he went on to tell us about how he already has four degrees, one with honours and is two years into another. It struck me later that it seems a bit odd that someone with four uni degrees would be applying for an entry level support job, maybe he was counting degrees from Snucky-U or something. A girl then turns up half an hour late and you can see the hesitance in her expression, wondering whether to bother sitting down, as she looks at one of the women in the corner with a clipboard and prays that there isn’t enough red ink in that pen to make a big red X next to her name.
The rest of the hour that this “interview” process went for involved discussing in our table-groups how you would respond to an irate customer. There was a lot of noise and varied discussion with everyone generally saying the same thing, sympathise, blah blah blah. This was followed by “Roleplaying” where we were paired off and told to read off a piece of paper to each other as one became the employee and one the client. By this point, any credibility I’d given to this interview had long gone out the window. We were then stopped to be told that the process was over, and we would be called later that day to be told if we had “progressed to the next stage”. What is this? Who wants to be a freaking millionaire? I have no idea how they could have possibly extracted any useful information from the session aside from the fact that I was indeed a real person, and was capable of dressing myself.
So I get a call a couple of hours later to say they want me back for more “Testing”. Joy. I go back later that day where they then stick me in front of an old P-II and ask me to go through some testing software reminiscent of the online uni tutorials I was given when a lecturer couldn’t be shagged making one, or the licensing software from the RTA, except this time, I’m getting multiple choice “Pick the word spelt wrong”, “Subtract these two numbers” and “Click the box that corresponds to you not being a complete imbecile”. This was followed by a terribly conducted interview with the woman I spoke with the first time on the phone. I say terrible because she was trying to find out some information, in particular whether or not I’d be taking leave anytime soon or leaving the company in a week if I got a better offer, and was asking the most obvious questions I’d heard. Maybe it’s just me, but if you’re interviewing someone, they want the job, so they’re going to tell you whatever they think you want to hear. If you tell them what you want to hear, you may as well be interviewing “Repeat After Me” Elmo. Again I get the “progressed to the next stage” dribble and I then I leave. The next day I got a call saying I didn’t get the job, citing a lack of “Customer service experience”. This is what bugs me. After the most ludicrous interview process I’ve ever been through, I’m knocked back on the premise of something that was clear and obvious on my CV from the very beginning, that being where my job experience was. Why they would call me for an interview in the first place if they wanted me to have had more experience in some setting (which wasn’t brought up in any of the “interviews”) is beyond me. Again I resign myself to the fact that 95% of everything is stupid.
Thankfully the day wasn’t a complete waste though, as Steve (who came up with me) and I caught up with Amanda in the afternoon and then went to see Korn, Static X and Fear Factory play later that night. It was bloody excellent. I was pretty impressed with Static X as I hadn’t heard much of their stuff before, but the Korn set was what I was there to see, and it rocked rather hard. Much to my delight, they only played 3 songs from their new album, this being a good thing seeing as how I haven’t yet grabbed said album and so didn’t know the tracks for squat. One thing I noticed that was pretty shocking was that the Security there were half-decent, not a pack of knobbers, and (dare I say it) even friendly. Like I said, truly shocking stuff. Both Steve and I got thoroughly soaked through in several peoples bodily fluids and a large volume of our own sweat while we were moshing with the other unwashed heathens, requiring a serious shower later that night.
One thing I started thinking about when we took a breather between bands, was where the hell did all these people come from? I mean I know their mummies and daddies loved each other (or the IVF needle) very much, but I’m standing in a crowd of several thousand people. Sure, some of them (like me, barely) could probably pass for relatively normal people during daylight hours and hold a job, office, labourer, telemarketer, whatever. But what the hell do the rest of these people do? I mean the ones with forehead-slapworthy and cliched tattoos coming out the wazoo and half a dozen facial piercings. And I don’t just mean the endless crowds of teenage walking advertisments for living the ‘angsta’ (read: only Linkin Park understand me) lifestyle. Is this where your tax dollars are going? Can that many people actually live in their parents basements? Who knows.
I’m going to see a fellow tomorrow about possibly doing some work in Bunbury. I don’t know if it’s a good thing. I want to move to Perth, there are just so many of my friends I haven’t seen and so many things I want to do that I can’t do here. But if it’s a choice between having a job in Bunbury or being unemployed in Perth… hell, I dunno.
February 8th, 2004 at 9:33 am
Ok, so I’ve realised in the past few days… alright, now that’s a lie and I’m only seven words into the post, I’ve known this for a long time, I’ve just been avoiding doing anything about it, but back to the point at hand… that I really should start learning or doing something that’s going to mean I get more enjoyment and satisfaction out of life (at least during business hours) than solving and creating problems on PC’s day in, day out. I thought about this last year before I left my last job. It’s one of the main reason I left my last job, I wasn’t really enjoying it, and I spent a lot of time doing it, and why should I spend my waking life doing something I don’t enjoy? So obviously the first thought was to go finish my degree… oh wait, that’s right, I was never particularly passionate about this degree in the first place and a lot of the reasons I did it in the first place were because I could get in, and I knew I could do it (when I actually put effort in). Still, I was already down a whole stack of imaginary money, so I figured I’d be better off in the long term to finish off the degree before going off and starting something else. After all, it’ll help me get well in the meantime, it’d be nice to have finished something I started again for the first time in a while, plus 2/3 of a degree is about as useful to me as a uterus. That being ‘not very’.
I’ve never been a gambling man. Not with any intention of actually winning anything anyhow, I’m just like the rest of the suckers who win a couple of dollars from the twenty cent machines and then proceed to stick them back into the machines until they’re all gone. I’m not even into shares and the stockmarket, to me that’s just like gambling, except really slow and they take out some of your money every time you try to bet. The relevance of this being that the odds of me personally kicking Valentino Rossi or Chris Cornell out of their respective lives, so to speak, are quite low, and it would be quite easy for me to spend many many years of my life and scads of money trying to get there, but the bottom line is that the odds of me pulling it off are infintessimally small, along with the fact that I know I’d be just as happy doing a dozen other things, and it doesn’t mean I can’t dabble in what they do as a daggy amateur in my spare time. It hasn’t stopped me so far.
My point being that now I’m sitting back in my proverbial rocking chair with my proverbial pipe and slippers in an entirely nonexistent proverbial loungeroom considering my options. I mean there’s a few ways I could start paddling this boat (preferably one of the downstream options), what I’ve gotta do now is just toss up what I really want to do, how easily I can wing it, and what I’ve gotta do to get there. Make no mistake, I’ve plenty of ideas, and I plan on accomplishing as many as possible before my limbs fall off or I get chucked out of this world (pending the schedule of leprosy and death respectively), I’ve just gotta make sure I keep these balls moving (you have a sick mind, you hear me? sick. Shame on you) and don’t end up in a zombilical* fashion of nine-to-fiving again.
So for the meantime, it’s rolling rolling rolling…
(*) another addition to the Dwightionary
February 6th, 2004 at 8:51 am
Well, not a great deal’s been going down in the bunker lately, but I’m going to tell you all about it anyhow. It’s been a week since my exam and the Uni still hasn’t published the results, which is longer than they told us to expect, but that’s nothing particularly surprising really. I’ve booked in my licensing test for my open bike licence, but the earliest they had was the 9th of March, which I thought was a bit harsh. Damn teenagers and their drivers licence testing. Anyhow, I’ve applied for about 14 jobs so far this week, it’s not particularly exciting, in fact it’s rather dull and monotonous, but it’s gotta be done. All of them have been for helpdesk/customer service/junior developer/tech jobs which are all in Perth seeing as how there doesn’t seem to be diddly squat going in Bunbury unless you’re a chef, plus I’d like a change of scenery.
I’ll be heading up to Perth again Monday with Steve to go catch the Korn/Fear Factory/Static X concert over in Claremont, which ought to be pretty cool.
All of this staying indoors writing applications and being cheap means my skin pigment continues to consist of some kind of colour anti-matter, and I haven’t shaved in a few days, which is beginning to take its toll on the outside world. Wildlife in the immediate vicinity have been looking somewhat on edge of late. I am quite confident in thinking that these two matters are not unrelated. I have resolved to shave in the morning as a precautionary measure, not wanting to start a holy war between the local fauna and my face.
When you realise that you are discussing the state of your facial hair on a webjournal, it is probably time to stop.
February 2nd, 2004 at 10:03 pm
Today on “You’ve gotta be kidding me Monday”; Dubya and Blair are nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for beating the crap out of a nation for no reason in particular.
The Australian
BBC