Contemplative Order of the Drunken Masters

There are three steps. There’s a phone pre-screen w/ the tech recruiter. Then a phone screen w/ someone from the team. Then, they fly you down for a Tech interview, and a management interview

I am past step one with flying colors. To quote the guy “I think you’d be a good fit.”

Next step is the tech screen with someone from the team. I’ve been studying their documentation.

I hope this pans out quick.

This place gets about 70k resumes a year. They interview about 1000 people a year. They hire about 200 a year.  Since they are interviewing me I’ve gone from 350:1 to 5:1.

That is fscking awesome. I am now 70 times more likely to get hired now.

So friday morning (the 23rd I’ll have you know) I had decided to give up waiting for NetApp to contact me. It had been a month since they had gotten their new money; when I had expected to get contacted. I was getting down about not getting contacted; like the really good guys didn’t want me. So I decided to let it happen when it happened and keep trying to make Lexmark work. No sooner had I resigned myself to the idea and told a friend of mine about it than I got an email from NetApp. They want to have a phone interview with me tuesday or wednesday. If this goes about like the hiring of my former co-workers I can expect a second interview about a week later (if they like me) and then a contract a week to two after that. So maybe three weeks before the contract is dry. I’m gonna need to give my current boss some time; at least two if not three weeks or four. If I give them three, tell NetApp four, we are talking about 7 weeks before I start the new job and 6 weeks before I have to leave Lexington.

Eeek.

If I get signed I’ll start gutting my apartment of things I don’t need soon after. I’ll have about 3 weeks to get rid of the crap I don’t need, give away crap other people can use, and pack the rest. I’ll have to get a place in NC and then get all my crap there in a week. It’ll be a lot of work and my reward will be a strange foreign place that I won’t know and will be stuck with for a while.

Also eek.

Have I really become this much of a coward? Is this what happens when you get old? Is my desire for stable and ease made me so hesitant? I really am going to miss my friends. I’m worried I’m going to become one of those old guys at the bar that doesn’t have anyone with them and talks to everyone who looks at him. It’s like I want to get set in my ways. How is that any way for a discordian to live?

Strangeness abound. Interesting times are a double edge sword that cuts both ways. Hail Eris even if she is a bitch sometimes.

I feel so done. I think my work going to shit has brought on a case of mid-life crisis.  I’m going through the sophomoric philosophical questions and despite them being exceptionally trite I don’t have answers.  I’m not really having fun here any more and one of my co-workers has gone right around the bend. There is too much work and too many expectations.  I’ve got a fair amount of cash stowed away but I loath the nervous feeling of not knowing when new money will come in. ::sigh::

I’m sick. I spent all superbowl weekend on my couch in a mild fever induced trip cramming myself full of vitamins and cough syrup. The people at work all saw me leave with the early on-set of death plague. Walking into my office this morning made it abundantly clear that while I had conquered death at her own game it had cost me something; in short I still wasn’t back to my normally staggering amount of awesome.

We had a drive in our filer go bad. This isn’t a problem. Every tray of hard drives has two hot spares ready to leap into action the moment one goes bad, and, in the highly unlikely even that three hard drives go bad all at once, the filer next to it is a hot copy that will auto swing into place. So one drive blowing is not bad. Especially since the filer calls the manufacturer, transmits the problem, and orders a replacement drive. When I got to work at 8:30 I found out about the problem and by 9 the drive had been picked up from the dock and slotted in the filer and everything was good.

Chet; my twit co-worker, who so wants to be my new team lead despite the fact that he can’t find his ass with his hands and the help of a gay proctologist, comes in and starts asking me if I knew it had happened and telling me what I needed to do to fix it. He cut what is an incredibly easy procedure into the smallest possible of steps and then questioned me if I had done them yet in a manner that suggested I was a god damn retard incapable of listening and breathing at the same time. After I had explained to him that it was covered; an hour and a half before he showed up to work, he starts going into things I ought to do which I have already planned to do when I get a spare moment. I’m sick and it’s early, but what the hell, suffering fools is good for the soul. I shush him up and tell him there isn’t anything about this that he can request of me that I haven’t already done or plan to do since it is my responsibility and not his. Politely told to shut up and leave he goes and I take several small breaths to restore my blood pressure to something that doesn’t make me feel like I’ve got a chest burster about to pop out and kill half the crew of my starship while I have bad 80’s hair and skimpy white panties …. sorry.

Two hours later when the old foggy that ran our NOC before my last team lead shows up; thats 12:30, 3.5 hours after I’ve fixed the problem, he starts in on if I knew of the problem and did I know how fixed it. But this guy is different slightly in that he doesn’t stop to get my answer to his questions. He asks a question and then immediately goes into long excruciating detailed explanation of why it’s important and how he’d have done it.

At this point I lose it. I just start chanting “I’ve already done that” with breaks only for breath while rocking back and forth. When the foggy stops talking I keep going; chanting my mantra. Eventually he is lost; not knowing what to do when a co-worker obvious has gone absolutely barking fucking mad, ape shit crazy in space. Then I seem to break free of my demonic possession, look at him, and tell him that if I’ve already done the next thing he asks me about this that he has to leave. He thinks about it; desperately hoping to pick something obscure so that he can continue being a obnoxious know-it-all and asks his question. Before he gets it all the way out I know I’ve already done it. “I’ve already done that” and point to the door. I kinda wished he had tried to keep talking so that I could just start barking and slathering at the mouth but he realizes I’m an inch from filling him full of squirrels and leaves.

I think I ought to post a list of warning signs so that co-workers and users don’t cause me to burst because I can totally see me blacking out one day and coming to while repairing a computer; replacing parts, screwing and unscrewing stuff, when SWAT rolls through the door and tells me to put down the screw driver at which point I’ll realize it was a dead bloody body that I was putting a new hard drive into.

Well work has gotten interesting. I think I’ve gotten my friend Gene a job at Lexmark. I think I’ve gotten my friend Casey a job at Lexmark if he wants it. I am going to be getting a new job there also. I talk to a person here, I talk to a person there, and suddenly everything I’ve been working towards for months happens right now. We’ll see how this plays out with my trip to Thailand. Everything is going to be crazy and difficult but from chaos and hard work comes vast riches if a Discordian knows his way around a whelk.

Hail Eris; that crazy bitch!

I was given reason to enter a white hot frothing rage today as instructions that I laid down clearly became corrupted not once, not twice but at least three times because the people who were responsible, or irresponsible in their turn, could not be bothered to do their own jobs and let me do mine.