I’ve been hoping that this would be the week I finally landed a job. What with no less than five different possibilities all pending I figured this week would be the week that it happens and it still might be, but not as of today. First off I’ve still not gotten the offer from my old contract house that I know is supposed to be coming along. Not sure if they’ve changed their minds since I last talked to them or they’re still busy with year-end benefits issues, but the call still hasn’t come and I’m getting to the point where I’m not even worried about it anymore.
One of the new contract houses I’ve spoken to recently is responsible for two of the opportunities I’ve been waiting to hear on and one of them, going to work for a major banking chain that’s based here in the Detroit area, had me in for an interview on Tuesday afternoon along with about 9 other guys from the same contract house. The interview was one of those short 15 minute jobs where it was less about your qualifications than what the job entails and what your people skills are like. They had seen my resume and had no doubts I could do the job—which was basically a two month contract to do PC renewal at three of their major office locations—they just wanted to make sure, in the literal words of one of the interviewers, that I didn’t have 14 million piercings across my face. I don’t, but I do have a shaved head and a beard some have likened to Saddam Hussein’s. That didn’t seem to be a problem at the time of the interview and I answered their questions on my people skills with examples of how I’d deal with various situations. A telling moment was when they were explaining how they knew there were ways that you could tweak the renewal process to make machines load stuff faster or put up witty splash screens and they didn’t want us to engage in that sort of thing because anything that deviated from the process they had established would put other processes at risk and so on. I piped up and said, “You have a standardized process for support. Makes perfect sense. Deviation could result in breaking other applications or the support systems you have in place. I’m quite familiar with standardized installations.” The guy interviewing me practically jumped out of his chair with excitement saying that I was the first person in the two days they’d been interviewing that used the word “standardized” and could explain why it was a good thing. So, naturally, I thought I’d be a shoe-in for the job.
You can imagine my surprise and amusement then when I got a phone call from the contract house today and was told that the bank had decided to pass on using me on the contract because I had “too much personality.” That’s a first in my career. I’ve been turned down plenty of times, but never because I had too much personality. Now the rep I spoke with today wasn’t sure if that was what the bank actually said or if it was just the interpretation of the account manager who was handling it, but that was the reason he was given. It seems quite a few of the folks this contract house sent over didn’t get picked up which is odd considering that last year when they had a similar cattle call every single one of the people this contract house sent over did get hired and several are still working there. But that’s OK because this same contract house has a pretty strong relationship with a local energy utility and I’m on the short-short list (one of two people being considered) for a position with them instead which I should be hearing about within the next day or so.
Additionally the potential job down in Ann Arbor, which would be great from a commute standpoint once I move in with my in-laws in Brighton, has scheduled me for a 11AM interview this Friday. I’m also still waiting to hear back on the Server Administrator position I interviewed for last week that would be the best paying out of all the jobs so far (at least out of those that I know what the pay rate would be). So while I missed out on possible job I still have four other possibilities pending. I just need one of them to hurry up and decide if they’re going to hire me so I can get some bills paid up. The drama continues....
Ouch. If they visited SEB they might have concerns that your blog persona would channel in your work persona. So from their view you may have too much persona-lity.
On another note, (and I wish I’d asked for this months ago) if you write Expression Engine for Dummies I have no doubt it will sell one copy to almost every user. One to me, at least. If the Dummies people are too dumb to go for it, you could self-publish on Amazon.