Unemployed No Longer

I fooled you. I still don't have a job. However...

There has been new light shed upon the job search this week. Whether it is good or not, I do not know. Nonetheless, I have succumbed to the big, green coffee giant and have applied at one of their many Longmont locations. I have an interview with them on Friday. Although this is the first interview I have had all summer long it is hard to get terribly excited about it, but after months of looking around and a lot of advice I have discovered that experience is all that a company is looking for. Unfortunately they don’t need someone to analyze 18th century English literature, or the early American novel. The only place I can get hired to do that is at a university and I need two more degrees to make that a realistic option.

I walked into an employment agency today. Based on the appearance of the place, I almost turned around and walked right out but I was pleasantly surprised by the service I received. The place looked like a gutted saloon. Its hard wood floor covered with a thin layer of light brown carpet. The furniture was sparse and all of it an ugly wood finish like the baseboard and trim work of houses built in the 80s. The walls are covered in cheesy employment posters and a free calendar with loads of ads surrounding the field of dates with scribbled in appointments.

After some preliminary paperwork I was led to a back room filled with shabby cubicle walls. The agency wanted to see what I could do. Well, they must have a lot of brilliant people in there because first I had to alphabetize, sort numbers into the right range, spell some words, and perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. This all was depressing at times, but I took it casually for the most part and considered all these tests as little personal challenges. There was no difficulty in completing any of them, but there was fun to be had when I tried to see how quickly I could finish.

The real fun began when I had to take a typing, data entry, and Word proficiency test on a ten year old computer. This beast was still running Windows 97. You had to punch those keys for the computer to input the correct letter. I was able to plunk out 57 words per minute and almost 8000 keystrokes in an hour for data entry. I forgot to look at the proficiency printout and that was my one disappointment after leaving today.

Lastly, I watched a safety video in case I am hired for manual labor, although I told them I wasn’t interested in that work. The video addressed personal protection equipment, or PPE, electricity safety, cleaning of the worksite, and emergency procedures. There were a whole variety of people in the video. I was captivated by their feeble attempts at acting. Where do they get these people? Were they aspiring actors from the East coast who were making their way to Hollywood, but only had enough money to get as far as Oklahoma? Now they make a living off of safety videos and television infomercials by moving dumbly and expressionlessly throughout “hazardous” situations and “real” worksites.