So this? Was a job interview. I have applied for a job in a department adjacent to my own, which focuses on my specialty in my current job but doing different things with it. Happily, I got an interview for it! I have been thrilled about it since, especially since I had my review at work and it boiled down to "even though you are excellent at your specialty and pretty good at the rest, we cannot stand how you interact with other humans and as far as we're concerned, you only get worse." Really?! There are some minor shitty consequences for that and I got told that if I don't drastically improve, the consequences will be worse next year.

I would have been a lot more devastated by that had I not had the interview, lemme tell ya. A few days after that, it occurred to me that I should have asked how they'd determine if I had improved or not. But at this point I think my reputation is so bad that there really isn't a way to recover from that. Once you scar someone for life, it's too late now. I don't think they'd even have criteria beyond "suck less, somehow." And happily, this job doesn't involve dealing with random people and solving their problems when you have no idea how.

At this point I am determined to GTFO before things get even worse.

So I had the job interview today. It went well. It was at 8:30--in one of the conference rooms in my office, and I had to wait in our lobby and hope nobody spotted me. The only one who did was my boss, who I told about the whole thing before then and she's super excited. Whew.

Anyway, I came to work a little later and waited outside until five minutes ahead of time. I talked to the potential supervisor* and she gave me the interview questions ahead of time, very nice of her. I probably knew all but two of them--very practical stuff and none of this "what's your weakness" crappity. I did think it was funny when she figured out that I work "right over there," that hadn't occurred to her when making the room reservation. They were interviewing for the rest of the day, so I tried not to look over there. You're better off not knowing that information, I think.

The only question that fazed me was "tell us how you've made travel arrangements and food arrangements and set up conference space," to which I was all uh, crap. To be fair, I'm a clerical working peon and I don't have opportunities for that (both because I'm a peon/not a manager, and because my office doesn't really do that sort of thing), or travel either. Anyway, once again, another thing that's apparently a requirement that I have never had mentioned until the interview grrrr. Well...we'll see.

* also, ironically, technically the first person who ever hired me here, to work some random temporary event back when I was in college. Still remember her though and she's still nice!

Anyway, the interviewers were the two ladies I'd be working with and well, a third guy I think they might have just thrown in to have three people, I suspect he might not do that much with them normally. Anyway, didn't talk to him much in there.

I had some very interesting conversations with them about what I do vs. what they do. No public service, but would have to work the occasional event such as Picnic Day, apparently. One of them said they put her on working an event when she'd started a week ago and they just let her hand out walkie-talkies and I thought, "how nice of them, to not put you on the front lines knowing nothing!" The office I'm in now would chuck me in the front to answer weird questions with no preparation, as we all know. I'm not super thrilled on having to work overtime but it sounds like it's just the occasional event and I'd have notice about it way ahead of time.

They have busy season all the time ("I take vacation in November") pretty much. I might have to take home work to do in December. As for travel, sounds like they go to conferences in California--mostly in the Bay Area and sometimes in Irvine. Eh...not thrilled on the idea of going to far away conferences, but what are you gonna do, I need the heck out and everything else sounds interesting/cool to me. And I'm certainly down with training people and writing up stuff and working online.

So other than not doing room setups and travel, I think I'm pretty good. I am hoping the pay will at least stay the same and not go down, but since overtime happens maybe there's more money on that. I don't think this is going to be a quick decision though, sounds like they may want to do a SECOND ROUND of interviews if they think two candidates are good enough to tie. Gulp. I'd like to be the number one clear choice, but who knows with the room reservation thing. Anyway...don't know how fast this will go, so beats me on there. I probably need to try to put it out of my mind for the time being.

Anyway...let's do a happy dance for a well done job today! Also, it was quiet at work, nobody else figured out what was going on (I "de-interviewed" my outfit a bit before going back in), and I found someone's lost keys. So it was a good day!

previous entry - next entry
archives - current entry