Or, "More Stuff You Really Don't Care About But Which I'm Going To Blither About Anyway".
OK, so, obviously, you're getting a "twofer" here, and I'm going to just let them stack up over there ===> because my previous experiments on having them line up in a nice column was highly variable depending on screen width, and the odds of it looking like crap were pretty high, so you're getting them in row (which means on older monitors, this copy here will look like crap).
Why two of these The Job Stalker posts? Well, for one, it gets me caught up a bit without having to chunk out the time from my schedule to write two posts ... so you have that going for you (ultimately, you're having to suffer through less blithering) ... but it's mainly to kvetch about the inexplicable traffic patterns I get from that enterprise.
You see, one of those got maybe the biggest number of hits of anything that I've put up, while the other one had nothing, NADA, zero, until I clicked through on it today! WTF? Now, admittedly, the nature of the posts was rather different, but what I did to get the word out on them was identical.
The first of these was another Wednesday feature on a Job Pro ... and the job pro in question was very excited to be being featured, and cross-marketed it to both her own Twitter followers and the folks following her company Twitter account (this is what I expected to be the reaction of folks I approached for that feature, but it's, unfortunately, not been the case before this). As such (according to the bit.ly figures) we had over twice the usual number of direct clicks and like 4x the number of total clicks ... still not a huge number (to tell you the truth, I'm sufficiently embarrassed by the traffic figures for The Job Stalker that I really don't even want to "go there" numerically), but a huge spike over the norm.
The second of these was my regular Friday link dump. Now, this has been noted on other job blogs as "the best part" of The Job Stalker, citing the ever-expanding big list of links (if you've not read any of these, I do a dozen or so "best things I've seen on the web this week" links every Friday, and continually add those into an alphabetical listing in a .doc file) as a "shouldn't miss" resource. However, until I clicked on one of the links for that myself today, there had been NO click-throughs on that since it went up on Friday.
Now, in both cases they got my "four Tweets over two days" promotion, where I write four differently-worded Tweets about each The Job Stalker post to go out at variable times over two days to try to catch as many eyes (of those less obsessive about their Twitter reading than I've tended to be) as possible, fist in @TheJobStalker and then subsequently re-Tweeted in @BTRIPP. It just seems odd to me that one could have do so well, and the other been totally ignored!
Anyway, if I suddenly see a bunch of clicks showing up for Friday's post I'll know it was you all over here on LiveJournal actually reading this, which will, of course, make me feel all warm and fuzzy (which sounds like a state in bad need of rubbing alcohol).
Oh, by the way ... the Census thing does look like it's grinding to a close ... I got sent home after 3 hours last night (along with most of the other "clerks") because there really wasn't much of anything to do ... I actually did have stuff to do, but it required an on-line program that was not going to be accessible until 6am or so, and rather have me sit there waiting (sleeping?) they cut me loose and saved the rest of my stuff as an unpleasant surprise for the 1st shift (my main function has been to have stuff ready to roll so that the day-time "quality assurance" folks can hit the ground running with phone calls ... sending me home means they're having to do a bunch of stuff that's going to require jockeying for limited "seats" on the program). I'm, frankly, surprised that I haven't had a phone call today telling me that they're cutting the 3rd shift now that the main Field Ops have been shut down (and we have far less "stuff' to process at the office). I'm not even sure if I'm gong to still be working there by the end of the week as they may decide that they don't need a QA on the 3rd shift and don't need the extra body on 1st or 2nd.
Frankly, I'd prefer it if they didn't bring me in for just a couple of hours over-night ... in the morning it would take as little as 20 minutes for me to get home (or, heck, when I was getting off 2nd shift at Midnight it was rarely more than a half hour), but at 3:30am it took nearly an hour between the limited bus schedules and various other "we can screw things up downtown because nobody's going to be here" projects going on which made other things inaccessible ... I wouldn't mind a "modified 1st shift" coming in at 4:30am, and getting all my stuff done, then leaving at 1pm, but I doubt The Government would be that flexible!