Remote Printing

My work and play space is in the living room where, from my desk (a gift from Mom and Dad when I was stationed in Montana decades ago), I can hear the garbage and recycling people, and sometimes the neighbor chickens, the sound of Annie's Corgi nails clicking on the kitchen floor as she looks for food scraps, and the distant neighbors using their chainsaws and leaf blowers.

You can't really see it, but among the books behind my laptop is the AP Stylebook. Once hooked, there's no going back.

It was a productive morning in an applying-for-jobs kind of way. I found two, both part-time and both through Craigslist, worth throwing my hat in the ring. 

 DISTRACTION ALERT!

Curious about the origin of that phrase, I find that it began in the 1800s, the action being a taking up of a challenge in the boxing ring. I'm no boxer, but I do remember throwing my hat down in the barrel racing arena before starting the course. We all did it. Whether that was a protest of the protocol of  having to have a cowboy hat on to enter the ring or a misguided assessment of aerodynamic is lost in the hoof-generated dust of history.

Back to the jobs. One was to be the remote "right-hand gal" for a marketing woman based in Mendocino, up north in redwood country. Another was for an outreach manager for a non-profit that trains and stages productions with 50+ aged people. I thought I was pretty clever in my application transmittal email to note that, not only do I know how to work with old people, I am one.

When I apply for a job, I often send the advertisement to the printer, located next to Maureen. From her computer quadrant, she hears everything I do and more. The more being the sound of the printer coming to life all on its own. I holler back to her before committing the job to the queue to avoid startling (aka, "Scaring the shit out of....") her. She's taken to looking at what comes out of the printer, ignoring the recipes but typically saying something positive about the job and my perfectness for it. 

In the immediately previous post, I did not remember to comment about how unusual it is to actually hear back from a hiring person in response to a job application. With the growing stack of jobs I've applied for, I've only heard back from two. Whether that is a function of the utter decline into chaos of basic professional manners or a sign of the applicant-saturated times, I do not know.