I'm having a very hard time staying focused these days ... being THIS CLOSE to finally getting a job again has been, not unexpectedly, drawing a lot of my attention. My production for The Job Stalker has faltered a bit, although I have been at least keeping up (as you can tell from the above) with the posts. Part of the problem is that I got "stuck" in a couple of "eh" books, and I've not had anything to put up on Mondays, and I've had some "industry types" flake on me for Wednesday features, so I've been pretty much having to "phone it in" to a certain extent. Last week I ended up doing a "guest post" (re-cycling a blog entry from Seth Godin, who was very approachable and gracious about it) for Monday 10/25/2010, but then had nothing for mid-week, but figured the "cat book" (previously reviewed here ... you read that, right?) was "close enough" so went with that on Wednesday 10/27/2010, and then went with the usual "link dump" on Friday 10/29/2010 even though it was mighty thin, as I'd had a couple of days where my Twitter reading (and hence my finding the links) was almost non-existent last week. As always, I'd appreciate the clicks ... I get so depressed when my bit.ly links show only 2-3 usages even though I "broadcast" them on Twitter 4 times each (and re-tweet from my own account).
As I noted a couple of days ago, I got called in for a "second round" interview with the CEO and the VP of HR for this Marketing Communications job on Thursday. It was a bit more intimidating than my meeting with the Marketing team last week, but I think I did OK. We never fell "into sync" like the previous interview, but I think I did very well on the predictable "trap" questions.
I am trying to dis-engage my emotions from this as much as possible, because I'm going to be MASSIVELY crushed if I don't get this job ... and I got very freaked out when I heard that there were three finalists they were considering. I can't imagine anybody else bringing a more targeted "skill set" to this position, but there's a lot of stuff in play here that could lead them to considering somebody else for "cultural" reasons. They had two interviews on Thursday, I guess, and one more coming in next week. I understand that the decision should be made by next Friday, so the time's at least defined, but I'm a wreck waiting.
Needless to say, anybody who's been reading this space regularly knows how horrible these 17 months of being unemployed has been for me ... and this gig is so close to an "ideal" situation (I'm estimating it's about 85% of my job "wish list") that it's torture to have it "just out of reach". Needless to say, if I get the call telling me "I'm their guy", I'm going to be ECSTATIC ... and finally start feeling like I'm not some massive failure to my family.
Oh, I entered another Haiku contest ... this one was for a "Halloween Haiku" ... haven't heard if I won or not (I do pretty well on Haiku contests), but here's what I sent in:
Just lovely, eh? The other contestants (this was on Twitter) all were doing "cartoony" things in 5-7-5, this at least stays to the seasonal element.What shade rises now
from spirit worlds to wander
in Autumn's fading?
©2010 by Brendan Tripp
Anyway, there it is. I have about 80 "possibles" to plow through this weekend to crank out resumes (I figure if I'm throwing stuff in the hopper, it will cushion the blow if I don't get this job), but I sure hope I do get hired and can quit this damn job search!