We had the interview for candidate #2 for the BigBoss position today. I think everyone was pretty much bored and unimpressed. She seems nice enough, but doesn’t have experience in certain things and definitely didn’t seem like she’s ever had to manage a trainwreck office before—sounds like she has had maybe one troublesome person to deal with ever. Frankly, “knows how to deal with trainwrecks” is my #1 requirement for whoever gets this job, so….meh. Comparing her to #1, there’s no contest: we’re all for #1.

My aforementioned coworker who doesn’t get in trouble for saying blunt things just straight up said this time things like “The previous BigBoss wanted everything to be nice and just kind of swept everything under the rug and ignored it, like bullying. How do you deal with that?" The candidate's response was that it depends on situation and she’d talk about it and doesn’t believe in ignoring it. She also gave an example of handling ONE incident of one coworker saying something that ticked someone off. Only one incident of that has ever happened to you at a job? Lucky you!

My blunt coworker continued with saying stuff like "the previous BigBoss wanted everyone to be family so he just brushed things under the rug and ignored them and didn't do anything meaningful beyond bringing food occasionally." He also pointed out that BigBoss would just agree with people and say yes to whatever anyone asked him to without consulting with us about it--which is certainly true and happened to me when Former BigBoss promised I was going to do something and then never mentioned it to me until it was almost too late. I did not realize how super annoyed this guy was with BigBoss before. It is both kinda harsh and...yeah, true. I like Former BigBoss as a person, but he was still too nice for the job.

Oh yeah, and after some people pointing out that they want a BigBoss that know what we are doing, Interim BigBoss admitted she has no idea what we do. Oy.

The thing candidate 2 said that I appreciated the best was that she has managed to get enough employees to actually do the job because if you keep loading more work onto the same number of staff, it’s not sustainable and the quality won’t be good. Without going into details about where she works, let’s say they have 5-7 people at a smaller business doing each aspect of my job. I am one person doing two major fields at once and they’ve got 5-7 people per each field and they farm out part of my job to another couple of people on top of that. DAMN. (My boss pointed out that they do more work that we don't do along these lines, but still, I say. They needed more people and GOT THEM!) So point in her favor there. Hell, maybe I should apply at that place, even though I don’t particularly want to live in that area. It sounds very cushy.

Overall, #2 would probably be fine in a sane, nice office, but this ain’t it. We need someone who can be nice but tough and someone who will actually deal with the problems. So my vote (such as it was) went to #1. I was so unimpressed that I didn't even bother to go to her presentation/open forum, but the aforementioned blunt coworker went and said it was a disaster.

I’m kind of flabbergasted in retrospect that we only had two final candidates in the process and only one of them really stood out as being what we need. Was the pool that bad? Or are we that obviously bad? Or both? I heard they had 38 candidates originally, were all of them of the ilk of candidate 2? Did they just have to have a minimum of two so they threw her in? Sounds like it.

In other news, I went to the knitting group holiday party and it was awesome. I learned from last year's disaster (a: MAKE A SHAWL, b, start doing it weeks in advance) and everyone oohed and ahhed at the one I made, and it was stolen TWICE! I was thrilled and flattered. I did feel sorry for the original opener, though. I don't think she minded having it stolen because she said it wasn't her color scheme, but she wanted gifts 2 and 3 and those were stolen and she was clearly not too into gift 4 that she ended up with. Well, there's always someone who ends up like that in the game....

As for me, I scored and got four cute little bags of holding with sheep/yarn/knitting themes AND a free lesson in how to make said bags from the bagmaker! So I talked to her about sewing a lot. We'll work on this in January, I think.

It was nice to be back with this group again after 8 long weeks of being elsewhere!

I then came home to find a present from one of my back East cousins--she gave me a super amazing awesome tote bag/satchel with pockets and clear pockets and multiple straps that is amazeballs. I probably should have waited until Christmas to open it, but she was thrilled that I opened it now! Huzzah!

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