Someone who likes to ride a unicycle.  You know who you are.

On Friday the 5th, I had a second interview for a job in the Twin Cities.  I think it went well.  Not great, not horrible, but sort of middle of the road.

This was my first experience with interviewing via Skype.  I guess it makes sense to do this, so the hiring manager can see how old you are get a read on your body language.  Setting up for the Skype session was kind of a trip.  Besides dressing as if I was going for an in-person interview, I also:

• Cleared all clutter in the room behind my chair.


• Obsessively viewed myself from every camera angle in case I had to get up during the interview.


• Turned on every lamp in the room.


• Created a Rube-Goldberg-esque laptop stand, involving a desktop computer set on its side, eight very thick science fiction anthologies, and a USB keyboard and mouse.

The worst part of the interview was wanting to tell my story so badly that I forgot to breathe at times.  I just kept talking until I ran out of breath, which probably didn't sound so great on the other end.  I had so much to say and we had an hour, so I tried to pack as much into the time available as I could.  Adding to my nerves was the fact that I couldn't see my interviewer.  He said he was having technical problems, and asked if I wanted to go ahead with the interview, and of course I did.  But now, a few days later, I wonder if he had other people in the room with him and didn't want me to know that I was being watched by more than one person.  Paranoia will destroy ya, I guess.  Doesn't matter now, because the interview is over and either I did well enough to get the job or I didn't.

I have spent a good amount of time online looking at the Minneapolis - St Paul area and I admit I am kinda jazzed about moving up there.  It's not like moving to some B.F. Nowhere place.  They have Trader Joe's, they have Costco, they're civilized.  That's one of the things that has been more than a little annoying about this job search.  I get these recruiters saying, come on, why don't you relocate to Earwax, Montana or Unsolved Murder, Florida, to work for my client?  Because I don't want to live in a backwoods nowhereland, that's why.  I am deathly sick of living in Chicagoland, with the corruption and the murder and the guns and the gangs and hooray for heroin, but that doesn't mean I want to move to some new place where you have to drive an hour to get to a grocery store.

I wrote a thank you email this morning and sent it to the hiring manager and the HR guy who originally recruited me to apply for this job.  They said I should get a yes or no some time this week.

If it's a yes, I'll head up there (a 400 mile drive) and stay in a hotel for a week or two while I look for a house to rent.  I've already searched online and wow, there are so many great homes available for renting, and in nice areas too!  The trick will be finding a place with hardwood floors that will accept multiple cats.  Once that hurdle is over, I will need to pick up a temporary bed and some IKEA furniture so I have the basics.  I will come back here, pack things up and bring them north in my truck bit by bit, until my sister finds a job up north.  Thankfully there's a lot of healthcare companies up there, so her prospects should be good.  Once we're ready, I will hire my favorite movers to bring all our stuff and stuff - that's the part I'm not really looking forward to.  I'm sure I can get some kind of sedative or something for the cats, because they will not appreciate a six-hour car ride to their new home, I'm sure.

If I get a rejection letter this week, then of course all these plans are for nothing.  I'm still working with a couple of recruiters on other jobs, but I'm kind of holding them at bay, hoping the job in Minnesota will work out.  Fingers crossed, optimism in place.

Edit:  Cruising through the job boards, I see the position I have been interviewing for over the last few weeks was just posted -- SEVEN DAYS AGO.  I guess I made a big impression, huh?

From the Alliance At IBM Website:

02/25/13: The latest I'm hearing from the few people left at IBM that I'm in contact with is that India is starting to complain to their management lines that they have very few people to 'bail them out' of jams. I guess they relied on US teams as part of their support process and now that IBM has constantly fired them and others (like myself) have left on their own, India has fewer and fewer people left to bail them out of jams. My suggestion to India is shut the hell up and start pulling your own weight. Welcome to life at the REAL IBM. -Glad-I-Left-

Oh, that is so rich.  Over the last few years,customers would open incident tickets which were sent to India, and the India folks would ignore them for a few days, and then play hot potato and swap them around from queue to queue, and then once the customer raised the severity of the ticket (meaning it had to be resolved RIGHT NOW) the India folks would put their hands up and say "oh no, we don't handle high severity tickets, that is done by the Americas folks" and throw the ticket into the queue of a group in the U.S.  The people in the U.S. would of course resolve the ticket quickly and once again the customer would be complaining to their account rep saying "why does it take the U.S. folks so long to resolve tickets?" because they had no idea that the India folks were just playing tag and adding delay instead of resolving the customer's problem.

I'm entering new territory in the job market.  I've never played one employer off against another.  I have always been the type of person who applies for a job, goes through the interview process, gets an offer and then takes whatever is offered.  Now, I'm actively "negging" a recruiter and the job he's trying to place me in.  I didn't return his calls yesterday, leading him to threaten this morning to tell the employer that I wasn't interested.

To further the recruiter's agony, I told him I was in active talks with another company (which is true) but then the white lie comes into play. He asked if I had an offer, and I said I was waiting on one.  This is partially true.  I have one more interview before they'll give me an offer, and I'm waiting for that offer to be scheduled.  So... it's technically true.  I know I will ace the interview, because the job is right up my alley.  The question is, when will the interview be scheduled.  I expect to wait at least another week before that happens.

When I said I was waiting on another offer, the recruiter acted sad and said he would tell his client I was moving forward elsewhere.  Then he calls back 5 minutes later and says, can you interview with them anyway, just as a courtesy. Sure, why not, I told him.  I am acting cool and disinterested, like oh, you want me but you can't have me.  Let's see if this strategy works.  I predict it will make them want me more and maybe they'll feed me diamonds / throw something enticing into the mix.

Feigning this attitude of "I know you want me but you can't have me" is kind of fun and kind of scary at the same time.  I know there are people who operate like this all the time, but I've never had the self-confidence to play this way.  It might backfire, or it might lead to something fabulous.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

During the "fiscal cliff" negotiations that opened 2013, President Obama laid out a fix to the sequester mess, limiting domestic and defense spending cuts to $200 billion. He sought to make up the difference by leveraging government purchasing power to reap $400 billion in health-care savings and banked another $200 billion by ending waste in farm subsidies and other "mandatory" spending. Obama rounded out his proposal by demanding sacrifice both from the wealthiest – limiting tax deductions and loopholes for the rich – and from future retirees, trimming Social Security payouts by adjusting the way Washington measures inflation. Twenty years ago, this is the kind of self-negotiated proposal that might have been floated by Republican Sen. Bob Dole. But the party of Eric Cantor and John Boehner reacted as if it had been proposed by Hugo Chávez.

Read more here.

I saw this ad for Rolaskatox's appearance at Roscoe's in Chicago's Boystown (one of the places Captain Alcohol and I used to haunt) and it brought back so many memories and flashbacks. I lived with Captain Alcohol in 2003, and he was the typical gay party gasbag you find in every gay bar.  He liked to go out to the bar five or six nights a week, getting liquored up and acting the fool.  He owned his own company, which he ran out of his house, and his business hours were whenever he wanted to work.

So yes, of course we would get in the car at 10 pm on a Monday, to drive 30 miles, to get into Roscoe's by 11, so we could sminch ourselves in there like so many sardines.  And I'm not exaggerating - when the joint got hopping, it was literally butts-to-nuts.  No airspace between you and the person in front of or behind you until the place closed around 2 a.m.  You wanted to go from the bar to the bathroom?  Well get in the line and take half-inch steps for the next 20 minutes.  I loved being there at closing time, when the Ugly Lights would come on and all the twinks and kinks would hustle out to the sidewalk for Last Call, to see if they were going home with someone or by themselves.  We did walk up and down the line a couple times just for shits and grins, but in the end we would always get back in the car and drive the 30 miles back home to suburbialand sans company.

And that wasn't the worst of my late night behavior.  A short while after I broke up with Captain Alcohol, I very casually dated this other guy (former schoolteacher turned fitness model) and his thing was to go to clubs that didn't even open til after midnight.  Yep, I'd drive into the city, pick him up around 10, then we would hang out in coffee shops and get super caffeinated.  Later, we'd drive over to the club, getting there around 12:30 (because we were the early crowd, I guess?) and we would stay til 4 or 5 am.  I would drive him home, or sometimes he would go home with someone else, and I would head back to the burbs, with enough time to shower and change and go to work.  Hooray Tuesday!

It felt like such an odd, underground thing to do - hang out in a smoky, cavernous former warehouse, sitting on top of speakers the size of a VW Bug, listening to deafening techno music, and watching the tweakers do their tweaky dances on rickety plywood boxes, with their glow sticks and flags and things.

Today's Old Man Flashback was brought to you by the letters W, T and F, and any number over 40.

Just have a look at this awesomeness.  The animators captured all the significant parts of the movie and I love their additions.



In other news, I had a talk with the company that wanted me to relocate to Atlanta.  They made an offer, about 40K less than I made last year.  I went back and forth with the hiring manager, and explained that I have been working from home, so my current sweats and t-shirt wardrobe won't work for their 50 to 70% travel job, which means I need to make a significant investment in wardrobe, I also considered all the incidentals that don't get reimbursed when one travels for business, and in the end I would probably be looking at another $5K to $10K out of pocket, plus relocation costs, so their offer really did not work for me.  The hiring manager increased his offer $20K but that still would mean a significant loss of income, so this was not going to work out.  We agreed that if my situation changes, we would revisit our discussions, but for now, it's a no-go.

So here I sit, applying for local jobs, and waiting for recruiters to schedule interviews on two other jobs.  Ho hum.  At least I'm getting all kinds of things done around the house, which is nice.