Job Search Hiatus

Funny how the allure of a perfect job takes the wind out of one's job searching sails. I've been becalmed for two weeks after interviewing for an assistant marketing position with a small consulting firm made of various flavors of geologists. It is a half-time gig close to home; bonus points for the fact that I would get to blow raspberries at my former workplace on my way to the office.

I really like working with geologists. I wanted to be a geologist when I was little, shortly before I announced to my mother that I wanted to be in public relations so I could manipulate people. True story. I have no idea where that idea came from although my Aunt Carol was the president of the Ad Women of New York at that time. In defense of my young self, I used "manipulate" in its unadorned, value-neutral sense. I still like rocks - from those I pick up along a trail to the over-heated, over-pressurized chips of pure carbon that are diamonds.

Geologists, not surprisingly, tend to take the long view about things. They look at the world in a different way, too, seeing the upheaval of great mountains and their subsequent erosion to the sea as both inevitable and nuanced. No, "Wow, that's a pretty hill," from a geologist. No siree. Who knew, as another example, that groundwater can and does flow up hill sometimes? I didn't until a geologist at work swept away my insistence that we use, "down hill," instead of, "downgradient,"explaining how in California, a far geological cry from, say, Nebraska, regional hydrogeologic pressure forces groundwater through the fractured substrata in such a way that the water beneath the ground increases in subsurface altitude. Or depth. Something like that, anyway.

For some reason, I've found that geologists like to explain things to normal mortals. So unlike engineers who, when asked what engineering is, think deeply, grow misty-eyed, and say, "Design." Nothing more. They seem awash in the intense emotion about, "Design." Most varieties of scientist will explain how and why things work but with an air of one resigned to consorting with the lesser classes. 

You'd better have time if you ask a geologist to explain something. It helps to know your epochs, too. "Remind me, did the Cenozoic come before or after the Mesozoic? And when did dinosaurs roam the earth?" Geologists with whom I worked relished the idea of explaining to me how their world view looked. They'd haul out the topographic maps, tell me again how to read them, flip through voluminous regulatory submissions to find the graph that gave me a visual understanding of what kind of dirt and rocks lie below the surface (down hundreds of feet, mind you, and sporting such fasionable names as alluvial deposits), and genuinely enjoy my sometimes feeble attempts to construct a reasonably accurate simile or metaphor to be able to translate their multisyllabic explanations. In short, they are a fun bunch who regularly inspired me to become reanimated in my role as the translator of all things technical.

Small wonder, then, that I preferred basking in the possibility of working again with geologists to the mind-numbing, grueling task of culling endless job application possibilities. The HR woman who sat in on the interview told me they expected to make a decision in a week. That week and another went by with not a word from them. I finally steeled myself to inquire and learned that higher business priorities had prevailed for the moment. So relieved I was that I decided to delete all the job listing emails again. Still hoping, hoping, hoping.

Where Have All the Fun Jobs Gone?

(note: title is meant to be read in the tune of Paula Cole's "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPegaBQyemo
Woe is me! Maybe it's Arizona, maybe it's my search criteria, perhaps it's a severe lack of connections, but I seem to be incapable of finding any employment opportunities that entail the slightest trace of enjoyment.  I've always averred that "jobs don't have to be fun; you work so you can enjoy your time not working", but I'm beginning to disagree with my oh-so-wise self.  To be fair, this was brought about by a recent discussion with one of my many acquaintances currently residing abroad.  My former roommate/partner in crime is seeking employment in China, and one of the positions he's currently pursuing is "Video Game Tester".  Upon recovering from the ecstatic shock that the movie "Grandma's Boy" could potentially be based on (or one day become) a true story, I was filled with envy.  Doing something you love for a living? Unheard of!

I was born without the hand-eye coordination skills required by video games of any sort (a birth defect I've learned to accept) so video game testing would actually incite quite a bit of stress and frustration for the likes of yours truly, but conceptually this was quite the eye-opener for me. Maybe jobs/careers I won't completely detest do exist! When is Will Shortz retiring?  Is Marlboro hiring?  Who needs a new beverage consultant?  I wiiiish. But the fact remains, there's hope.  I've now shifted gears, and rather than mindlessly hitting "apply" and filling out the same tedious information for any job within 25 miles that seems remotely doable, I've decided to be more selective.  It's extraordinarily disheartening, and I may need to broaden my interests in order to meet the new criteria, but at least there's some life behind the never-ending search for employment.

I will not do sales.

If anybody working in the alcohol industry is reading this, I was not joking about the beverage consultant thing.

That's Odd

Having attended school in the days when one couldn't take a slide rule into a math test because it was too much help, imagine my surprise when my emailed application and resume was rejected. Why? Because the organization only accepts them in submitted in person or delivered to its doorstep by the U.S. Postal Service. If only I could afford a little drone.

Dad gave me this bit of swag from his associates at The Boeing Company; SRAM is short-range attack missile, for those not in the know. Nuclear-tipped, thank you very much. On getting this obviously prized gift (since I still have it), I am quite sure I was appropriately in awe and grateful. I don't think I ever fully confessed to either of my parents that I couldn't figure out how to use a straight slide rule, let alone a circular one.

Wikipedia tells us that the slide rule began in the 17th century and went on until the 1970s as the primary tool for making scientific and engineering calculations. I was in college in the mid-1970s when Hewlett Packard (HPQ) and Texas Instruments (TNX) introduced their first pocket scientific calculators. I remember being impressed by my biology major roomie's TI and equally grateful that my philosophy and cultural anthropology classes required no such academic accessories.

Nowadays, I'm even more impressed that, on July 20, 1969 - seven years before the advent of scientific calculators - Apollo 11 landed on the moon, with our heroic astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard, and returned those men with Command Module Pilot Michael Collins to Earth on July 24 (specifically, to the Pacific Ocean, 210 nautical miles from the storied NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] weapons test and storage Johnston Atoll, and 13 nautical miles from the recovery ship, USS Hornet, also known for evacuating the last Americans out of South Vietnam). Despite my 15-year-old moodiness and superiority, I watched the news coverage with intent interest with my brother as my mother tied a red thread around a piece of the braided rug she was making. I still have the rug, too.

My parents were born the year that the car radio was invented, four years before stations could broadcast in FM. They likely didn't notice the inventions of nylon, synthetic rubber, the Slinky and Frisbee, and LSD because they were young and living through the economic devastation of the Great Depression. They and their generation saw The War to End All Wars, and the Second World War introduce means by which the globe could be swallowed in a nuclear winter. They watched as war - armed conflict between nation states - morphed into conflicts in Korea and Vietnam dragged on far longer, and with as dire and acute consequences as wars.

My mother died five years before the notion of war changed irrevocably and, in my opinion, permanently. But still, as it always has, war begets technologies, perhaps most noticeably these days, the drone. Envisioned and employed as a killing machine that separates the killer from the killed by many miles and tens of thousands of feet in altitude, we could soon have it deliver our books (how retro is that?) and, for that matter, our pizzas. 

I've reread this post several times as I've written, wondering to myself where it was going, never mind how I might get it there. So much rereading, in fact, that I'm tempted to rewrite and expand (lest anyone come away from this thinking the Frisbee started out as an instrument of war). All of this wandering and musing because I find it unfathomable that an organization doesn't accept email job applications. Well, it is a government agency so maybe not so unbelievable. 

At risk of rambling further, I'll just leave it at that. I need to head out to the post office to mail something.