That's classified!

So, now it begins... again. Darling Wife started work today. Well, she had some meetings and stuff. Her students don't arrive until Wednesday of next week, but for all practical purposes, her job has begun in earnest. That means I have to put more effort into finding a job myself. I have been on the job market countless times in my life, most recently last summer, and I have to say that I am really tired of it.

First, I have to scour the classifieds, ask around, and check websites to find something that appeals to me. This is not an easy task. I will be starting school full-time again in the spring, so I'm not really interested in a full-time job that I will have to quit in four months. If I were, I could get something fairly easily. The library at my former university is hiring for several positions that I am more than qualified for. But I'd prefer something part-time that I can keep when I start classes again. Unfortunately, most part-time jobs involve retail sales or food service, and they want you to work nights and weekends. Not gonna do it! Period. So, I don't have a lot of options.

Then once I've found something that seems promising, I send out resumes. This involves a series of issues with formatting if I submit them electronically and a significant delay if I have to snail-mail them. Then, the problem is that businesses seldom care if you are capable of doing every item in a job's description. If your resume does not indicate that you have held a position exactly like the one they want to fill, then they won't even consider you for the job. They assume you don't have the right skills. And let's face it, years of library work and teaching seems rather limited on a resume, even if they required the same tasks as 90% of desk jobs. So, I get all excited about a job, and then I wait and wait and seldom here anything from the dozens of resumes I sent out.

And then once I do get a call back for an interview, I have to go into the used-car-salesmen routine. I have to guess what I should wear, what I should say, how I should say it, what to agree to, what to disavow, and on and on. There really is no way to know for certain what a potential employer is looking for, so it's all more or less a shot in the dark. I have to try to figure out on the fly how to convince the interviewer that I am what he or she is looking for. And there is no real way for an interviewer to get to know you during the course of a 30-minute interview. Sometimes the smallest thing can give him or her the wrong impression. So, once again, I wait and wait and hear nothing. Few employers have the courtesy these days to call and let you know you did not get the position.

And finally, when I do get a job, there is the grueling training period in which I feel awkward and incompetent for weeks until I eventually start catching on to the way things work at the place. And the job is seldom exactly what I wanted anyway. It's just what I had to take because it's not TOO bad, and I didn't get the positions I liked.

I will certainly be glad when I can begin a career and stop job hunting every few years.