(I wrote that all a month ago and the darn entry has been sitting in the drafts folder, unfinished.  So now I suppose my reason is just that as usual, I’m just bad with the follow-through.)

A month and still no update.

So it’s another quickie catch-up…

We went camping with Clever Canines, our dog club.  Our non-dog friends think it’s strange, but we love Tracie and Joe and all that they’ve done for our family.  Camping with other people who believe in pack mentality is so much more comfortable.  Now if only we could find the AP group of of the alpha dog world…

We went to Edmonton.  Pictures here.

We Jim tore up the deck in our backyard.

We Jim built a patio.

My parents booked a trip to come visit us!  But those plans fell through and they didn’t make it here.  Hopefully this means I get to visit home sooner than expected.  (We were planning for next summer, but maybe this Christmas instead.)

I’m twittering now.  But I’m not so sure I get it.  This morning I twittered the fact that it took six minutes to get from 37th to Blackfoot via Glenmore.  Which is miraculous, but really – why would anyone care?  Ryan Ozawa twitters stuff like that and it’s useful to people because he has twitter groupies.  But I have a small small circle of friends who keep an eye on my twittering.  And sometimes I’m not even sure I want them reading.

I am addicted to facebook but not ready to join the 12 step program.

So a friend of mine is blogging now.  (Is it pretentious that I STILL hate that term?)  She’s not doing it on a domain that advertises her real name.  I don’t know that I told her that I did this for years under a made up name, with a domain name that had no identifying factors other than my registration information, which totally gave me up, but let’s face it:  google my name and you don’t get a listing of all the domains that are registered to me.  So really that’s not much of a giveaway.

Anyhow, I’m jealous that she can write more than I can because she’s not doing this out in the open.  I’m wearing a tshirt that says jaimebourne.com, and she’s got the invisible ink version.  If you shine it in the light just so, you can figure it out…

Dr. Scott recently went underground.  It’s possible that I will follow suit soon.

P.S.  I got a mac.  There’s no lightrooom for linux and holy crap was I missing out.  Is aperture worth a look?

Funny work incident that won’t get me fired:  One of the things I do is finalize documents before they go out to clients.  Sometimes these docs go through peer reviews so that everyone is happy with what they say.  Normally it’s all very cordial – people just change words and fix things up and no one takes any of this personally.  Last week I got a doc back from someone that had the “wtf?” written on it.  I don’t think the original author has any idea.

]]> http://jaimebourne.com/journal/archives/2008/09/16/well-where-the-heck-have-i-been/feed/ 0 http://jaimebourne.com/journal/archives/2005/12/12/177/ http://jaimebourne.com/journal/archives/2005/12/12/177/#comments Mon, 12 Dec 2005 23:57:30 +0000 jhb http://jaimebourne.com/journal/archives/2005/12/12/177/ I don’t enjoy job interviews. Does anyone? In the past I have found myself spazzy and nearly completely unable to think. Of course, I haven’t had to go through many interviews in my life. I’ve worked several jobs, and I suppose each of those came with an interview, but for the most part, when you interview for a retail job, the interviewer just wants to make sure you can speak in complete sentences while maintaining an appropriate amount of eye contact. And then they hire you on the spot.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve been to many interviews in which I didn’t get the job. When I was 15 or so I applied to work at the House of Music in Ala Moana. Is that still there? The manager at the time called me in for an interview (my first one, ever,) and proceeded to give me the impression that he liked me. Then he tried to tell me that my availability *might* not be something they could work with. But he never did say, “sorry, we are unable to hire you at this time.” He kind of gave me the runaround. Anyhow, after that I pretty much got every job I interviewed for.

I think I’ve sent out at least thirty resumes and cover letters. You know what sucks? They tell you over and over again in school to double, triple, quadrupal check your resume and cover letter, ensuring that there are NO TYPOS. It sucks when you send something off to a potential employer, applying for a job that you’re totally interested in – the kind with wonderful pay, super hours, and even a company gym – and after sending it, you realize that you sent off that stupid cover letter with a typo. Yes, this happened to me more than once. Of course I shouldn’t be admitting it here, where a future employer could see how careless and unfocused I am…

I’m getting the hang of it now. The problem was that most job applications are submitted online. Times sure have changed. So, if you’re submitting these things online, chances are you aren’t even printing off hard copies of these letters and resumes. You’re just reading and correcting them off the screen. I’ve learned that printing them off for the corrections is totally worth both the paper AND printer ink.

So of those thirty or so resumes, I’ve been called in for four interviews. Two of those jobs I lost to “more qualified” applicants. One was a “Placement Company” which I did work with for about a month, and one was an interview that I went to today. When you look at those numbers, 30 resumes, 4 interviews, 2 outright rejections, it’s a little discouraging. Jim reminds me that I’ve probably never been in this kind of economy. I’m also not willing to work for minimum wage anymore. Incidentally I did not get spazzy today, as the interviewer was very good and able to put me completely at ease. (There’s a second one tomorrow, so I’m thinking today went well.)

On the other hand, though, I miss having money. I miss being able to walk into a store and not feel guilty about buying some new knitting needles. I miss having stuff to think about, people who need me. Sure people need me, but there isn’t always that constant hum of stuff going on in the back of my head. No amount of self-directed projects is going to restart the humming.

I’ve always had a fear of the future. I’ve always been afraid to commit to a career. Everything I’ve done has been “temporary” or “just until I figure out what I want to do.” I’ve spent a whole lot of time feeling sorry for myself, telling myself that one day I will go back to school. I’ve even gone back to school a little bit, and failed pretty miserably. In case you guys are wondering, the month after breaking up with someone is not the time to return to school, no matter how much of a good idea it seems at the time. The distraction of school doesn’t keep you from being sad.

I was going to be a whole bunch of things at some point in my life. Nail tech, hairstylist, dentist, which my cousin urged me not to do because I would get AIDS. (This was a long long time ago.) Attorney, and then judge, professional actor/singer/jlo. Damn that jlo for stealing my thunder. Math teacher, computer somethingorother, CPA, Hawaiian studies activist/teacher/Hawaiian issues attorney, psychologist, journalist, novelist, English professor, letter carrier, photographer.

Obviously none of those stuck.

But in less than a month I will be 29. I can remember when my mother was 29. I need to figure this shit out. I need to decide, I need to take charge and deal with it. There was a time when people would pressure me to talk about it. Not everyone can understand the thing where I don’t know what I want to do. The thing where I don’t want to talk about what I want to do. The thing where I’m deathly afraid of picking the wrong thing, of finding myself twenty years from now, unhappy in my career choice. I don’t know how I became this person. The kids I went to school with are settling comfortbly into their jobs. They are commiting to something and making it work, having babies, supporting families. They don’t seem to be threatened by the prospects of a bad choice.

I am still afraid.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my future again. In that obsessive way that I tend to do, where I don’t think about anything else, and read every single thing I can about a given subject. Well, this month it’s nursing. Nursing! I’m really excited about this, but you never know with me. Sometimes I get excited about stuff and then three months from now I have a new thing to be excited about.

It’s a big deal that I’m telling you people.

Work is good. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m inherently lazy and hate waking up in the mornings, only to head to a job that doesn’t allow me to pee out my morning coffee whenever the hell I feel like it, it would be Really Good. But for now, it’s just good. It’s getting hot and I get sweaty and gross on a daily basis. My hair is never pretty. I’m getting a wierd mailman tan. My arms, from wrist to the end of my sleeves are a shade darker than the rest of my body. I’m betting that this will get worse as the summer progresses. I have a couple of things to cover in the world of mail.

First – those of you with pretty flowers around your mailboxes – please please get rid of them! Flowers are nice and all, but you know who else likes flowers, aside from you and I? Bees. I’m not very tall either, so according to anatomical drawings of Leonardo DaVinci, the fact that I’m short in stature means that my reaching distance is also abbreviated. And so to deliver mail to you flower people, I find that I sometimes must trample in bee territory. Not my idea of fun.

And second, mail carriers are not human road maps. If I’m eating lunch in McDonald’s I surely don’t want to spend the entire time telling you where the local Sights To See are. We drive on the right hand of the truck. Don’t pull up alongside the left of the truck and expect us to simply roll down the window. There’s no way I can roll the window down from the right side. They don’t come equipped with power windows, in case you were wondering. I can’t even reach the door handle from the other side of the truck. Don’t get pissed when I don’t know where the party that you’re going to is. Really. Especially when you don’t know the address. You have no business even leaving home when you don’t have a clue where you’re going.

Aside from work and not writing, you may have also noticed that I’ve moved things around. Again. I’m thinking that I have a thing for starting all over again. I decided that moveable type is again the way to go. So much for entries formatted by hand. When I set up that last format for the journal I was oddly thrilled that I would be able to control all the entries independantly of each other. Nevermind that THAT is stepping backwards in the technology of the www. It was somehow Really Cool to me that all this work would go into each and every entry. I’m thinking all that work had something to do with the fact that I haven’t written since Christmas.

The wayback machine has released my Sept 11 entry, which, starting with its title, is filled with cheese. Still I’ve put it back into the order of things here. There are so many entries that I’m missing – many are ones that I thought were so important. I can see them in archived versions of my archive page, but the individual pages that actually show the text aren’t making themselves available to me. It only pisses me off a little bit, mostly because I get really excited when I see the archive page that never used to show up, containing entries that have fallen off into cyberspace, come up on my screen, giving me a false sense of retrieval confidence. Making sense? Didn’t think so.

It’s okay, though because *I* understand. And like I was telling DJ earlier, I live in a bubble, with me at the center, shielded in a layer of ignorance.

Folks we’ve got months of silenced me coming to the surface. And no, I’m not sorry about that.

Not being sorry is another thing that I need to talk about. You see, I’m tired of this politeness sham that seems to be running rampant on the internet. Message boards with messages that start out in “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” and poorly executed snark (Pamie knows what she’s doing and I clearly do not, so there will be no snarky wit from me because I’m not the talented and smart girl Pamie is,) “uh, thanks for sharing.” COME ON PEOPLE. You know there’s more you want to say. You know you want to tell people to check their ill-fitting egos at the door because there’s no room for bullshit like that here. And “Yes, I do want you to take this the wrong way. That’s exactly how I mean it.”

I so want to participate in THAT forum. The one where we talk and get along and don’t worry about how she will *feel* when she reads the mean mean things that I said. Grow some balls and let your honesty shine, people. That’s all I’m trying to say.

No one wants to deal with a new employee two days before Christmas. Especially when you’re working for the post office. I’m sure they weren’t *that* happy to see me. Needless to say, it’s not my fault I was told to report on that very day, and no one should treat me as such. For the most part they didn’t. But there were some detectable looks. Glances at my on-the-job trainer, as if to share with him their pain. “Poor guy has to train some chick when we have (holding up hands) THIS MUCH mail!”

Yeah, I saw you guys.

It got off to a rocky start. The trainer made a crack about a certain religion. A crack about a religion. Two days before Christmas, training a new person, whose personal beliefs you know absolutely nothing about, and you make an off-color comment about a religion. And wouldn’t you know it – it’s the one *I* believe in. It couldn’t be a crack about cults, or about stupid people, both of which I’m sure many of you categorize people like me who actually show up for weekly church gatherings, no – it just had to be about Catholics. Thanks.

As soon as it came out of his mouth, my eyes dropped to the floor. My face turned bright red, as I was really truly insulted. Hurt. Let me try and explain. Pretend you have a child. You love your child. Your kid may be funny looking, or have some kind of physical disability, but you’re his parent, and you don’t care. You love him no matter what. And then someone talks about him in front of you. Someone who doesn’t realize that’s *your* kid. That’s how it hurt.

He looked at me and asked, “You’re not . . . (dramatic pause, where I could imagine him actually holding up his fingers in hex-like cross configuration) Catholic, are you?”

Uneasily I answered, “Yeah. I am.”

It was a long day. Too bad I really want this job.

Friday night I got to bed nice and early. Nervous as I was, I knew I’d be no good out there with not enough sleep. Of course, it wasn’t like I had to drive all day long, or deliver any mail or anything, but it was scheduled to be a full four hours long, and I really didnt know what to expect.

I woke up early. Five AM early. Me and no one else in our entire apartment complex. It’s the Saturday before Christmas, and people have better things to do than to wake up at FIVE AM. Like sleep. I loaded up on coffee and headed out the door.

Got there a little early knowing the instructor was one of those guys who shows up early for everything, and hoping that he’d start the test early so that I could go home early. No such luck there.

The sun wasn’t up, so he wasn’t in a rush to get out to the truck. Of course they should have thought about that when they scheduled the darn test. But no, that would involve too much thought. Or perhaps they just wanted to get the testing done with early. There were two tests scheduled that day: mine, which was to last until 10:30, and another new inductee (if that’s what you call it), who was due to begin his test at 11:00am.

We got all the paperwork out of the way and headed off in the direction of the trucks. I had to drive two different vehicles for my test – my station has a couple of different types of delivery trucks, so I’m required to be certified to drive both types.

Of course the testing part of the lot is at the completely opposite end of the building entrance. So we treck it out to the testing area, only to find that there was only one truck there. Being that I didn’t know those were our testing trucks, I didn’t understand the instructor when he stopped in his tracks and sighed, “Shit.”

“What?” I asked.

“There should be two trucks here.”

“Oh.”

It’s now 6:45 and we head back accross the lot, back to warmth and phones. He makes a couple of calls and finds that our truck has been borrowed for maintenance. Uh. Don’t these people check before carting away training trucks? Apparently not.

Someone towed it back to where we were and we got on with the test.

I’ve always wanted to drive a postal truck. Tell me you’ve never wondered what it’s like to drive a right hand vehicle on the right side of the street. Yeah, you’re jealous, I know. It’s ok, though. It’s not that exciting.

I swerved into the wrong side of the street a couple of times. I parked where I shouldn’t have parked (you aren’t supposed to back into stalls situated in front of day-cares when there are open stalls at the far end of a parking lot – stalls that you can front-end into, and drive straight forward out of.) I forgot to turn on a blinker when driving inside a parking lot (I thought that one was a bit nitpicky myself) and I neglected to use a merging lane that I turned left into. It wasn’t marked. I turned straight into the driving lane when I should have used the invisible merging one.

It’s okay, though. As dumb as I think some of those were, I passed the test!

Now I just have to make it to March 15, when my probation ends.

On the drive home I tested myself. I pretended I was taking a driving test and maneuvered everything according to the rules that were outlined in the training session. Doing so accomplished two things: 1) It kept me awake. I had to leave home at 6am all week, and I’m so not used to hours like this. 2) It showed me that I have some really good driving habits. Sure Shawn thinks I’m a bad bad driver, and sometimes I have been known to believe him, but today I found that the things we talked about in class – looking both ways before entering an intersection, even when you have a green light, holding your braking foot over the brake peddle when doing so, keeping a long enough distance between you and the car in front of you – are all things I normally do. Thanks to my excessively-cautious dad, I have developed some great skills.

Sure I’m the old lady on the highway who actually follows the speed limit, who lets everyone ahead of her in traffic because she doesn’t insist on riding *on* cars in front of her, and who slows to a complete stop at stop signs and red lights, but for once, all this will work to my advantage. You *do* know you’re supposed to stop at a red light before proceeding on the right turn with caution, don’t you? Yeah, no one actually does it. I don’t know why I’m surprised when people honk their horns at me for stopping with my blinker on.

Tomorrow we go back for five more hours of driving class. FIVE MORE HOURS. God only knows what we could talk about for five more hours. I honestly think we will have completely exhausted the subject of driving by the time this training class is over.

From there, there’s more training, but I have yet to receive a schedule on that. There will be a road test that consists of street driving and a closed-course cone maneuvering thing. Some people are taking the test tomorrow after class. I’m hoping I’m among those so I can get it over with. If I don’t pass, this whole thing is over. I have to apply for a non-driving position, and honestly, I don’t want one of those. And I really don’t want to go through these orientation sessions again.

Pray for me, please.

There were all kinds of plans I had, too. Big Writing Plans. All listed neatly in my writing book, which travels with me everywhere I go. You see the intention is to write worthwile things in that book whenever I have a moment in my day, and then when I get home I am supposed to come here and enter entry after entry of wordy goodness. I had plans to write about my old job, working in the place where cars and licensed, dealing with people who don’t understand that there are certain rules that need to be followed, otherwise you don’t get a title. And that if those rules weren’t followed the first time around, and you didn’t get a title that time, but instead you received a letter explaining why said title was never issued, and then you proceeded to ignore said letter, that it really isn’t my fault. There’s absolutely no way it’s my fault.

And when you come in on a Saturday when the line is two hours long, you need to just shut up and be patient. Don’t show up on the last day before penalties start to accrue and expect me to help you when you’ve missed your number. If you miss your number because you went to eat lunch, do you really think it’s fair for me to help you when all those other people *pointing* sitting out there have been patiently waiting for their numbers to be called? If everyone went to eat lunch and returned at their leisure that would pretty much defeat the purpose of the number system, now wouldn’t it?

Do people think before they open their mouths?

“You need an emissions test before I can issue you plates in this st–”

She interrupts, “So where would I get an emissions test?”

“Do you know where blah blah is?”

Blank stare.

Okay, I have a map. Right here is where we are. And here (marking with my pen) is where emissions is.”

“Where do I get a driver’s license?”

“Here. (pointing again.)”

“So when can I get plates.”

“After you go to –”

“How long do I have.”

(If you interrupt me one more f*cking time) “After you go to –”

“What. Do. I. Need. To. Do. To. Get. Plates. In. This. State.”

She says it like I wasn’t listening to begin with. Like I wasn’t ever trying to help her. Like I wasn’t patient with her the three times she interrupted me.

So slowly I start to list everything she needs again. And she already has everything – it’s just the emissions test that she needs. But here’s the cherry on top: I have this pen. A special pen, as all writers tend to have. One that no one is allowed to touch, because it holds the key to all my creativity and knows my soul.

She reaches accross my counter, onto my desk and grabs it. MY PEN. The bitch grabbed my pen.

That was it. I lost it. First she doesn’t listen, then she has the nerve to grab a pen that isn’t anywhere near her. Just grabs. Doesn’t even ask.

Seething, I grabbed it back.

“You can use this pen.” I hand her the pen on a chain.

“I want to use that pen.”

Authoritatively, “No one uses my pen.”

Again she’s not paying attention to what she needs to pay attention to. She’s writing down something that I’ve already written down for her and she hasn’t listened to me say that ALL SHE NEEDS IS AN EMISSIONS TEST.

“My hands are clean.” She mumbles to herself, half wanting me to hear. So I play along.

“It’s not about clean hands. It’s *my* pen.”

Yeah I had big plans to bitch and whine about it all, but I think now I may have gotten it all out of my system.

And that’s all.

Of course, I have no idea where Queen Anne is. Being that I live in Bellevue, I usually try my best to stay away from Seattle during the week. There’s traffic and pedestrians and cars everywhere (yeah, traffic, I know.) So I leave home nice and early, giving me lots of time to get there and find parking, because you know parking is awful hard to find in big cities. Parking that doesn’t run you completely dry, that is.

So I get there and I’m on time – which we need to establish right now, is a feat on its own – and I nervously drop quarters in the parking meter across the street from the post office. Quarters, because I was all kinds of prepared. See in downtown Honolulu, there are evil parking meters that take ONLY quarters. No sense taking up valuable space with nickles and dimes when you can make people pay for even more time that they don’t need using only quarters. So when I left for Seattle, I was sure to pack enough quarters to park a small fleet.

I make my way up to the 2nd floor, put on my “I really want to be a mailgirl” attitude on, and pull out my good pen. Surely there will be writing.

And there was. There were forms to sign and a questionnaire about my medical history. There was fingerprinting – smashing my fingers on a glass plate hooked up to a computer. All my fingers – not just the thumb like they did when I got my state ID in Hawaii. This was each and every finger. Several times, too, because the machine seems to be very picky. You had to have just the right combination of natural oil, dry finger, and moisturizer.

And then she handed me a map and explained how to get to the medical unit. Of course it was in yet another part of town that I had never been to. Somewhere by Boeing. God only knows where that place is, but thanks to the wonderful green map, I found it. And only five minutes late. Which really wasn’t a bad thing, because the staff nurse was out on lunch, and according to the “will return at . . .” sign, she would be back at 1:15. She won’t even know I was late.

So this medical thing – first there was a drug test. Pee in a cup, bring the cup out, maintain constant eye contact with the pee sample to ensure that no tampering is going on, and wait for five spots to turn blue. If they turn blue, you pass. Of course I had no reason to be worried about the pee test, but it was such torture waiting for those little spots to turn blue! I mean what if something went wrong? What if the testing strip had been contaminated before I even got there?

Anyhow, all was fine with that. Then there was a vision test, a blood pressure test (thank God I have normal bp, despite my size!), and a review of the medical history thing that I filled out.

I passed and return to the personnel place next week for “final processing.” I’m so stoked! My actual starting date is the 15th.

And then about a month ago I get a large, heavy envelope in the mail. From the postal service. Woohoo! They want an interview. Inside the packet are pages and pages of forms – the kind that require signatures and dates all over them, including a complete 10-year work history, and driving abstracts. The interview is scheduled for Sept 18.

So within days of receiving the packet, I fill out almost all of the forms. I also ordered a driving abstract from Hawaii, and went into the WA dol to pick up one for my washington record. In case you were wondering, WA charges $5.00 for the service, HI charges $7.00. I also found a website of a private agency offering to get you your driving abstract in Hawaii for the low low price of $55.00. There better be some Liliha Bakery Coco Puffs included with that!

Anyhow, the interview was scheduled for 1:00pm. I planned to leave home at 11:00am, leaving me plenty of time to get lost and twiddle around Redmond, trying to find the place. I pulled of the driving directions on Mapquest and set them aside, while I continued the finishing touches on the application. You see, I said I had filled out *most* of the paperwork – not *all*. I had skipped over a huge chunk of the application envolving work history, mainly because I was too lazy to fill in all the blanks.

11:00 – Still filling out the forms, I decide that a departure time of 11:30 wouldn’t be a problem. I’m still wearing just a bra on top. You see, I have a habit of getting ready without a shirt on, just in case I drop my mascara wand, or pen on myself – I won’t be wasting clean clothes.

11:30 – Putting on my shirt, I decide 12:00 is pushing it, but the forms still need to be worked on.

12:00 – Crap – they want TEN YEARS of work history. This could take ALL DAY!

12:30 – Walking out the door. These Mapquest directions had better be right. I only have one shot at getting out there on time.

12:50 – Safely arrive at a Postal facility somewhere in Redmond. Thank God the directions were accurate. You just never know with Mapquest.

So I had some time to sit in the car and calm down before the interview. I need to tell you – I dread interviews like most people dread their yearly pelvic exam. They make me fluttery, but not fluttery in a good way. Imagine butterflies in the average person’s stomach. Now imagine those are 50lb butterflies knocking around in there. Yeah, that’s me.

I walked into the place, unsure still of whether this really was the right place, until I spotted a sign that said “interviews” with an arrow. I followed the arrow and ended up in a lunchroom. A man was eating his lunch, and four other people like me, apparently other interviewees, sat scattered throughout the room, nervously waiting.

Four of us were Asian. One was white. Of course, the Asian people probably grouped me with the white guy, but I checked the asian/pacific islander box on my application. I may not be pure Asian, nor am I pure Hawaiian, but I surely don’t identify myself as being white. I’m that girl that you don’t quite know what to label. Unless you’re from Hawaii, you don’t usually come across mixed-breeds like me. At least once a day I am asked if I speak spanish.

I don’t.

Anyhow, a woman appeared and invited the five of us into a smaller room where we watched a video ~ a day in the life of a city carrier. It made for some great entertainment. They basically want to let you know about all the crappy parts of the job, and then give you the opportunity to bow out before they waste time interviewing and training you. After the interview the lady asked if anyone wanted to leave, based on what was presented. No one moved.

Okay then. J, stay here for your interview. Everyone else, please wait outside.

So the hard part is here, and I get to go first.

The interview was basically a review of my application. She made sure I filled everything out okay, and that I understood that I would be in trouble if I got caught lying. She asked why I wanted to work there, and told me about how demanding they are, how you have to pass a driving test, and that I could leave my current job, not make it at this job, and then be unemployed. Of course, I’m willing to take that risk. At the end she said a letter would come in the next two weeks to let me know if I made it on to the next step. Once I pass the interview, my name goes into a hiring pool, and as positions become available, applicants from the pool are hired.

I left feeling good about what happened, though a little nervous, being that I didn’t get to see anyone else leaving the room. What if other people were being hired on the spot and she interviewed me first so I wouldn’t have to see that? What if the speech about a letter was just a brush off so I would leave thinking I still had a shot?

I convinced myself I did have a shot and went back to my regular life. Back on the waiting list, I figured. When I signed up to take the test, I knew that it could take a year, possibly two, to get to the actual hiring process, so really I wasn’t concerned with the waiting.

And then today I came home from work and checked the mail – guess what I got. Aside from the next two selections from my netflix queue (John Q and Amelie) was a letter from the post office. I ripped it open in the elevator.

I’m in the pool! Let’s just hope they don’t call me in next week for the drug test. It’ll be kind of hard to take from Hawaii.