Job Hunting: Some Stats

These are some personal statistics, specific to my job hunting, followed up with some details. In roughly 85 days of being unemployed, I've applied to 94 different job listings. I've had about a dozen job interviews, some promising and some not so much.

Barring some sort of disaster, I'm starting at a new company on Monday. I'm not going to post the name, as I don't want to jinx it at all. In case you haven't heard there was one company that I interviewed with back in October that I got a semi-official job offer from via email. This was on Halloween at about 4pm if I recall correctly. We all celebrated, ate dinner, took the kids trick-or-treating and everything was great. Then a few hours later I got back to my email and noticed that at about 6:30pm, there was another email rescinding the previous job offer. At first it was "temporarily" then it was permanently. I don't really know what happened there, but that's life. So you can understand if I don't celebrate quite yet for this job until it becomes a little more real.

Something else I forgot to mention was that I had a temporary contract job for about a week working IT for a company hired by (another company hired by) an insurance company here in St. Louis to do computer station moves. They were moving several dozen employees from one floor to another and our job was to make sure the computer systems (PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.) were properly packed and secured. Then on the other end of the move, we'd unpack them at the new desks. The individual user's personal stuff would be packed in boxes that someone else was moving. The actual lifting of the packed hardware was also handled by a different company and stuff so it had to be relatively well orchestrated. My job was simple; go to desk F1-104 through F1-120 and pack up the stuff. Then go to F2-060 and start unpacking the computers on that row as they arrive. Attach monitors to the adjustable arm on the new desk. Once the users had their computer on, install the drivers for the nearest network printer. It was actually fun and simple enough for me to do. It was just nice to work again even if temporarily and I got some good feedback too.

Additionally, I've taken on a voluntary web design project for St. Francis Health Services. Still a little early to post anything in more detail about that, but I'm doing it for all the right reasons both selfless and selfish (e.g. padding my portfolio).

Other than this, job hunting is not fun, never fun and I'm looking forward to being done with it for awhile.