Seek, and hope you find…
How many people out there in cyberspace are looking for a new job? If you are, welcome to the club! Are you in NYC? We should all get together somewhere to compare notes, because, let’s face it, a lot of what’s out there is “out there!”
Job searches have certainly changed since I first started working. Gone are the days when everyone could just waltz into an employment agency and apply for the best job they’d seen in that week’s Sunday New York Times. Gone, too, are the days of faxing your resumes and cover letters.
Now it’s all pretty much done online.
In a lot of ways that’s wonderfully faster and easier, so I’m not complaining. However, here are some of the wackiest incidents that have happened during this particular job search. Enjoy!
One online ad said, “The boss is not just looking for office help. She wants someone to be an extension of her brain.” Italics mine.
An extension of her brain? Seriously? That’s, um, physically impossible.
An interview I landed was at a union. I have no desire to mess up their mission by divulging which one. I will only say it seemed like a wonderful place. I could tell because all of the workers seemed happy, were smiling, and some even came up to start conversations with me while I waited for the interview to begin. I felt right at home there.
But during the interview, they asked me if I was available to be away from home for four to six weeks at a time. This was not in the online job description.
“Why would I need to be away for four to six weeks?” I asked. I was applying for an office job, wasn’t I?
“Well, we do a lot of our work in secret! It takes time! We go places to organize and sign up workers, but it all has to be done behind their bosses’ backs!”
Can you picture that? “Carolyn Quinn, Union Spy?”
But what could I say? “Oh, how gloriously clandestine,” I decided on as a reply and smiled, trying to go along with this, “like something out of a novel.” Yeah, right, folks, one where the union organizer’s in one form of danger after another. They liked that rejoinder and laughed, but it was an enormous relief when I left that interview.
Some positions come complete with “online assessments.” If it’s for workplace competency, I’ve taken the same silly test so many times already, at least twenty-five times and counting, that I have all the answers memorized, even the math. Another, from a New York City medical center, gives people a psychological test with one hundred and twenty questions. Pick this or pick that. Are you shy or loud? Are you friendly or anti-social? Are you usually early or late? It goes on forever, but it isn’t too bad.
What was bad, in fact, outrageous, was another psychological test I was given by some horrible highfalutin’ real estate company. They asked job applicants to rate how they felt about certain statements. Okay, I thought, again trying to cooperate, sounds hilariously touchy-feely, like something out of the worst part of the 1970s, but here goes!
Then I read the creepiest of the statements they wanted me to rate. The test asked how would I feel about somebody “poisoning the water supply.”
POISONING THE WATER SUPPLY? What kind of a job application question was that? And what kind of a wacky company would even conceive of insulting their applicants by asking them such a thing in the first place?
That one went way too far. It rated quite a letter from Yours Truly to not only the division that was doing the hiring but also the company’s CEO. Let’s just say it wasn’t exactly a love letter and leave it at that. The division head claimed he didn’t know what I was talking about since he’d never taken the test himself! Perhaps he hadn’t, but he has now, since I had no problem with “gifting” him with the crazy link.
I’m a published Author looking for a nice, decent, administrative job. I have several decades’ worth of experience. I’d like to be among co-workers who know how to come together as a team. As the old song from GYPSY says, “No fits, no fights, no feuds and no egos/Amigos/Together…”
If you’re in New York City, and you’re looking for an employee like me, here I am!
The hunt continues.
Splendiferous Everything 