It’s that time of year again, kiddies. (feel free to insert maniacal cackling here)
[start gripe here]
After spending many weeks job hunting, my prospects now are in deeper crap than ever. I am now one of millions in an endless, endless cycle of job hunting. It goes a little something like this: pass your resume, wait for call, come in for initial interview, wait for test, wait for final. The final step varies from job offer to (more common) the classic line “We’ll call you by X date. If we don’t, you didn’t pass”. It’s funny.
They can at least have the decency to reject you on the spot! None of this silly pandering and planting of false hopes in an applicant’s head. Like thieves in the night, you don’t expect failure and rejection when they tell you that. The way they say it implies that we’ll consider you and in the end, we’ll hire you. Not that you’re not getting in this company, no way, no how. See you in X number of months, kid. Try again next time.
And of course, there are those that outright reject you because of your lack of experience. I take issue with that as well. To quote Michael J. Fox from the movie The Secret Of My Success: how am I supposed to get experience when none of you will damn well hire me? His words, though fictional, are true. We’re not going to get experience if we’re not being hired so that we can get it. Companies seem to fail to realize that if a company trains an employee, unless the management or HR is that bad, they’re likely to stick it out. After all, the certainty of work can often outweigh the risk of a better offer.
People Support seems like a nice enough company and the account I applied for is something in my field, so that’s a plus. The pay is decent, the area is near where a friend of mine lives so I can stay with him and the work is simple, really. Travel reservations. You listen to some idiot in the US make a booking, make his requests and do it for him. Easy as pie. (trivia: Pie is English, not American as most people think) I’d really, really like to get in this company but, as the result of a stupid mistake I’ve learned never to repeat again, I’m in a bit of a bind there. My former employer’s contract has them worried and, as far as I can tell, as much as they want to hire me, I am not getting in there.
Ambergris Solutions is a little stranger. I passed everything and am now pooled in the event that they have openings for…whatever. However, the nature of the questions I got thrown in the interview doesn’t sit well with me. The constant references to my applications in the airline industry seemed contrived. The fact that they asked me whether or not I’ll stay with the company if an airline ever called me up for an initial interview really said to me that they’re afraid of it. I get the impression that they’re thinking that they have no faith in their company’s ability to keep employees around. Come to think of it, so does the fact that they’re pooling. I find that highly suggestive of a high rate of resignations within a specific amount of time, like 1 year or 6 months. And there has to be a reason for that. Frankly, I’m not inclined to actually have to be employed to find out.
If you really think about it, finding work in this god-forsaken country is next to impossible. Most employees don’t bother leaving, believing it is wiser for them to stick it out in a certain company. Frankly, I don’t blame them. That way of thinking is starting to make sense to me. And with millions of applicants out there and so few opportunities and such poor support for the arts and the poor pay for skilled tradesmen like plumbers and electricians, many people are screwed. Add to that the illogical need for experience when they know well enough that most people can’t get experience, and you’ve got yourself a bit of a quagmire. Milton’s words ‘To rule in Hell is better to serve in Heaven’ takes on a whole new meaning from this light. Me? I’m sticking to the few applications I have left that haven’t called because I just applied yesterday or 2 days ago. In the mean time, I’m writing and reading up on things, as well as catching up to the books I’ve been meaning to read. In particular, War of the Worlds and 1984 I’ve been dying to finish.
[end gripe here]
Fiction Updates:
Charity: scrapped. I was never really that comfortable writing vampire fiction. Must be all the Anne Rice books I’ve read, along with my addiction to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, not to mention reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. A pity, really. If nothing else, the city of Charity had jeepneys even though it’s an American city, mainly because I had jeepneys as the main and only mode of public transportation.
The Da Benjie Code: on the site somewhere. Don’t know when and I don’t know how I’m going to expand on it. It’s just there as it is for now.
Darkenholme: fantasy was never my thing to write. I love fantasy as a game, like Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn or Planescape: Torment or even the occasional session of D&D or L5R (if you prefer a more Oriental approach to fantasy). However, I don’t have the discipline in me to create worlds as lush and as filled with wonder and life as most fantasy novels do. At least, not without compromising plot and characters in favor of the details of such a world. The resulting mess was one where I had a character so detailed in the nature of their organization, their lack of ethics and morality and their observance of the mission but completely lacking in humanity, in actual personality. She rarely even spoke! It wasn’t pretty.
Requiem: the project that was about half-demons and their full-blooded relatives falls apart for the 5th time since I first thought of it. What killed it this time? A lack of conflict when there should have been plenty. Oh well. I still have the notes for it, that’s a plus.
Project: Ghost: hosted currently on FPC, I honestly want to continue it but I can’t get a feel for it anymore. I dropped it long enough for me to actually…lose touch with the mood I tried so hard to get right. Still, I do plan on trying again. Starting with a complete re-write of the whole damn thing.
Anyway, working on something else now. Similar to Project: Ghost on some level but this time, I am steering clear of a lot of things.
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