So I finally made it through HR after a month, and I've got an interview for the job on Wednesday!

Today has had ups and downs all over the place. Yesterday was too. Even though it wasn't a phone day, I had a different thing (training or whatever) going on from hour to hour, AND I had an avalanche of "must be done NOW" dropped on my head and I only had 30-45 minutes at a time to work on the avalanche in between training things. And then I came home to find the "must renew your apartment immediately... okay, technically we give you a month, but not really these days" notice on my door, which pissed me off...really, must they move it up earlier and earlier every year? So I went home and got drunk--no, seriously, actually did to the point of wandering around dizzy. Probably shouldn't have done this while making cookies, but eh, the second batch is only slightly more burnt and they still taste good, so who cares. I turned off the oven and didn't notice in between rounds 1 and 2, then they just sat there not quite baking for awhile.

Today has been a "be on the phones all damn day" day and it is making me crazy. I will restrain myself from saying exactly why. When I finally got out to go to lunch--late--I needed to call one of my references. I e-mailed one of mine the other day and heard back, yay. I e-mailed the second one, I haven't heard back yet but I only did that last night. The third one was my old boss when I started working here, but back in the day she would only give me her home phone number. As it turned out, that was a bad idea. Down: her phone number was disconnected. Up: On the other hand, I just walked over to the CC and asked the head of it to be a reference for me instead. Score! Not to mention, whew!

The thing about references is that you gradually/inevitably fall out of touch with people. Even if you like them and they like you, you eventually lose the main thing you had in common, or the reason that you kept in contact in the first place. Yeah, yeah, I know, FACEBOOK, but among other reasons as to why I don't like social media is that once I "reconnected" with long lost people, I ended up realizing that we had nothing to say any more. Which is depressing and not exactly any kind of friendship either, and the pseudo-friendship of Facebook just made me feel sadder to see say, someone I used to be best friends with, but now she has a husband and 2 kids and it's like, who the heck are you now? And since I didn't make the same changes and am pretty much the same as ever and she's probably thinking the same of me....it doesn't work. It's a sad fake friendship.

When it comes to old coworkers, I pretty much like everyone I used to work with, but without that excuse or some other one to see them regularly, you just end up drifting off. Whether I wanted to or not, it happens. Which isn't really an issue until oh, you need job references. And since I don't exactly apply for jobs and get this far in the process very often, it's kinda like "oh shit" whenever I do.

I had about five possible references from my first job, some of whom have totally disappeared in the intervening years. The reference I use from there is the one chick that I actually end up talking to once every few years (um, hopefully she's still around...that's the one I haven't heard from yet in e-mail). I am now using two folks from my volunteer job since putting down references at my current workplace is pretty redundant (i.e. they will get asked anyway). I suspect the person I first e-mailed, the ex-CC manager, will end up drifting off because she's now retired, but for now it's still recent enough that I can talk to her.

And then there's my ex-boss that I tried to call today, who would have made a perfect reference for a technical job, but DAMMIT, WHERE DID SHE GOOOOOOOOOOOOO? Grrrrrr. She is not the sort to say, provide information about herself and where to find her online either, so she's gone. Dammit. I always kinda thought she'd come back to work here someday. Plus years ago, the one lone psychic dream I've ever had (I was trying to find where the hell I'd put her phone number, and in the dream I pictured that it was in my living room desk drawer. It was!) involved her wearing a cop's uniform, and I always wanted to know what that was about. Like, whenever she decided to go back to work, was it going to be at a police department? Now I'll never know.

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