dianaschnuth

Jobs applied for: 9
Responses received: 3
Contract jobs in hire process: 1

Basically, I’m still officially in the running for a position I applied for back in early May; another company that seemed promising in early May is due for a prodding; and I did get an offer of a part-time contract job back in late June, although I haven’t yet been called in for a contract-signing.

This is the most important thing right now: finding a job. Granted, I have potential severance and retention money coming in September… but I’d rather not have to use it for actual survival in the midst of unemployment.

No worries. No stress (yet). It’s just time to pour it on, and get ready to jump onto the merry-go-round.

(No, I have no idea what that metaphor really alludes to. It just sounded good in my head.)

Long Story Short: I now have a potentially steady stream of part-time web development contract work. I do not yet have a new full-time job.

The Rest Of The Story: It appears that I passed the “task” with flying colors, and went above what the other two or three potential coders had accomplished. Yay for being anal about cross-browser compatibility. I also apparently finished the task faster than the others. According to the seemingly-older (read: my age) partner who totally took charge of the interview, I will get paid for my ten hours of work. How much? That remains to be seen.

I had an entire page of questions ready to ask them, but was stopped short when I realized that this would be a contract job, part-time, max of 20 hours a week, working from home. All my questions about benefits, family leave, PTO, company stability, all went out the window once this became a nice side gig. Granted, it *is* a nice side gig… but I still have to do some follow-ups regarding other possible full-time positions.

(When I do secure a new full-time job, I may request that they withhold extra taxes, too, since my new contract gig won’t be withholding for me.)

If I were a college student and landed this gig, it would be the best thing EVAR. Experience and money doing what I want, and just in my free time! Hell, I probably could have done it during my time working in the computer lab, and no one would have been the wiser. Alas, now I have to pay bills and mortgage and whatnot, and I have not such luxuries with my time and livelihood.

So… more time to maybe hang out at Sky and get my August 10th incentive pay and maybe my September 21st severance. The stress is just a little lessened now, but not entirely gone. I’m not entirely sure how this contract gig will pan out in the long run. I’m hoping for the best, and am still genuinely excited to be a part of this growing and evolving company, but I can’t guarantee that they can give me what I need to pay the bills.

While my portfolio is still not quite finished, I have put up a passable temporary placeholder, and have now sent out three resumes. One was to a friend’s former employer (they say it’s not what you know, but WHO you know), one was a classified ad brought to my attention by a co-worker, and one was an ad I found on my own in the local paper (well, on their website, anyway).

I still have a really hard time “selling” myself as being THE employee a given employer should hire. I’ve been playing up my quick learning and adaptation skills, and my versatility — need a designer with programming background, or a quick-learning programmer with design skills?

But, still. I’m no rockstar, no matter what my husband says. I can’t let on to potential employers, though.

I’ll find something better than banking. I’m sure of it. It may not be the ideal job, but it’ll be invaluable experience, and it’ll use the part of my brain that makes me happy and fulfilled. I got to do that for six months, while James and I were actively developing our database, and I’d never been happier about going to work.

Of course, I’m *hoping* for the ideal job. That would be pretty keen.

…

Dammit, I *am* a rockstar! Look at all this shit I can do, and without even a CS degree. Really! That database James and I made is pretty posh for Access, considering how much of it we Googled along the way. I can do this. I can hang with the rockstars. I rule!

Toy store!!!

OK, so this time I was at college. It was supposedly BGSU, but again, you know how dreams are. I had a room by myself for a while, then my old roommate Mary moved in with me. (Good christ, Mary teaches the Gifted class now?!) — Anyway, I was living in a poor excuse for a dorm — more like a shabby apartment complex that should have been demolished. But it was mine, and I had it all figured out. But Mary moved her stuff in, and blocked the doorway so people had to literally crawl into the room, and kept moving the beds around into weird and unsuitable places in the room. Then she found a room in the next building over where we could cook food, and proceeded to make four different dishes on the stoves in this dank, dark, unheated and really creepy place she’d discovered. Of the dishes, I only recall the cheesy potatoes. Then she went back to our room and left me to put the food in containers and store it… somewhere. When I finally got back, via back hallways and tunnels, she was asleep or studying or something.

Somehow, at the end of the dream, Mary magically became Amy — either Mary moved out and Amy moved in, or one of those weird dream-things happened, where people just randomly become different people and it’s perfectly OK… until you try to explain it later. Anyway, the end of the dream involved me trying to convince Amy that maybe we should move out of the dorm we were in and back into one of the dorms with larger rooms: Rodgers, or even Kohl. She was quite receptive.

I know I forgot a lot of the details, and there were plenty, but that’s the basic gist. Jeez, is this what I get for thinking, "You know, I haven’t remembered my dreams for quite a while now…"? Or maybe it’s from being regularly awakened by my alarm clock earlier than usual, to prepare myself for 8-to-5’s again.

Anyway, back to the real world…

I had my phone interview with HCR ManorCare today. Mr. Kevin Shoop sounded to be about my age or thereabouts — seems they had the guy call all the people he could potentially be working with, and tell them about the job to make sure they were still interested. He seriously sounded more nervous than I felt, and that really relaxed me a bit. So, I’m to be one of ten candidates eligible for an in-person interview for this Web Content position, slated to be filled by mid-December. I’m glad I don’t have all my proverbial eggs in one basket this time, though — even if I don’t get this HCR position, I still have a new job and a pay increase. And a $600 incentive check in January, and another raise in March, if I stick around that long. Either way it goes, I’m happy. I think.

I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time on the Saginaires Alumni Association website lately. Well, why not, when we have an alumni benefactor who’s donating 300MB of webspace indefinitely, plus covering our domain name (which was once my own "donation")? Oh, yeah, and the traffic on our Yahoo! Group has increased from a rare maximum of 19 messages a month between December 2000 and September 2003, spiking up to 233 messages this October and nearly 1000 this month so far. I attribute the growth to the success of the alumni reunions (which I had nothing to do with this time — I didn’t plan it, and I didn’t even go, because it’s on Black Swamp weekend). They all seem to love the site, so I’m going to continue to run with it. There were times when I’d considered shutting the whole damn thing down — but I didn’t, because it was my baby, my first website, the reason I learned HTML in the first place. And now, I’m glad I kept it around. Just goes to show, I guess.

Oh, and by the way: if you feel you must drink diet soda, check out Diet Rite. White Grape rocks my world.