So we have been doing some interviews for a position in our office. I am happy to report that the coworkers in on this with me and I are in great accord as to how we feel about things. It boils down to "we like everyone and think they'd do a good job of it," and ruling people out has been difficult. Which kind of boils down to....well, nitpicking a bit. Like one person who everyone likes is getting ruled out because their answer to "why do you want this" was that they love helping people and this job doesn't really do that.

At this point the remaining top people all have the qualifier of "we like them personally, but they did not give the world's best answers to the questions," but they have other advantages on their side or were already operating from a deficit that we knew of (in the case of one person, they had whopping jet lag from a 30-hour travel disaster that had happened right before the interview). So now they're kinda all, "should we do second interviews? and what
would we do in one anyway?" I'm not 100% sure on what's going to happen at this point (especially since other disasters are going off around the office).

This is giving me a lot of perspective on the interviewing process. I've been on interview panels before, but in those cases it was pretty clear who was best oh, every time or so to me (someone was crazy or creepy or just not as great), and in almost every case we ended up hiring the right person. Except one time where I loved Candidate A and Candidate B was okay,
my boss at the time considered them equal, and the only thing "distinguishing" them was that Candidate A had a pre-scheduled vacation around the start of the job. So Candidate B won and Candidate B...had a lot of personal drama going on during her employment, I'll put it that way. Being on a panel where everyone likes everyone and are weighing what few minusses are in a
way to try to rule people out...I dunno, makes me feel a bit better about being the person who never makes it to the second interview. Or for that matter, why they do them in the first place.

I am pretty neutral about the interview tomorrow because after getting the actual job description...once again they want an event planner and they didn't say it in the original job listing. So even though I could do most of the job, I know how that kind of situation goes is and I won't be perfect enough, again. Sigh. Whatever. It seems to be my thing to get one job interview a year, in January, and then not be perfect enough for it. But oh well, for all I know it could be worse, and I'm not super attached to it since it's not in my usual field/special areas of expertise. Also, it's not like I'm going to have to do a lot of
interaction with the winner after I lose out. It could be like applying with the police in which I came out of it both knowing I'd lost out because I didn't have 100% of what they wanted, but at the same time thinking, "You know, I'm okay with not getting this since there are four different bosses and I suspect they all don't know how to handle it."

But looking at other jobs in other industries not my own is just...terrible. Why on earth should you have a bachelor's degree for a $12/hour job? Seriously?! Everything out there is crap. Total crap. Impossible expectations for $12-14 an hour. Everything is customer service. I'm subscribed to various searches and I don't get why they're so damn bad--why did they give me jobs like "nanny" and "driver" that ask for writing? It's wading through a ton of shitty jobs I don't even want or qualify for (I have no qualifications for being an accountant!). I don't know why people rave about that website. But seriously, job hunting makes you feel totally inadequate and hopeless. Since I already have a job that does that pretty frequently, this isn't helping to be doing after hours.

I'll be fair: the first five days or so back at work were actually pretty great, but yesterday was a total trainwreck halfway through the day, I was getting asked a billion questions I didn't have answers to, a computer program we work on is permanently busted in a way nobody knows how to fix, and finally I got forced to deal with the total disaster that is our microfilm system, and that is going to drag on for like a week. It's also super rainy. Then I went to the CC and one of the managers had a kidney infection and another had just had some kind of horrible breakup and was a total wreck (lucky for him there were tons of backup managers around and very few customers). It was just that kind of a day.

On the other hand, today was nice for me because I had a whopping computer problem that STILL hasn't been fixed all day long and therefore I couldn't do much, including deal with the avalanche of questions (though today it was more like minor rocks falling). I spent the day pretty much watching online videos for work about customer service and conflict resolution. Though I'll admit that after about 2-3 hours of waiting (I couldn't get it to work at 8 a.m. and it took till 2:45 to get someone to come over and check that it didn't work. Alas, I have to wait on someone else to actually get the whole thing fixed), it got kinda old. But hey, I managed to solve the microfilm hell! There's that!

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