Primal scream (don’t read)

On April 8, 2016April 8, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Work2 Comments

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News on the job front! I have, once again, had someone contact me with a job offer! And it pays $37 an hour! That’s a lot of money! And it’s a real job this time and not a scam!

A real job that will have unpredictable hours from week to week, have a lot of travel, and end in October!

Okay, there’s a possibility of coming on full-time once the specific project I’ll be training people for is over, but hours will still vary widely from week to week, which challenges my notion of what “full time” means, and the job will still be mostly travel!

GODDAMMIT.

Exclamation point!

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.

Oh and also the job is literally working for the literal devil. That’s not a joke.

In which the good news isn’t

On March 26, 2016March 26, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Work7 Comments

So, in theory, I got offered a job last Wednesday, which ought to be good news. I had a company contact me out of the blue regarding a resume that I had posted on a job site and asking for me to come in and do an interview. The actual job itself wasn’t something I might have gone for on my own– sales, generically– but I suspected I could be good at it, and screw it, job.

Two interviews and some new clothes later, I actually got offered a position, asked for a couple of days to discuss it with my wife, and then found myself in the odd position of realizing that I need to have my scam filters up while interviewing for a job. Long story short: the position pays on pure commission, which is bad enough (I have had one commission job in my life, which I quit after my second shift by simply not showing up for my third) but the way the commissions are determined is… we’ll say shifty.

When the guy interviewing you says, during the second interview, “It’s like a pyramid. Not a pyramid scheme, but a pyramid!” it should throw up some red flags. And it did, but they didn’t really fully register until I got home and my wife looked up the company on some web job boards. And at that point… yeah. No.

So I gotta email this guy tonight or tomorrow and turn down an at-least-in-theory paying job when I haven’t been to work since October, which chaps my ass something fierce to have to do, but I should never have to use the phrase “at least in theory” when referring to the paying part of a job, and for this job I kinda do.

So, yeah. Still doing this: anybody wanna hire me? I’m good at stuff!

tl;dr: blaaaaaaargh

On February 9, 2016February 9, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Work1 Comment

Does it count as progress if I’ve applied for a job at a place where I know some people and those people have repeatedly talked me up to the boss as someone who would 1) be exceptional for the position they’re looking for and 2) fit in well with the mix of other personalities at the office, but that due to the vagaries of the hiring process there is virtually no way I might be able to start work before mid-March even assuming that the people responsible for hiring me actually decide that they want to do that? Because I feel like that’s sort of progress, but then I look at these couple of projects I have going on around here and think well, no reason to work on THAT today, it’s not like I’m going to run out of time to do it.

I have, effectively, been out of work since October, and officially been out of work for just over a month, and I am heartily fucking tired of it, people.

(Listening to Pandora while typing whiny blog post; discovers that See You Again is a Wiz Khalifa song; temporarily does not understand how universe works.)

Anyway. I should go buy some pączki or something to cheer myself up, but it’s cold and snowy outside and instead I’ll stare at that a in pączki and be really aggravated that the diacritical marks are screwing up the size of the letter so badly. I’ve been really boring around here lately, and I need to either just take the plunge and go all-politics all-the-time until after the election or find something else other than, say, my life to discuss.

I mean, hell, Michigan’s Senate just passed a bill making blowjobs illegal. No, really. That’s not a joke. Twelve years ago, that would have been good for a week of profane sarcasm, or at least some decent mockery. And here I’ve just only now mentioned it.

The boy’s getting in trouble at lot at school lately, and that’s its own big thing that I’m not sure what to do about. I’m used to working with older kids, obviously, and I don’t quite know what to do to rein in a preschooler when I’m not around him. I got a hint from one of his teachers this morning that the problems are worse than I’d initially been led to believe, which also isn’t helping, because I’ve been interpreting “no email home” to mean “no problems,” and apparently that just means “problems, but not enough that I’m writing home about them.” Which means I’ve been praising my son for doing good jobs on days when he wasn’t. So, great: I’ve literally been reinforcing bad behavior. That’s … awesome.

(Brief moment to be glad I’m not teaching any longer.)

(Then this next paragraph, immediately afterwards.)

Maybe I’ll just start homeschooling. With the money we’d get back from tuition it might actually be worth it. Ugh. There’s also the ugly possibility that we may have started him a year too early; he’s the youngest kid in his class, and while he appears to be up to snuff with everyone else academically no one would have blinked had we decided to take another year before we put him into school. (His best friend, in fact, is two weeks older than him, and not in preschool yet.)

So, yeah. Obviously my head’s all over the goddamn place right now.

On that job hunt

On January 29, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Work7 Comments

derbs.png.jpeg A few months ago I sent out a flurry of applications for work-from-home, set-your-own-schedule types of jobs. One of them was doing background checks on people who are trying to get security clearance to work for the federal government. It didn’t look like something that would be super fulfilling as a life goal, but my mentality at the time was basically fuck it, apply anyway.

Forward to the end of January, yesterday specifically, and I get an email from these people, informing me that I’ve passed the first stage of screening (which apparently just involved reading my resume and cover letter) and need to take a couple of online tests as the next stage.

Tests? ‘Kay. Sure, why not, and I was stuck on the manuscript anyway so I needed something else to do. The tests turned out to be childishly easy once I figured out what was actually going on; the first was a Flash replica of a Windows desktop and they asked me to perform several basic tasks like “attach this to an email,” “delete this file,” “rename this file,” and things like that. They allotted fifteen minutes, I was done in five. You get to make one mistake on each question before you fail it, and I made a mistake on the very first question because I didn’t quite get what was going on (if they want you to open the Start menu to open a program, and you click anywhere other than the Start menu, that’s an error) but I was perfect from then on.

The second test was literally “write these three emails.” The first was explaining a policy to an employee, the second was giving directions to a place to a job seeker, and the third was informing the staff of a mandatory meeting. In each case they gave me a bunch of details they wanted me to include but otherwise let me write the message as I saw fit.

I resisted the urge to make the second email dude, here’s our address, if you can’t figure out a way to get directions in 2016 other than bothering me for them you don’t get the job.

I got another email late last night informing me that I had passed Stage Two and asking me to email them several times in the next few weeks where I would be available for a 30-minute phone interview. Included in that email was a description of the training process for the job.

Which is three months long, full-time, mostly out of town, and unpaid. And, furthermore, if I were to complete the three-month unpaid training and not spend a year in the job,(*) I would have to pay them for the training.

They will not be receiving a list of times to call.

The really sad thing is, that entire story legitimately represents the closest thing to good news on the job front I’ve gotten lately. Whee!

(*) And if you thought to yourself I bet they haven’t said how much the job pays, you get a cookie, because no, they didn’t.

Okay, enough of that

On January 27, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Work1 Comment

LMS Business Card Front 2.jpg LMS Business Card Back 2.jpg

Those are the cards, and I’m done screwing around with it. I lost my mind for a bit last night when I realized that the font I was using was the font from The Office, and several hours of searching for and downloading different fonts didn’t produce anything that I was 1) equally happy with and 2) equally legible and readable, so I just went with bolding everything to remove the Office-ness of it and now I’m moving on with my life. The point of these cards is to give them to people at cons who might be useful at some point in the future, and by the time I hand them a card, the way things have been going at these cons, I’ve already been talking to these people for several minutes and I’m fairly certain they’re going to remember me. If not, hey! There’s my face. So they need to be legible, say “word-dude” somehow, if they don’t say it literally, and have my contact information. A bit of a science fiction flare won’t hurt either. So, there. Done.

(Luther@prostetnic.com is my new real email address now, by the way. The old gmail account isn’t dead; I’ll leave it open for quite a bit longer to make sure I catch anything that people are still sending to it, but if you’ve ever emailed me for any reason, do me a favor and change your contacts, and if you email me at the old address my response will come from the new one.)

The funny thing is I’m still happier with how my dad’s cards turned out than mine, but whatever.

The next project: I’m probably not going to work on this today, but my Bruce Banner side is getting a digital resume. One of the annoying things about sending paper resumes to people is that, even with a cover letter, it’s difficult to get the hey I’m actually pretty decent at a whole lot of damn stuff idea across, and if I put together a little WordPress site for myself at myrealname.com it’ll give me a lot more breathing room for what I actually want to let people know about me. That’s not today’s project, I don’t think, because I need to put some thought into exactly how I want it built and what I want on there, but it’s coming. Then drop it into the paper resume and onto LinkedIn see if it gets any traffic.

Oh, and there’s that book to worry about, too.

Busy day coming. What are you working on today?

In which I totally lose the thread

On January 19, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Work9 Comments

So it turns out Chatroulette is still a thing. Who knew?

Today was a morning full of errands and minor home improvement tasks, an afternoon of nothing, and then full-time Daddy Duty all evening. I may or may not have mentioned my wife’s new job; I think I have but I can’t remember specifically doing it. At any rate, I have officially ceded the title of Breadwinner; she came close to doubling her salary by changing jobs and even if I still had last year’s job she’d still be like 20% above me.

So this means that when Lord High Muckety-Mucks from her new company are in town, she has to go to Big Fancy Dinners to entertain them. So she’s there, and I’m a househusband today.

(Hey, it’s better than “unemployed.” I did my first job application today where I had to admit that technically I don’t have a job any longer, although I suppose I could put self-employed on there and list Prostetnic. Maybe I should. Hmm.)

(Actually, I really should. Author/Publisher/Marketer/Owner/Technically-can’t-call-myself-a-CEO, dating back to 2013? Hmm.)

Yeah, this post was gonna be about something and now all I can think about is how I should redo my resume. What was I gonna say again? Shit.

…yeah, I lost it. Dammit. 🙂

#Weekendcoffeeshare: 2016 edition

On January 3, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories12 Comments

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If we were having coffee, we’d be talking about the same thing everybody else is talking about: it’s 2016! What have you been doing with your life for the last couple of weeks? What do you want to do with your life next year?

I’m not super interested right now in looking back at 2015. I blogged every single day last year, most days more than once; feel free to start with January 1 and work your way through. The year had high points and low points much like any other and was, I think, on balance more high than low despite the chaos of the last few months while I’ve been on medical leave.

I don’t do resolutions. Resolutions happen in January and are abandoned by February. However, if you ask me what my current goals are in life and I don’t have any, it means I’m probably deeply depressed. I always have a couple of goals that I’m working on; right now is no exception. Most of them are related to my writing and I’ve already discussed. The rest, right now, are job-related.

I want a new job. Preferably soon. Real soon. I’ve put a hold on stressing out about it over the holidays; there was no point, as the holidays are a deeply bad time to be unemployed. You have to be unemployed through the whole several weeks; all the folks with job openings, on the other hand, are looking at piles of resumes and going “Yeah, we’ll deal with that when we get back.”

(The exception that proves the rule: my brother recently moved to Illinois to be with his fiancee, and has had some trouble finding work too. He had a series of interviews last week in rapid succession, and when the third interview in three days was “go downtown, talk to this person, and then do the paperwork for your background check” I told him he had the job and to not worry about it. Why? Because they pulled in teachers over winter break to interview him, and they did three interviews in three days, and that means they’re in a huge damn hurry to get the job filled. I was right. Most of the jobs I’m applying for are not jobs that are going to lead to death or dishonor if they’re not filled this week.)

Well, at any rate, tomorrow’s Monday, so everybody will be back. My suspicion is that every office on Earth will start with a horrible three-hour meeting and then 80% of the people at work will spend the rest of the day looking around their desks, bleary-eyed, and trying to remember their passwords, and that therefore the earliest any “Hey, come interview with us!” phone calls could possibly happen will be Tuesday.

I am desperately hoping to get a phone call on Tuesday, especially for one particular job that I applied for the week of Thanksgiving and was explicitly told not to hold my breath about until after New Year’s. We’ll see, I guess.

At any rate, I’m going insane over here and I need a new job. So that’s goal one, even before any writing stuff happens: get a damn job.

I kinda feel like that’s enough for right now. How about you? What are you working on right now?

In which I tinker

On October 6, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

Spent the evening polishing and updating my résumé; I’ve been fiddling with bits here and there but it was time for a more serious overhaul. In particular, there’s a section now highlighting my skills with social media and mentioning oh, I wrote some books. Now, this could backfire on me rather considerably, I imagine. I don’t actually give my pen name or mention my website, but the fact is I’m applying for some jobs where familiarity with social media is a plus and it would probably be useful to point out that I’ve got 10,000 Twitter followers in cases like that. Hopefully it won’t blow up in my face. We’ll cross fingers.

In other news, I’ve been back at work for two days, and so far it hasn’t been that bad. I’ve mostly kept a lid on my temper, a fact helped considerably by the fact that many of my more problematic kids are suspended right now. It’s amazing what pulling just three kids out of my afternoon group, in particular, does for the group dynamic. They’re still not angels by any stretch but it moves them from one of the most demanding groups I’ve ever had to just average, and average I can easily handle. The only problem I’ve been having is with getting up in the morning and (possibly medicine-related?) an incredible amount of morning nausea. If I were a woman I’d be seriously wondering about pregnancy right now. I was completely convinced yesterday in particular that I was going to have to charge out of the room and puke at any moment, but so far both days I’ve been able to keep it together. I don’t know if it’s stress or the meds or just having to get up way before I’m ready for it (the exhaustion hasn’t gone away) or what but I’m kinda done with it and I’d like it to go away now.

Four days until my self-imposed Searching for Malumba MUST BE DONE deadline. I probably oughtta get on that, huh?