Just aborted a job application in midstream when it became clear that they wanted me to take one of those godawful personality tests, where you have to Agree or Disagree, or worse, rate your level of agreement or disagreement with an ambiguous-ass, obnoxious statement like “Although I don’t let little things get to me, in a big project I can easily get stressed out.”
Here’s my answer to your personality test, guys: I have a perilously low tolerance level for bullshit, both my own and that of others, and the second you start making me parse shit like that alarms start going off and I decide very quickly that I don’t want to work for you. If that makes you not want me as an employee I’m good with it; I am absolutely certain that it is more your loss than mine.
(I am aware that they think these things represent something real or they wouldn’t do them. I’m also well within my rights to think that maybe a fifteen-minute phone interview will tell them more useful information about me than whatever bullshit data their test spits out. Fuck these things.)
Anyway.
Kitty passed all of her blood tests and was dropped off at the vet this morning for her dental surgery, so I’ve been staring at the phone waiting for the vet to call me and tell me everything went fine and she’s okay. One mistake I made: not actually bothering to ask when the surgery was. I headed straight over to them, cat in tow, after dropping the boy off at school this morning, and it didn’t occur to me until I was back in the car and heading home that just because they wanted her dropped off by 8:30 did not mean that they were going to immediately commence to yanking teeth out, nor do I really have any idea how long it might take to deal with a tooth abscess in a cat. I strongly suspect they’ll end up pulling more teeth than they initially thought, as she’s had not-great teeth pretty much forever and I’m sure they’re going to find something else in there they don’t like. I just hope to not be too completely broke when they’re done.
And also to have a healthy pet. That too.
Hmm. Last night as I was drifting off to sort-of-sleep I had a great idea for a politics post float through my head and I no longer remember a single word of it. I’ll update when I get the kitty back and if I remember what that was about I’ll toss that at you too. More later, in other words.
I’ve applied to… five different jobs today? Six? Something in there– and I’m playing phone tag with someone who called me. So hopefully we’re getting somewhere.
What I haven’t done is thought or done anything interesting enough to warrant a blog post, so you’re gonna get another Prince video, because I’m at OtherJob tonight so there won’t be a late post tonight one way or another.
Let’s pretend that I’m focusing on my speech for the wedding. That makes it sound like I’m doing something.
So I just found out that my eighteen year old cat has a tooth abscess, which is going to require a spot of dental surgery on Wednesday, and my brother’s wedding is the weekend after this, and the hotel alone for that trip is going to be ugly.
What I’m getting at is that this would be a great time to buy a book or two, if you’re the type to enjoy science fiction or nonfiction books about teaching. I even sell autographed print books directly if you’re interested in that. Because the next two weeks were already going to be bugfuck expensive, and the vet bills ain’t gonna help. And I still don’t have a proper job.
That said, let’s tell a little story about the job I do have. Several years ago I was in charge of the morning video announcements at one of my schools, which involved putting together a script, hustling a pair of middle school students through reading it, then editing the whole thing together and adding sound effects, text, and the occasional bad joke. Over a while it became a running joke that Mr. Siler Doesn’t Dance. It started with a two and a half minute speech about sports physicals by our gym teacher that I intercut with shots of students dancing to keep them paying attention and then eventually cut to me, sitting perfectly still, because I don’t dance. A later shot had me doing a gesture with one finger (no, not that one, but hell if I know how to describe it) in tune to the music while other people danced behind me.
For the rest of the year, any time the kids walked past me, especially the younger ones, one of them was bound to be doing that finger dance. It stuck around for years.
Fast forward to Saturday night. We got killed at OtherJob on Saturday; I walked in to discover the day shift had done probably 30% better than they ever do, especially on a day with no big groups or birthday parties, and we managed to double that number by 7:30 PM and triple it by the time we closed. It was gorgeous outside. You could tell.
Anyway, I was at the outdoor register and basically had my head down most of the night because the line of people wanting to play never let up. At one point I heard my name off to my left. “Yeah, Mr. Siler used to do this all the time,” the kid is saying. I look up, and it’s a former student, a kid who’s probably 16 or 17 by now. He’s part of a big family. There’s a (good) story about his sister in Searching for Malumba. I think I had him and three of his brothers and sisters.
And he’s talking about me, and he has no idea that I’m standing a foot away. And he’s doing the goddamn finger dance.
The look on the kid’s face when I called him out by name was hilarious. I don’t know if he just wasn’t paying attention or what– it was pretty common knowledge that this was my other job, so frequently kids would come looking for me if they showed up, but it’s been a few years since I’ve seen him– and I think I exploded his brain for a bit there.
I’m having a good day, as two of my books picked up five-star reviews today over on Amazon. There’s a short one for Sanctum of the Sphere and here’s another for Skylights. Check ’em out!
I’m Luther Siler. I’m a writer and an editor. Welcome to my blog, infinitefreetime.com.
I’m the author of Skylights, available for $4.95 from Amazon, and The Benevolence Archives. Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is 99 cents from Amazon. Volume 2, The Sanctum of the Sphere, is $4.95. All three books are available in print as well, and the print edition of Sanctum includes BA 1 as a bonus! My newest book is a nonfiction memoir about teaching called Searching for Malumba: Why Teaching is Terrible, and Why We Do It Anyway. The ebook is $4.95 and the print edition is $15.95.
Here’s where to find Luther Siler on the interwebtron:
You can follow me on Twitter, @nfinitefreetime, here or just click the “follow” button on the right side of the page. I am on Twitter pretty frequently; I use it for liveblogging TV, whining about anything that strikes me as whine-worthy, and for short, Facebook-style posts. I generally follow back if I can tell you’re a human being.
I don’t know what the deal has been lately, but twice in the last few weeks I’ve been the subject of angry tirades from dickbags who think the world revolves around them and, crucially, also don’t understand that if I don’t comply with your dickbaggery immediately then it is very unlikely that I’ll comply with your dickbaggery later if you decide to escalate things.
Examples? Sure. There is a Taco Bell near OtherJob (which, I suppose, I ought to start calling OnlyJob by now) where the drive-thru lane funnels you into about thirty feet where the building is on one side and there’s a curb encircling a grassy planted area on the other. In other words, once you’ve ordered food, you’re stuck in that line unless you want to hop the curb.
So I’m attempting to order food and it is taking ridiculously long for whatever reason. The car in front of me gets their food and an extremely apologetic employee tells me it’ll be another couple of minutes before I get mine. I wait. Sure, whatever. The car behind me is not so patient and starts honking her horn. I glance in my rear-view mirror and I see that, somehow, she’s yelling at me, gesturing that I need to move forward so that she can pull out. Now, I’m driving a small SUV, and her car dwarfs mine. She can easily get over the curb, she just doesn’t want to. And if I pull out of this line, the cars behind her are going to move forward, and then there’s going to be a clusterfuck, because I’m not going to be able to get back to the window.
So, no, lady, I’m not going to be accommodating you on this. So I ignore her and stay where I am, but continue to glance in the rear-view from time to time. Note that I can’t actually hear her, but I can see her continue to yell and gesture. No. You hop the curb. Or just be patient. This is ridiculous.
Eventually I get my food and she roars away.
Yesterday, again on my way to OtherJob, I’m second in line waiting for a red light in a left turn lane. I’m maybe a foot off the bumper of the car in front of me– not up his ass, but close enough that there’s clearly no way to squeeze in between us. To my left is one lane of traffic. To my right, the going straight/right turn lane and then an entrance to a parking lot for an apartment complex, which is probably closer to the light than it should be, so even though I’m only the second car waiting for the light it’s basically immediately to my right.
A bigass yellow pickup truck turns right off the street I’m trying to turn onto. He wants into that parking lot, so he just stops, the rear end of his car blocking traffic on the cross street, and starts hollering at me to back up. If he just completes his turn there are a dozen different places within a hundred yards where he can loop around and turn right into that lot, but no, he wants to turn left. Through my car, and eventually through the car to my right that wants to go straight. But no, we can’t do that, so I’ve got to holler at the guy who wants to turn left to back up so that I’m not inconvenienced for twenty seconds.
Again: um, no. Meanwhile, cars are piling up behind him, because he’s blocking a lane on the cross street.
At one point he actually guns his car at me and lunges a foot or so closer. This actually gets him eye contact. Go ahead, asshole. My car is sixteen years old and has 150K miles on it. It’s legally old enough to drive itself. I can handle a dent.
He literally sat there and hollered and blocked traffic for probably a minute or two rather than taking thirty seconds to complete his turn and find a place to turn around. Meanwhile, I’m starting to muse about how difficult it would be to mount a flamethrower where my running boards used to be.
Ah, humanity.
(*) There is absolutely no chance that I’m going to start walking to work.
I feel like that video yesterday didn’t get enough attention, guys. That shit was genius, on a number of levels, and deserves to be appreciated properly. Go watch it. (And, to be clear, Child cleans Ramsay’s clock.)
I’ve been in either a towering rage or a pit for most of the last couple of days, and I’m really trying to find a way to shake the mood heading into the weekend. You may already have guessed that I didn’t get a call back from that job interview last week; I got a shot of confidence on Friday when my online resume, which on a typical day gets no traffic at all, got 27 hits from 3 viewers, two of whom Googled my name to find it. It got three more on Monday. The interview was last Tuesday and the interviewer told me I’d either get a call from him or an email from his assistant in “Oh, a week?”. We’re at ten days; I’m assuming that writing on the wall is as legible as I think it is at this point. So back to square one, again.
I’ve started applying for sales jobs, because fuck it– probably five or six of them in the last couple of days. We’ll see if that gets me anywhere. People need to sleep, right, and sit on things? And occasionally, like, place things on top of other things? Sure they do. I can sell shit. Why not.
The good news is that I think I’m going to blink and the next two weeks are going to evaporate. My brother’s wedding is June 4th, once I’ve recovered from that the primary election season finally ends on June 7th, and then I’m tuning politics the fuck out until the conventions. Or at least I’m going to try.
Just aborted a job application in midstream when it became clear that they wanted me to take one of those godawful personality tests, where you have to Agree or Disagree, or worse, rate your level of agreement or disagreement with an ambiguous-ass, obnoxious statement like “Although I don’t let little things get to me, in a big project I can easily get stressed out.”
So I just found out that my eighteen year old cat has a tooth abscess, which is going to require a spot of dental surgery on Wednesday, and my brother’s wedding is the weekend after this, and the hotel alone for that trip is going to be ugly.
I feel like that video yesterday didn’t get enough attention, guys. That shit was genius, on a number of levels, and deserves to be appreciated properly.