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A sign of just how eventful my week’s been; this is pretty much the only thing of any real significance, since I’m still waiting on things like, you know, job applications to come to fruition (I’ll post more on that tomorrow, or later on tonight). I did my usual thing of late, that being staying up until whenever o’clock in the morning instead of going to bed, well, when most normal people would consider going to bed. When I did decide to finally crash, I did so for maybe an hour or so. Got up, futzed around for a bit, then fended off the mother’s insistent demands that I absolutely must go to Pembroke next weekend. And then sat down to do my usual routine of check email, laugh at email, reply to the occasional one, then cruise the flist. Except no internet. Checked on my various TV show downloads, no connection. Went into the other room and futzed with the router for a bit, notta. Powercycled both modem *and* router, she still no worky. Well fuck, my first official TekSavvy outage. And what craptastic timing.
So I call them up, somewhat reluctantly (I’m still used to Bell’s tech support. Sue me.), and turns out it’s a known issue with the modem that when powercycled, it loses the configuration settings and needs to be set up again. Well fuck, again. At least these guys have a clue what they’re talking about, anyway. About 20 minutes later on my slower than the second coming laptop, we had us a newly reconfigured modem. Another 30 seconds and I was back online. For… 45 minutes. Further investigation revealed it had decided, yet again, to forget my settings. And this time it wasn’t because I powercycled. Well fuck, and fuck again. I didn’t wanna do anything productive tonight anyway.
So while on the phone with someone because, well, I likes me some damn good conversation and she usually provides an awesome one, we get to talking about music. It gets to a song she hasn’t heard that I figure she’ll find absofuckinglutely hillarious, and then I’m reminded. Duh, moron, you can has no internets. Which meant another 20 minutes because, to demonstrate my utter lack of preparedness for chrisis situations, I’d turned off my slow as hell laptop in favour of the much faster beast in the living room, which I’m using now, and which is conveniently nowhere in ethernet cable range of the craptastical modem. Clearly I was on some serious crack when I planned the layout of this network. Needless to say it managed to be fixed a second time, and it *looks* like the temporary bout of amnesia we were fighting has apparently subsided. Or at least has gone on a hopefully permanent vacation. I did learn something from all this, though. Speedtouch modems, or at least ones of this particular model, are absolute crap, and should be set on fire. *After* a suitable replacement is located.
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when I left work, they forgot to kill my MSDN subscription. I just downloaded an image of Windows XP Home, I’m downloading an image of Windows Vista, and then of Office 2003 Pro. Anyone want anything? 😀
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`So I ended up going in for the interview this morning as threatened, and it actually went remarkably well for an interview I had very little time to prepare for. They didn’t play 20 questions with me like a lot of them will do, which is nice. Mostly the HR dood and I went over my resume, he gave some general info about the job like sallary and whatnot, and then I got to play 20 questions with him. Which was awesome in the extreme. Then he brought in the department manager I’d be working for if I’m hired, and there was more specific info gave about the job, like call volumes (they do email, too! Yay!), and generally how they run their break/lunch schedules. Which, I do have to say, I love their approach. That is to say they don’t *schedule* breaks/lunches, but rather trust their staff, all of like 30 people in that particular department, to take them when they feel they need to. Which means no going like 5 hours between a craptasticly scheduled first break and my lunch. Which, okay, I liked that at Dell my lunch was rather conveniently scheduled around the same time as a certain person’s break, but damn. That’s a god aweful long time to wait before stuffing your face when you leave home at 6:30.
It sounds like they make things about 3 times easier than I’m used to, which I love. I mean really, really love. I got to play 20 questions with him, too, which really helped to get a handle on exactly what I’d be doing if they decided to hire me. One thing that did sort of catch my attention though was he basicly asked me why I’d trade one job doing the exact same thing for another. Which kinda makes sense, in most cases. But what he probably doesn’t have a clue about is if Dell hadn’t decided to close up shop, I’d probably still be working there. Now granted I’d be working there making $36k/year, which is a far cry from the $28k they’d be starting me at with this job, but I’d still be there. And since I’m not really dealing with a whole lot of joe users who have absolutely no clue what the hell the difference is between a keyboard and a base guitar, it *should*, God willing anyway, be a whole lot less stressful in certain areas than my last job. Not that that was overly stressful to begin with; there was, after all, a reason I stuck with it for a year and a half. But, you know, not having to tell someone where the start button on their freakin’ machine is 20 times in a row and 20 different ways is probably gonna give me less of a headache. combine that with the fact the 3-hour call, at least so far as I can see, no longer exists and good lord why didn’t I apply to this company sooner?
I should know, according to both the HR person and the departmental manager, by late this week or early next whether or not I have a job. And they seem to be pretty flexible for start dates though they haven’t given me any solid indications yet either way. I did tell them I had prior commitments though, and from initial impressions they do seem to be willing to work with me on that. Which is always, always, always a good thing to keep in mind. In the meantime though, because I fail at the whole optimism thing, I’ll do my usual hope it works and fire out 6 more applications in 6 more directions, all at the same time. On the bright side, I’ve still got a few months so it’s not like I need, need, need a job like yesterday. But hey, if I’m getting offers, then I’m not about to be stupid with them.
The interview itself took all of maybe an hour and 10 minutes, after that mom and I went out for breakfast. I got my coffee fix, mom did her usual cleaning rampage of the apartment when we got back (she did one before we left, too, but I guess she was bored?), and we shot the shit for a few minutes. Then she headed up back to her place, and I crashed serious hardcore. I ended up getting up about 5:30 or so, and have been pretty much catching up on email and processing things since then. At some point I may actually find something with which to stuff my face, though that probably won’t be until much later; breakfast’s still sitting there like so many tons of bricks. But for the time being, I go ingest additional caffeine, find methods to prevent the sticky, and enjoy my evening. Damn it feels good to be a geeksta.
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