Things are looking up....?

Despite being in my sixth and hopefully final month of unemployment, job prospects are looking up a bit. Yesterday, I interviewed with Robert Half Technology, and despite some seeming disasters, it still looks like I made a good enough impression for them to at least forward my resume for possible jobs.
Let's count the disasters.
My interview was scheduled for 10 a.m yesterday in Northbrook. My alarm failed to wake me up, so I looked at the alarm clock and swore when I saw the time was 8:55 already.
A quick breakfast, shave and shower later, and I was on my way.
I arrived at the place at 10:05, but had to fill out some paperwork anyway. Turns out I didn't bring the right forms of ID, so I'll have to take care of that later.
Finally, I started talking with the recruiter. He did a pretty good job in making his company stand out from the other headhunters I've dealt with thus far.
Problem is, about halfway through the talk, I realized my fly was down.
I mentally made a note of all the swearing I would do if I weren't in the middle of an interview, consciously moving my tie so it would cover the fly. Not sure if it was noticed or not.
At any rate, I waited for the recruiter to leave the room, then made sure anything that was open was closed for good.
The recruiter then decided now would be a good time for me to take an assessment test. Yay. I endured assessments on Windows and LAN troubleshooting, cursing quietly to myself every time the computer indicated I got a question wrong.
Boy, did I get a lot of stuff wrong.
As luck goes, though, turns out my scores were either average or slightly above average for other folks who had taken the same assessments. Maybe there's hope.
Now, I have to fill out some tax forms for the company, just in case they can get a job for me.
I was also (finally) contacted by another contracting company earlier this afternoon. They forwarded my info to a client, who apparently wants to meet with me tomorrow morning.
Yikes.
Once again, I'll have to bathe, shave and such to make myself at least partially presentable to someone. The job doesn't pay as much as my last one, but it would get me some experience with my Cisco knowledge, which is more what I want at this point.
Hopefully, I can get something soon. There's only so much Springer I can stand.

Inertia, Vacations, and Pressure

"Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. "
"The relationship between an object's mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma. "

"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. "

So said some old dead geezer 321 years ago. Amazingly, he was British.

We had not yet returned from our delayed Christmas vacation when the phone rang. It was my office. They were excited. So excited that they called me up in Hawaii to tell me how great it would be, and how much money 'we' were going to make from loads of night and weekend work, and how I was pivotal to this whole effort, and wow, gosh golly gee wouldn't it be great if I could show up to work on the Sunday I returned from vacation so that I could get right to work?

Let's review the previous laws. I was at rest, a very long, protracted, enjoyable state of rest. I was not ancy about returning to work and 'making a difference.' In a business sense, I had gained mass with a promotion, and an insufficient amount of force was applied to cause acceleration. But the most interesting is always the third. My equal and opposite reaction was to be pissed that my company would call me on vacation to ask me to work on Sunday.

I go through the motions on my return to work. They really did want me up there, they wanted me at this 'exciting' job immediately, and pressured me to drop my other work to go. Never mind that one of these pieces of work was a legal, court-mandated response to a government agency that had to be completed in two days. I communicated this to my company. They chose to ignore it, forget it, or not to care. Another small irritation.

I get to this job, and it is an 'exciting' job: excite \ex*cite"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Excited; p. pr. & vb. n. exciting.][L. excitare; ex out + citare to move rapidly, to rouse: cf. OF. esciter, exciter, F. exciter. See Cite.]1. To call to activity in any way; to rouse to feeling; to kindle to passionate emotion; to stir up to combined or general activity; as, to excite a person, the spirits, the passions; to excite a mutiny or insurrection; to excite heat by friction. (Dictionary.net)

Notice how in the definition of this word there is no guarantee of a positive connotation?

The jobsite was in a panic. Vice Presidents were shoving directors, who shoved managers, who shoved their employees. Multiple departments across the company. Something went wrong and it needed to be fixed. It is the job of a "leader" to push people to do things they don't want to do, or so I'm told. I went in with a calm, rested head. I knew the capabilities of all involved. And I walked out of my first meeting on the jobsite almost having quit my company.

Let's revisit. I had overcome my inertia. My entire company placed enough force on me to get me in motion with sufficient acceleration. But the forces, man. My company was, in effect, shoving me over diamond-grit sandpaper into a granite mountain wall. In effect, my company wished to move the mountain of a multi-national corporation. With me. What's the equal and opposite reaction to being broken and crushed?

If I succeed, they get the credit. If I fail, "we" get the axe. No assurances of "your standing with us will not be diminished if we do not achieve this goal." The glib wisecrack more frequently uttered was "you can't put nine women in a room for a month and make a baby."

After a mere 4 days on site, I left for the weekend. I went to Vancouver. I shouldn't have taken my cell. I received a call while sitting at the border crossing to the U.S., and it was a client on the site. He expressed his extreme disappointment with my work. I asked them (singular, intentionally vague) if there was anything I could do to relieve that disappointment right then, which got a 'no.' I told them I would return and address the issue when I returned to work. Then I let my company know about it.

This job has progressed, and the pressure hasn't died. Our company has work around the clock over both of the previous weekends to meet this customer's demands. I'm currently on call, in case there is a revelation and we need to return. No schedule. Our project managment is trying to do what it can with a customer that's behaving like a teenager in puberty. I may need to leave "at a moment's notice" to work for 12 hours. On a Saturday.

Sometimes I wish I didn't have Crohn's, because then I could just drink the pain away.

Now what?

It's been over a month since I got my CCNA certification, and I have yet to even get a job offer. I've been on interviews, sent out resumes and even went to another job fair, but still don't have a job.
Worse yet, I either get the runaround or no answers from the folks I contact for jobs or help finding a job.
A few weeks ago, I made an appointment to get resume and job help from the place I took my Cisco classes. Mind you, this person hadn't even returned my emails. I finally spoke to her, and we set a time and day for the appointment. I even wrote it down. I went to the appointment, only to find out she was still eating lunch. After about a 30-minute wait, she kindly told me that she didn't have me marked down for an appointment that day.
Thing that kills me is, it's her job to help people find jobs. It's not like I didn't talk to her. Makes me wonder how much lazier I could be and still find a job.
From there, I went to an interview at some tech security company. I had a 40-minute phone interview with the place just a few days earlier, so I was stupidly optimistic about my chances, even though the interviewer screwed me over on a troubleshooting question.
So, in the interview, it becomes abundantly clear to me that they're not going to offer the job, and if they did, they'd lowball me on money. I think I stopped trying at that point.
The funniest thing happened when the interviewer's boss, some kind of super salesman, started talking at me. He gave the whole "we want to know you, put a face to a name, serve our clients" spiel. For whatever reason, he started going on about the glory of sales. He then had the nerve to say "sales is all about honesty."
If I didn't fully give up on this interview before, I did at this point.
More recently, I've been applying for contract jobs in the area. Unfortunately, many of them are with my former company, and the company makes former workers wait at least six months before hiring them back in any capacity.
I also applied for some "internship" opportunity. Allegedly, you're supposed to get some good training and money from it, to say nothing of the experience. I did a little research on the company offering these "internships," and it turns out they charge $95 for the application, and apparently used to take 20% of whatever money you made for the first job you got after the "internship."
I didn't go completely through with this application.
Most recently, I was contacted about a contract position with Abbott Labs. I told the recruiter I needed time to think about this, and emailed him back expressing my interest earlier this week. I called him Monday, and he never returned my call. Yesterday, I called him, and he said he was sick, that he'd call me this morning. Haven't heard from him.
You'd think a recruiter would be motivated to make a commission off people. I'd understand if he was really sick, but he said he was home Monday and Tuesday, yet I spoke to him on his office phone Monday.
I know, I should chill on the paranoia.
Still, the whole job search is a pain. Makes me wonder why I stayed in Chicago in the first place.

Cat Fight!

This just cracks me up. I'm easily entertained like that. Audio's required for full humor value, and it's safe for work.