I may have mentioned before that I'm really utterly failing on this Get a Job thing. And in our society, success is so often tied up in being employed and having lots of money. If there was an award for the most Successful at Being a Failure, I would apply.
What has irked me so often is this thing about being overqualified to do work thing. Employers don't really try to find out anything about you, they make assumptions like if you are overqualified for a job you won't be very dedicated as you'll be very ambitious.
Well, let's just see. I have three tertiary qualifications and I haven't got much experience except in junior administration, do I look like the ambitious type? Please, these idiots really don't think very hard do they?
What I would like to say right now is that I would be a very reliable worker in almost any job, even low level, so long as people weren't totally beating me up every day, just because I HATE INTERVIEWS AND RECRUITERS. I can't stand them. I resent this whole process I am going through every damn day I do it.
I wouldn't try leaping to another job very fast because it would mean having to do ANOTHER STUPID INTERVIEW.
You'd have to be paying me a darn lot to make me take that jump quickly. A small pay rise or a new desk would not cut it. I would probably still sit there screwing tin lids on Cheesybite containers unless I got 300% payrise or something because I hate interviewing so much. It really is annoying the crap outta me!
There! You can rely on me, more than those not-so-bitter trainees who would jump for an extra $100 and a larger cookie jar in the shared kitchen.
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Do everything you can to throw them off balance. Once I showed up at a swanky Melbourne office for a job interview and when the blonde lady at the front counter told me to take a seat, I picked up the nearest seat and asked her where she wanted me to take it. (Got a blank stare for that.) Later in the interview I remember staring with a look of distaste at the interviewer's fingernails, which she'd painted with a weird detailed pattern, full of strange filigrees and ornaments, apparently treating her hands like so much upholstery to be furnished.
I still didn't get the job but of course working in any relationship with those people would be crap anyway, and I realised I didn't want it.
Job interviews are weird, bizarre, full of their own formal rules and requirements and I suspect that a lot of employers hate it just as much as potential employees.
I was thinking about that today - throwing a recruiter off balance, that is. I'm getting a birt sick of the usual recruitmant scene, I've tried the "acting professional" and "acting friendly" and "acting deferrent and polite" and the "normal interview with a few daring but appropriate quips".
I thought maybe if I was doing an interview and I either had nothing to lose because it wasn't a job I really wanted or I felt it was going badly so I had nothing to lose because of that, I could try something just plain weird. I imagined myself jumping up and:
1) Bursting into song, a kind of improv musical like you see in those comedy skit shows - "You need to take me for your employee, I'm the best interviewee you will see-ee, It's very clear, that if e'en if you search far and near, no one shall solve your problem better than Maria!" [click heels, pirouette, jump on tabletop and swirl skirt]. Or something stupid like that.
2) Another idea was a wild begging and sobbing thing "No please, take me, sign me up for a contract, I shall be beaten and killed if you don't! You couldn't! Pleeeease don't! Pleeeeease! Don't send me baaaaack! Nooooooo!"
3) Then there was a kind of soapbox rant about people like me kept people like them employed and maybe I'd throw in something completely relevantly irrelevant like a call to arms for peace, a discussion of rights of Aboriginal Australians and a rant about how offices perpetuated violence by encouraging hole-punches.
My imagination is running wild ... but it's fun :)
If only I had the opportunity ... and dared.
I might dare with the seat suggestion.
I hate interviews as well. I'm really bad at them. And yet, you know, a psycho on the phone and I'm calm-calm-calm before I end it, hang up the call and tell the phone exactly what I thought of the caller.
Are you looking for anything at all or a proper job? Career type?
Hi nails,
Proper job would be good but I'm terribly unqualified for anything proper. I've been trying to ask friends if they can squeeze me into a proper job by use of 'influence', it seems to be the way to get a proper job these days - the improper way. They said they'd love to but they can't because it's improper as I dont' have the qualifications or experience. Even though I could do just what the other qualified people do around there - that is, surf ebay and blogs, write lousy reports that don't get read, lose the company millions of dollars and boast about my non-existent competence.
I said, look, I'm fine with being improper, just get me the job!
They say, no, that isn'tr career-advantageous for you, it'll blow up in your face!
Considering I have the choice of having a job that is likely to blow up in my face or no job at all, I might take the former, thanks. At least it could be amusing for about ten seconds and a change of scene. But no one will help me out on it.
So at the moment I'm going for nothing jobs. Unfortunately the nothing jobs are yielding ... nothing.
I'm apparently too qualified to do photocopying. Now I don't know who got it into their heads that my Advanced Certificate 5906 in Photocopying made me just too overqualified to operate their very ordinary baseline photocopier, or that my extra superspeed filing meant that I just couldn't file slow enough for their needs but that just seems to be the way it goes.
It annoys the beejeezus out of me.
YOu know at one job I was at ehn I was still a student and had no work experience except working in a fast food outlet I was told I was too good to volunteer at the council community centre? Apparently I spoke English too well and I organised pamphlets too efficiently in the rack. And I tipped cookies into the cookie jar too quickly. They wanted someone who took three hours to do the chores instead of ten minutes.
It's a dolt's market out there for many jobs.
Here's what really gets me about applications.
I saw this as a criteria in a job I applied for:
"Must be able to work autonomously, as well as supervised, and as well as part of a close-knit team".
Covers all bases eh? WTF? What about "just works well" or "just works".
I actually responded to the ad but didn't bother referring to that part of the criteria in my letter.
That's "a criterion" (singular), dear.
Tsk, tsk. What would the Baron think?
Possibly that I'm not quite up to Baron standard. But I'm happy enough to be jus' Little Miss Non-Baron Maria, Bosch. Mixing up her singulars and plurals and whatever's in the middle etc.
I apologise for offence and abuse of "criterion" but I'll leave the post up there :)
Oh, on another board I saw someone refer to "criterias", Bosch.
Someone jumped in and corrected the poor guy before I could.
But I thought of you, sweet cheeks.
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