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.