Shaver is kind, though he
writes “association” where he means “comparison”.
Interview today! More news soon!
Here is the more news: Good. It is good news. I not only had
one great interview, I stumbled blindly into a second that also
went well, and came home to find two people asking me for my
references. They weren’t actually at my house, you understand; I’m
not nearly that popular. But their phone messages were.
The most interesting part of my day was going to talk to a
wireless-services company, only to find a painter, a ton of
swanky office furniture all piled up, and a note on the door saying
“This is a notice of distress, you owe us half a million dollars
in rent, we’re taking your stuff.” Well, that’s the end of that.
Right across the hall, though, there’s a company that’s apparently
just seized a huge Government contract to do network support, and
who agreed to speak to me the moment I walked in the door.
This can’t possibly be karma, ’cause I know where I stand on Cosmic
Justice front. That’s why I have insurance. Still, I have one trick
here, such as it is, and it might be what’s helping me.
First off, you remember in back in high school chemistry, where they
taught you “wafting”? That’s the bit where you’re trying to sniff your
experiment, so you cup a bit of the air over your experiment and waft it
towards yourself. This is a pretty obvious safety measure – if you’re
dealing with something unexpectedly noxious or actively volatile you
don’t want to stick your snout right into it, just so you can catch
a lungful of tetracholoromethylsomething. You get a slight, harmless
whiff of it and you work with that.
Well, “wafting” is to “drinking the contents of the beaker” as “websites
and newsgroups” are to “getting a job”. If you don’t hit the bricks and
find some way to differentiate yourself from the biblical deluge of
e-mail that every every organization with a job opening gets in this
economic clime, you’re going into the circular file. Other than that,
when you’re in a building downtown to talk to one person, look at the
building’s occupant list. In Ottawa, at least, there’s likely to be a
dozen organizations there you’ve never heard of that are looking for
people, that might even want to talk to you right then and there.
That’s all I’ve got, really. I might just be lucky, but it seems to be
working so I’m going to stick with it. Isaac Asimov once claimed that
a dullard was somebody who opened a dictionary, looked up the word they
were looking for and then closed the dictionary. As clever phrases go,
this might be a good candidate for generalization.