Category Archives: Personal posts

Random observations

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I went to a job interview of sorts on Thursday. It lasted from 9:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m.. It was a position where I could have made a great deal of money (easily double my previous income to start) but which required about 20 hours of overtime a week. If I were about ten years younger, I might actually think about something like that, but at this point I am pretty sure that I don’t have it in me to work that many hours -and especially not with a two hour commute each way. But damn I need a job.

I have realized, albeit about ten years too late, why I was never able to really excel at playing the guitar: I had been trying entirely too hard. I walked into the living room yesterday, picked up the guitar, and belted out part of Yngwie Malmsteen’s song Eclipse. Instead of concentrating on the notes and mashing the string to the fret, I just let my mind tell my fingers where to go (which doesn’t really do much to explain the actual difference). The difference was night and day. I have had the notes memorized for years, my fingers have always known exactly where they had to be on the fingerboard to play them, I just lacked the ability to make my mind connect with my fingers. The problem was that I was trying to use my eyes as a tool to make the two meet, but the eyes are not as fast as the mind, and the fingers are frequently behind the eyes (which I know doesn’t make any sense, but bear with me), which was leading to a lot of notes getting played at the wrong time, or not at all. Once I removed my eyes from the equation and trusted my mind to get my fingers where I knew they needed to be, it just came out. The epiphany that I really needed a decade ago, when I really cared about music, finally comes when I am only playing for amusement. Perfect.

If you are a guitarist and have been playing long enough that you can get your fingers to any given fret by feel, yet seem to have problems with particular riffs, just make sure you aren’t looking. Your mind can move your fingers a hell of a lot quicker than your eyes can, but you have to trust that your mind knows what it is doing -a real stretch for me- to be successful. I mean, don’t be envisioning the neck of the guitar in your head while you are playing, in fact, think of something else if necessary to make sure that your mind is making your fingers move without any visual cues. Trust me, and trust yourself, once you are able to do that you will become infinitely better. It is sort of like typing; I haven’t had to actually think about where the keys were for years, my thoughts just appear on the screen with an absolute minimum of intervention from the eyes (I do occasionally have to look down to see where some of the keys are, & and $ for example.). The guitar needs to be the same way, and if there is an occasional “typo”, so be it. The typos will dwindle with time and you will find that you are far better than you had ever thought possible.

Okay, I lied

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When I said that I put the guitar back in the spare bedroom never to speak of it again, I was lying. Sue me.

I restrung one of them yesterday, ’cause you would be amazed what three or four years of disuse can do to the pretty nickel plated strings, unless you own a guitar, in which case you already know. Then it was time to Shred! Well, “shred” might not be the appropriate word here, I might be looking for something more along the lines of “Then it was time to hope I didn’t outright suck!”

As I sat there plugging away at it, I started to remember bits and pieces of all of the songs that I used to play. I would remember one riff, play it, then try to remember the next part. Of course I could never remember the next part, so I would move on to another song, only to then remember the part from the last song. So basically I was sounding like every twelve year old that ever picked up the guitar. Sort of like a really bad guitar player to begin with, add in a little A.D.D., and you pretty much have my sound -at least I have the good since to do it with the amp barely audible, to spare the ears of any humans, pets, or NSA agents (yes, I intentionally made sure that I excluded the NSA agents from the “humans” category. Just one of my things) who happen to be listening in.

I decided that focusing my butchery on just a couple of songs would probably benefit a lot of people. Most notably, every band whose name is not Metallica, since old Metallica is the most new guitarist friendly music ever written (in general. It is often fast, but from a purely technical standpoint, easy). The two songs I chose were Master of Puppets and Welcome Home (Sanitarium). The former because it is one of the more difficult songs to play just for the sheer speed you have to maintain for 8 minutes or whatever (here is where every kid that ever touched a guitar chimes in with “I can play that”. To which I say, “No, no you can’t.” Playing the intro doesn’t qualify as playing it. When I say that I can play a song, I am saying that I can play every note in the song from beginning to end ((although some of the solos have always been beyond my ability)), albeit with an occasional mistake). The latter was chosen because my fingers need to re-learn how to get the hell out of the way to let the clean tone ring through without muffling it.

Every kid with a guitar really thinks that he can play Sanitarium though, and they think they are good enough to video tape in the process, and they think the resulting video is worthy of posting for all the world to see. Seriously, Check out some of these videos (the second page is where the real hackery starts, although the intros played on the first page of results could probably create a whole new level of “suck” all on their own). I can proudly say that having not touched the instrument in year, I picked up the guitar and still play it better than any of those guys. Of course that isn’t good enough for me, I need to be able to play it so precisely that you can’t tell the difference between my play and the album, which will probably only take a couple of weeks more practice, and the practice is only on the solos since the rhythm parts are so damn easy.

But I didn’t write this post to brag of my guitar prowess, it just kind of turned out that way when I went to see if anyone had made a video of them playing Sanitarium. Anyway, it was while I was searching through the horrible mockeries of the song that I came across one of the many that is just so horrible you almost can’t believe it is for real. This video is either the funniest parody ever conceived, or the most sad thing I have ever seen. The description of the video says:

Much metallica is gooder whith electric axe. Hear new digital delay, DOD rawks metal hard kore.


That is parody, right? RIGHT? God I hope so.

Hell, judging by these videos, I don’t really even need to practice. I just need to start booking gigs and banging groupies, all for the love of music, or something.

attitional note: There must be a tabliture floating around for this song on the internet, because almost every one of the videos has The same mistake in it at exactly the same place. I know that internet is never wrong and all, but you really ought to at least compare your tabliture to the song before you commit to it.

Dead Cichlids

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A little over a month ago, one of my wife’s friends from work gave her an enormous fish tank. I think it is 70 gallons, but I am not quite sure. It is 4 feet long, 15 inches deep, and 20 inches tall if that gives you any idea of the scale. To me, it is just fucking huge.

The fish tank came fully equipped, even including fish. The fish are African Cichlids (if you want to know what they look like google it. To me they look like Koi fish, but the also look like Goldfish, so I am not much of a judge). There were 13 of the guys that came along with the tank. Well, obviously not all guys, since many of them were the children of some of the other ones, and I don’t think they reproduce asexually (of course I don’t know, I didn’t actually pay any attention in biology class in high school.).

A couple of days ago, I was going to clean the tank for the first time. I wasn’t really sure what the proper procedure for cleaning was, so I just did like I do with our smaller tank, and started using a little gravity sucker thingy jobber to vacuum the crud off of the bottom. I began to remove all of the ornaments in the tank for cleaning purposes, and started to scrub the side with an aquarium brush (yes, I have three arms, which really made this a lot easier). While pulling the weeds faux foliage from the tank, I noticed a little baby fish, then another, then another… 14 in total. I decided that I had better put everything back the way it was, since I was not at all sure if Cichlids are the type that eat their own offspring, but I know that many species do.

So, how do I clean the tank without risking either the big fish eating the little fish, or sucking the little fish up in the gravity sucker thingy jobber? Two solutions. Solution in the first: Magnetic Aquarium Cleaners. This is a device I had never heard of, and it only cost about six bucks, but my god is it ever easy. Just two magnets with a scrubber on one, throw it in the tank, hold the other one outside of the glass and move it around just as if your hand was in the tank. I don’t know how I ever lived without it.

Solution in the second: A Plecostomus. I had wanted to get one when we initially got the tank, but couldn’t locate one large enough that there wouldn’t be a fear of the Cichlids eating it. I found one at PetSmart that was just about the same size as the Cichlids, so I was in business.

Time to leave the tank alone while the babies grow up.

The fish have been spending a lot of time near the top of the tank over the last few days. I had been attributing this to the temperature of the water, as the warmer the water, the less oxygen it will have in it. The tank still looked fairly clean from the gravity vacuum sucker thingy jobber I had used on it a few days ago. Although there was a bit of a fishy odor in the tank, but it is a fish tank, what do I expect? A friend called me on the phone at about six, and as I walked by the tank the fish were fine. I hung up the phone a little bit after seven, and as I walked past the tank again, about half of the fish were dead, and the ones that weren’t dead weren’t looking too chipper.

I didn’t know what the fuck could have happened to them so quickly. I could see if there wasn’t enough air in the tank maybe one of them would die, while the others started looking worse, but I was looking at about half the fish dead -in under an hour. The only thing I could think was that maybe the plecostomus had somehow gotten into, and clogged up, the filtration system. I yelled for the wife, and together we netted out the remaining fish. We put them into two buckets of clean water, one for the fish that still seemed pretty okay, one for the two of them that were barely clinging to life. Then we set about fishing out as many of the babies as we could -I think we got a total of 11 of the babies out of it, which is a pretty good total really, since I had only seen 8 since replacing all of the ornaments that day.

I started draining all of the water out of the tank with the gravity vacuum sucker thingy jobber as my wife put the baby fish into our smaller tank with the neon tetras (these babies are about the same size as the tetras). By now, the fish that had been on the verge of death only minutes before appeared to be back to normal. WHAT THE FUCK?

I continued to drain the water out of the tank with the gravity vacuum sucker thingy jobber, and was getting as much of the remaining crud out of the gravel as I went. When the tank was about 90% drained, I saw that Mr. Plecostomus was still in the tank, so there went my clogging up the filtration system theory -all of the large fish were now accounted for, and the baby fish were nowhere near large enough to cause a problem with it. That was when I saw what I am pretty sure was the problem: A tiny piece of broken glass. It looked like the bottom of a test tube.

As I continued to clean the bottom of the tank, I found the rest of the little glass thingy. It was a thermometer. Now my first thought was “mercury”, my second thought was “they haven’t used mercury in thermometers in decades”, my third thought was “Perhaps the internet knows the answer.”

The internet tells me that glass thermometers used in fish tanks are filled with alcohol (which makes sense since alcohol doesn’t condensate, otherwise there would be cloudy bubbles all over it all the time), which is toxic to fish. In addition to a liquid toxin in the liquid tank there are also little gray pebbles to weight the thermometer down. Some websites I found say that they are toxic while others say they are harmless. In my case the little gray pebbles weren’t spilled, so it wasn’t really an issue anyway. I didn’t even know we had a thermometer in the fish tank, I hadn’t seen it in the month+ that we have had it, but what are you gonna do.

Unfortunately, there are as many opinions on the best course of action now as there are forums. Some say that you should scrub everything with bleach and replace it, which I am most certainly not going to do, since the bleach residue is at least as harmful as the alcohol. Some say that you should only change half of the water, wait a few days, then do it again. Some sites that you should remove only a small portion of the water, and put a carbon filter cartridge in the tank to absorb the remaining toxins. There is certainly no lack of answers. Alas, I have no way of knowing whether Fishmanfl32 or bettababe have a better working knowledge of marine biology, so I am gonna just have to wing it.

I settled on replacing all of the water, and cleaning the gravel only using the gravity vacuum sucker thingy jobber. One of the forum posts that I read said that you don’t want to sterilize all of the ornaments and gravel because they contain bacteria necessary to break down the fecal matter that the fish produce. I am all about something other than me breaking down fecal matter, so I am going to give that approach a try. The fish seemed to spring right back to life once they were out of the contaminated water (well that was a poor choice of words, the ones that were already dead are still very much dead, but the ones that were nearly dead are now bright and chipper). So I hope that changing the water and cleaning the gravel as best I could with the gravity vacuum sucker thing jobber does the trick.

I will probably post with the results in a few days, since I wasn’t able to find any listings of people who had experienced this problem. Well, that is, I wasn’t able to find anyone posting results after attempting the suggestions. If this one works, I will let you know. That way the next time someone googles for dead fish aquarium broken thermometer they will at least know the results of trying it my way.

If you ever happen to google for gravity vacuum sucker thingy jobber, you will probably end up here as well, but that is totally unrelated.

Update:

Two days have now passed since the onset of the problem, and I can say with certainty that changing the water and vacuuming the gravel was sufficient to get rid of the toxins. I went to a pet store yesterday to see exactly what was in one of those thermometers, and found that the little pebbles in it are in fact lead. Why on earth do they manufacture something for an aquarium that has alcohol and lead, both toxic to fish, in it? And why on earth would anyone actually put one into their aquarium? To those questions, I have no answers.

A note on changing the water: Our aquarium is set up so that the entire length of the back of it is actually a water filter. The pump pulls water from the top on the left and cycles it through a series of spiky balls and filters before eventually being pumped back into the tank on the right. To remove as much of the contaminated water (and miscellaneous junk) as possible, when I began to fill the tank, I did so with the filter turned off and started filling in the filter system itself. The way our tank is set up, this forced the water to run backwards through the filter system to eventually overflow into the main tank, where I vacuumed all the crud out of it. I left the water running at just about the same speed as the vacuum was able to pull it out, and continued that process for over an hour. By the time it was done, the water that was flowing out of the filter system was all completely clear. I am not sure if that was entirely necessary just to remedy the contaminated water problem, but it did leave the water a lot purer than it otherwise would have been. As anyone who owns an aquarium knows, clear water is sure a lot prettier/healthier than scuzzy water.

The fish that survived the initial shock are now back to moving and playing like they have not done since we first got the tank. This leads me to believe that there may have been other mitigating factors which caused the sudden deaths. While I am sure the alcohol was the actual killer, I am thinking there was probably a problem with the pH or something else that was pre-existing. That is something that I have never worried about with a smaller tank, since the fish only cost a buck and when they die, they die -not that I would intentionally let them die. I suppose I probably should buy a test kit to monitor the pH and nitrates and the such so that I can avoid a repeat of this.

In other fish news, the baby fish are doing quite well in the 20 gallon tank with the little tetras. As I said previously, they are roughly the same size as the tetras, but they are quite obviously babies. You can still see through parts of them, and I don’t think they have even grown full sets of scales yet, but they are buzzing along just like the rest of the fish in the smaller tank. And boy is it ever cute to watch them eat -which is something I had not thought of until we had the problem with the large tank. The little guys are perfectly capable of eating the tropical flakes that go into the small tank, but I am not quite so sure if they would have been able to eat the large pebbles that we feed the adult Cichlids.

So, while we did lose half of the adult Cichlids in the thermometer break incident, we actually came out with more fish because of it. I have no doubt that many of the baby fish would have died in the large tank, either from lack of food (mouths too small to eat the pebbles) or the larger fish eating them. Now that they are in the smaller tank, we plan to leave them there until they are large enough to fend for themselves in the big tank. Since 11 of them made it through the toxic water (one even survived fifteen seconds or so on the kitchen stove -that was how we found out that the net has a hole in it), I don’t see why all 11 of them can’t grow to full size. So, strictly by the numbers, we started with 13 of them, we should end up with 17 of them.

A jog down memory mile

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It always seems that it is something random and insignificant that forces to mind memories long suppressed. Even though many of these memories are such a part of your being that you would not be who you are today without them, they have faded into the dark recesses of your mind to slumber, until some chance occurrence forces them back to mind. Whether the memory stirs a sense of embarrassment or achievement, success or failure, it is there and forever will be, waiting only for that one seemingly insignificant event to once again break it from its cell.

So as I saw the jogger beside the road today, I didn’t think anything of it. There are frequently joggers along the road, I probably see them almost daily; so often that I don’t even really notice them when they are there. Why it was that today, out of all of the times I have seen a jogger, is the day when a memory from the fifth grade instantly pops into my mind, with crystal clarity no less, will probably always be a mystery to me. But I haven’t thought of this event in probably ten years or so, it seems likely that it may be as long before I think of it again, so I may as well write it down while it is fresh in my mind.

I was in the fifth grade, as previously stated, and going to a small school in southern Arizona. This was the school (I know I have mentioned it before) that only had 42 students enrolled, and that covered kindergarten through the eighth grade. We were all forced to participate in band as well as sports, because there just weren’t enough kids to make a team/bank without everyone (as you would expect, levels of participation varied greatly. Some of the kids were gung ho about everything, some of the kids really liked some of the sports and tried really hard while ignoring the ones they didn’t like, and some just showed up because they had to. I was of the second or third variety there, though I did like to at least try everything once). Of the sports that we participated in, I enjoyed baseball the most. As a bonus that was the game that I was best at, in practice anyway. When we actually played against a team from another school, noting that we would be playing against a team that was an extracurricular activity for those involved, I found that I wasn’t nearly as good as I had previously thought: I could foul tip damn near every pitch, but I could never seem to get a hit. Add to that my horrible fear of catching a pop fly (based solely on taking one in the mouth a year earlier) and I was pretty worthless on the field. But I played anyway, not as if I had a lot of choice.

When Track and Field season rolled around (is there actually a “season” for that?), we were somewhat limited in the events we could participate in. Some of the kids in our school were actually good at some of the events, though I forget which students and which events -although I would bet that the students were the ones from the seventh and eighth grade, so we sort of got to pick from the events that they weren’t participating in. Once we had a participant for each event we could choose a couple other events to enter, making sure that the times for our events wouldn’t overlap. I remember signing up for two events, one of which was the long jump (I thought that I was pretty good at that, and I probably would have been in a field of my peers, but in a field that included people three grades -and several feet- beyond me, I was pretty fucked), the other event that I entered was the mile. The mile is one that I entered because no one else did, and we really wanted to have at least one participant in each event.

Being that I was in the fifth grade, I was no stranger to running. I ran every day at recess, well it wasn’t really recess since we were on a middle school type schedule, more of just a long lunch break. I participated in all of our team sports: soccer, football, baseball, etc. There was a lot of running in each of those as well. I figured it wouldn’t be much different to participate in the mile, hell, I must have been running more than a mile on any given day anyway. So my training for the mile was just that, I did no training whatsoever, just continued with my daily playing around.

The first time that I ever saw an actual track was on the day of the track meet. I had no idea just how big that sucker was. Remember, I was only ten years old at the time, and the track was at a high school, that thing was fucking huge! I took my place alongside about a half a dozen other people, all of which were at least a good foot taller than me, and waited for someone to tell us to go. Then I ran like hell.

I was able to break out in front of the pack immediately. I was thinking that there was no way these older kids could compete with me, hell, I was ten, I ran every day just for fun. By the time I got to the back stretch my legs were starting to get a little bit tired, so I slowed down a little bit. The rest of the group was still behind me, but closing fast. I managed to stay just a bit in the lead as we went into the corner, but someone pulled ahead of me just before the final straight stretch. I’ll be damned if I am gonna let someone else win when I have been in the lead the whole race. I turned on the afterburners and blew right by him. I got to the finish line and let my sprint turn into a jog, then eventually a walk. Then everyone ran past me back into the first corner. What the hell? Victory lap? But I was the one that won.

I started to jog again, but slowly. I still wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but the judges were still trackside, and everyone else was still running… I didn’t have any energy left in me, and it was all that I could do to just continue putting one foot in front of the other. I was nearing the back corner when I saw the rest of the field pass the finish line for the seconds time, and keep on running. I made it to the finish line for the second time just about the same time as everyone else had reached it for their third. I had been lapped by everyone else in the event by the time I was on the back straight for the third time. Everyone else stopped when they reached the finish line, so it seemed that it was actually a four lap race, who knew?

I had lost, and lost in a big way, but it wasn’t in me to give up. I pushed on, jogging when I could, but cramping so badly that I had to walk the majority of it. Just about everyone had left the track to go watch some other event (the pole vault, I think), leaving me there all but alone, with just one guy still trackside. When I finally hit the final straight stretch, I started to jog again. I wanted it to at least look like I was giving it an effort, even though only two people in the world would ever know it. When I finally finished the race, the guy who was still trackside came up to me and said “good race, man.” And, as cliche as it is, he actually patted me on the back.

I learned a lot that day.

I learned that it is probably a good idea to do at least a little bit of research before you sign yourself up for something. I learned that distance running is probably not one of my strengths. I learned that sometimes it really isn’t about winning, sometimes it is just about finishing; it is better to finish last than to just give up. I learned a very valuable lesson about life, one that I certainly didn’t realize at the time, but that is glaringly obvious now: The guy who watched me finish was holding a yellow ribbon, so he finished third, but he stayed around to watch me finish. Finishing first might mean that you won the competition, but there is a lot more to competition than just being the one who finishes first. It was the guy holding the yellow ribbon that was truly a winner that day.

I suck, evidently

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I have been actively looking for a job for well over a month now, as opposed to the first month where I was significantly more concerned with completing home repairs than actually finding a new job, and I am starting to get just a wee bit depressed.

When I was a teenager, I never had to worry about finding a new job because, well, I got every job that I interviewed for. I thought that my perfect record for interviews would translate over to my current job search, but I was sadly mistaken. I guess when you are a teenager looking for a job, where the employees are actually looking for a teenager, it is really a lot different; If you show up in clean clothes and freshly showered, you have already eliminated a good 70% of the field. That doesn’t seem to hold true as an adult.

I have now been to four job interviews (well, 5, but one of them I am not going to count since the only hang up was my inability to relocate), and haven’t landed a job yet. These are jobs that are in the industry where I have worked for the last twelve years and have a great deal of knowledge and experience. I find it difficult to believe that in every instance they found someone more experienced, or otherwise better qualified, than me. That can lead to only one conclusion: There is something wrong with me.

Since I am not yet willing to believe that there is actually something wrong with me, or with my experience, I have to think that it is something about the actual interviews. I am not sure what I am doing wrong, but there must be something. I dress business casual, even wear a tie. I am polite and attentive, and answer all their questions honestly. When they ask if I have any questions for them, I always ask several, none of which are ever about compensation or benefits; just more specific information on store procedures and the such. I just can’t figure out where I am going wrong.

The majority of the jobs that I am applying for have been from websites like Monster, so I know that they are probably smothered in applications, but they have managed to pick my resume out of the pile for one reason or another. Do I just appear better on paper than I do in person? I really would like to know what I am doing wrong.

Now that it is nearing the middle of June, I really am starting to get a bit depressed about the whole situation. This is the slowest time of the year for retail outlets down here, and the number of new positions listed each week is growing smaller and smaller. That likely means that each position is getting even more applicants, thus decreasing my chance of being the one that stands out. But what am I doing wrong? Why don’t I stand out?

The more that I think about it, the more helpless I feel. Each interview that I have been to without results has taken a chunk out of my shield of confidence. It is getting ever more difficult for me to keep my spirits up and be confident when I go to these interviews, and nothing is worse than going to an interview if you are already convinced that someone else is going to get the job. But I really am starting to feel helpless, and I don’t know what, if anything, I can do about it. I better stop now, before I depress myself even more. Here’s to hoping that the next one will go better.

Holy shit!

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During a bout with boredom sometime last week, I went ahead and tuned one of my guitars and plucked away at it a bit. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the only things that I could remember how to play, and actually still play with only minor mistakes, were all from Metallica’s Black Album. Of course I did spend thousands and thousands of hours playing that when I was a teen.

I dug out my old Yngwie Malmsteen tabliture book for the Rising Force album and and started trying to play Black Star again, it has been an awful long time since I attempted that song. Anyway, while I had a pretty good idea what the song sounded like, I couldn’t remember it exactly. So I went to you tube to see if I could find a video of it. Well, I found a video of it, but I also found this video of a kid guy playing the second song from that album.

Watch it, right now. Seriously, I’ll wait.


Then I put the guitar back in the spare bedroom. Let us never speak of this again.

Untitled

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So, you know that rambling post that I popped up here yesterday? It turns out that it was a good thing, I think.

During the course of the job interview today the guy asked me, quite specifically, what the most important qualities were for a supervisor. That was still fresh in my head from what I wrote yesterday, so unless I am completely wrong about the qualities, they should be impressed with how quickly I named the qualities along with very specific reasons why.

This is speculation, of course, so I will not go into any more detail. I will only say that this was the most comfortable I have ever been at a job interview. That I was familiar with all aspects of the business, and was able to answer questions specific to the industry. And I also don’t look half bad in a dress shirt and tie. I may not look like a million bucks, but a buck-o-five for sure.

P.s. Because the place is a financial institution I was required to take a math test as well. I missed one of the questions, and it really irks me. The question was “If an item costs $69.95 and you give the customer a 20% discount, what will the customer’s total be?” I answered it $55.95, the answer should have been $55.96. That is what I get for subtracting 10% twice instead of subtracting 20% once. At any rate, they didn’t seem all that concerned since this was the only one that I missed. I sure hope that this minor rounding error doesn’t weigh too heavily in their decision.

Slave to the grind

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Well, it has been three weeks now that I have been out of work, I guess that means it is about time I start really looking for a job. Sure I have turned in some applications and the such already, but I wasn’t necessarily trying to get a job at any of those places. I mean really, I applied for several positions with a starting salary of over 40,000. I really doubt I was qualified for them, but what if they actually hired me? That’s right, I would be sitting in butter (obscure t.v. show reference).

Starting yesterday I actually began applying for jobs that I really am qualified for. As a direct result of that I was called for two interviews within twenty-four hours of applying. I am going to go to one interview tomorrow at 10a.m. and the other one is scheduled for Thursday at noon. I don’t really plan to go to the one on Thursday because 1)I fully expect to get the first job offered to me on the spot and 2) the other job is in Tucson.

The thing about looking for a job right now is that it has been so long since I have had to do it. I haven’t been to an actual job interview in more than a decade (not counting the one I went to last week at 84 lumber), and I haven’t actually made a resume since I was a sophomore in High School. I hope that what I lack in recent experience can be overcome by my sheer confidence.

Working where I did for so long gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of people in entry-level positions at their companies. One of the guys that I remember most is Larry. Larry was a route salesman for Budweiser[1] some twelve years ago. Heck of a nice guy, he went so far as to give me a gift on my twenty-first birthday -the only one other than my mother to do so- . Larry went on to become the supervisor of his division. Why did he get promoted instead of someone else? Two reasons: 1) He had an extremely good attitude. When it comes right down to it your attitude is the most valuable asset that you have. 2) He never hesitated to make a decision.

There really are two different types of people in the world. There are those who will make a decision based on the available facts, then there are those who will tell someone else the available facts and ask them to make the decision. I used to believe that everyone had the ability to make a decision, it took me years of interacting with people to find out that some people just can not do it. The only reason I can come up with to explain this is that they are afraid of making the wrong decision; If they do not make the decision they will get none of the blame. While this may seem like a great idea on the surface, it is certainly not the way to go to advance your career.

If you look at an industry like Fast Food, for instance, you will notice that every store has one general manager, several assistant managers, many shift managers, and a whole heck of a lot of peons. If you have ever had poor service at such an establishment, you will know that out of all those managers the only one that will make a decision is the General manager. The shift managers and assistant managers will back away from it like the plague. Do they really think that they are going to get reprimanded for giving you another cheeseburger since the first one had a rat head in it? Probably not, but they (evidently) don’t want to risk it anyway. Thus they are actually nothing more than peons themselves. Given a shiny new title after scrubbing the same deep fryer for five years or so. (That is not speculation either. I can base that on my experience working in a chain Fast Food place in my teens. I may not have recognized it at the time, but it certainly is true).

When I first started working I was the same way. I would really hesitate to make a decision for fear that I would make the wrong decision. It wasn’t until my last job that I started to change that, and the reason why was simple. After I had been working there for about six months the owners went on vacation for a week. This was long before the cell phone gained popularity, hell few people even had pagers. I was left to run the store on my own. And I did a HORRIBLE job of it. I tried my best to keep from having to make a decision. I put aside papers for when the owners returned so that they could be the ones to make a decision. As a result of that we ended up running out of a lot of DSD items because I wouldn’t let them send anything without the owner’s consent.

Twelve years later that had all changed.

I am now confident that I will make the right decision, and so I make the decision. It is sometimes the wrong decision, but it is a decision that has to be made. Someone once said, though I can’t remember who, “often wrong but never unsure”, and that is sort of how I am now. It is extremely important to be able to make a decision without hesitation. It is important because the people who work under you need to know that you are confident. Whether your decision turns out to be right or wrong is far beside the point. A leader simply must be able to look at the available facts and make a confident decision[2].

Of course none of this matters one bit when it comes to my interviewing for a job. I will have to work somewhere for a while before my supervisors see that I do have the ability to make decisions. What they will see in the interview is confidence. Not confidence in a smug way, but the confidence that can only come from years and years of real life experience. I may not have a BA in accounting or Business management, but I do have confidence. Confidence is something that you really can’t learn by reading scenarios out of a textbook. You can read about situations with unruly customers all you want, speculate about what you would do on Easter Sunday when the freezer goes out and thousands of dollars or merchandise is at stake. Until you are actually in that position you simply can not know that you would have the confidence to make the right decision.

Do I really expect to walk out of that interview with the job tomorrow? Hell yes I do. And if I don’t get the job I will go to my next interview with exactly the same attitude.

[1] Technically it is Golden Eagle Distributors, which is a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch. Thing is I doubt that I know how to spell Anheuser-Busch, and Budweiser is more recognizable anyway.

[2] As I am writing this I can’t help but think of George W. Bush. He too is not afraid to make a decision, and he too is confident about his decisions. BUT he is not looking at the available facts before doing so. Has to be a package deal. Being confident about a decision that does not consider the facts at hand is more foolish than not making the decision at all.

Untitled

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Well, it has been a while since I have thrown anything up over here, so here goes.

Being unemployed is a lot of work.

I have been taking the time to do some stuff around the house that I should have done years ago. Not little things like taking out the trash either, I am talking major construction projects. In the past week or so I have re-tiled the floor in the Arizona room, replaced the plumbing in the entire house, installed a garbage disposal, installed a new water purifier, added electrical outlets in the kitchen, replaced rotting lumber under the kitchen sink, replaced the kitchen sink, installed a new vanity, faucet and medicine cabinet in the bathroom, replaced the light fixture there as well, re-tiled the floor in half of the bathroom as well as painting it, removed the tile and old lumber from around the bathtub, put new lumber around the back of the tub, and probably a bunch of other stuff that doesn’t come to mind immediately. Oh yeah, I also had to re-route some of the plumbing so that I could put the washer and dryer together in the corner of the back room. Oh, and I serviced our evaporative cooler.

Anyway, I have found a lot of stuff to keep me busy while I anxiously wait for calls about the various jobs I have applied for. Truth be told, I didn’t even start applying for them until Monday, since I was going to take a week off anyway (not likely to get a vacation this year). I did do a resume thing on Monster.com though, so I actually had an interview on Monday for a job that I never applied for.

The interview was at a place called 84 Lumber, which I had never heard of, but it is a 3.6 billion dollar a year business. The job was not what I was looking for; since I was not willing to relocate I would not have been able to get the management position. There is no way I am going to take another grunt job. I am far too experienced and getting a bit too old for that.

Well, that’s it for now. Check back another day for more riveting mundane crap.

Burning bridges

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Well, I always knew that it was going to happen eventually. Today became that day. After yet another bitching session at work, I grabbed my cigarettes and walked out the door. I doubt I will ever walk through those doors again.

That answers the question though. It turns out that I can be treated like a doormat for about twelve years before I have had enough. Or, to be more precise, I can be treated like a doormat for about three months without using alcohol as an escape. Now I know.

Time to start looking for another job.