fingers crossed! aja! aja! fighting!

Good luck, ej, regardless of what you decide later.

Yes, sweetie, good luck and I'm sure the right decision will present itself.

Thing is, despite the complainants from hell, I really enjoy the casework. I think I'd find this work boring. But on the other hand, in the area of work where I have most of my expertise and experience, all the cases have been transferred to a different team. One of my team-mates was transferred with the cases. He didn't want to go, as he didn't have the experience or knowledge to mentor the new team in that type of work. I wanted to go but they left me where I am.

Oh well, I'll see what they say about this job. If they have any sense, they'll move me to this other team, on an upgrade as a Casework Adviser. But, of course, they have no sense, as you've probably guessed by now.

To clarify, the job I went for today involves no casework.

The group you work for is just plain idiotic when it comes to personnel. Don't give up hope of finding some place that's a better fit. You've earned it!

What mightshould said.

"as an in-house candidate, they didn't need to [...] ask me what I've been doing for the last ten years."

When I ran the radiochemistry lab for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, my boss rarely knew what I was doing, mainly because the lab was redundant. Most samples were forwarded to a Department of Energy lab, one of those Congressional intercessions that occurred before I was hired. The bulk of my job was slapping pre-printed shipping labels for forwarding to DOE on packages arriving from state labs that could not afford proper quality assurance programs. 5 states, 1 package per state per calendar quarter, except Florida who also sent fish samples because of some barrels of radwaste that the US Navy may or may not have dumped about 20 miles offshore back in the 60s. My logging consisted of a check mark on a chart that stretched back 8 years and was barely a quarter full. No one could ever answer why the states could not ship the samples directly to DOE.

I would only open a package if it had been damaged in shipment to check for contamination. That was never the case as these samples had already been analyzed by the state labs as being at normal environmental levels, otherwise they couldn't have been sent via US Mail. DOE was simply verifying the states' results. Then I would toss it in the trash -- broken chain of custody, after all -- and call the state lab supervisor to alert him that the package had been destroyed. No replacement samples were necessary, just send the next quarter's samples as scheduled. These calls had their own logbook, and when I left the NRC that logbook had 4 entries. 1 was mine.

Realize too that that the analysis time of environmental samples is often 24 to 36 hours each because the radioactivity level is so low. Once a batch of samples is chambered, you just have to wait a week or three for the results. I was surfing the internet on the job when it was still just a short paragraph in the What's New section of Popular Science -- using gopher; pre-lynx, pre-Mosaic, about 3 years before Netscape. My first internet experience was using a typewriter-style terminal. For those wondering, yes, porn was (relatively speaking) easily available even back then (for those who had a monitor), especially in the NSA and NASA domains. To the best of my knowledge, Livermore lab was the first case ever of internet child porn. (Btw, people who used the net that long ago never capitalize 'internet'.)

Anyway, my senior management decided that for accountability, one person couldn't both manage the lab (that they knew rarely did anything) and be its lab tech, so they created a "Lab Adviser" position as a sort of foreman to regulate my workload so that I always had something to do. Iow, slow me down from a turtle's pace. He lasted 4 months before they caught him for the third time sleeping in the emergency response vehicle. He literally had nothing to do. As punishment, they paid for his move to Las Vegas where his job was driving a jeep around the test grounds' outer perimeter taking gamma radiation measurements, better known as sticking a probe out the window and seeing if it registered anything over normal background radiation. Stopping the jeep takes longer than making the measurement.

So much for my blather, wishing you good luck, ej.

Ardiril, that is awesome!

Good luck ej! Just being in the swing of looking and interviewing is good.

Bored, Ardiril?

Just being in the swing of looking and interviewing is good.

Yeah, taking action always feels better, even when that action doesn't seem productive at first.

Melismata: Nah, just channeling Bukowski.

good luck Jan!

Leave it to Wondermark to have the appropriate comic for this post.

I hope it went well, ej! I find the process of applying and interviewing for a job, even if it's internal and I'm ambivalent about the job itself, good for reflection and improvement on my current practice.

When it doesn't go well, though, it truly sucks. I hope you've had a good experience.

essexjan, right now I'm looking forward to the job interview I've got lined up. It was with Amazon! and they had an interview session which lasted for up to 6 hours. Out of the 16 of us who showed up, only 3 of us were hired, and we were supposed to show up for work in a couple of days, when they called us. Only thing was, I had the accident a day or two afterwards, and almost died, so when they called for me to start working, my mom had to give em the Bad news. They were really sorry to hear what happened, and wished me a speedy recovery.

You know what, I didn't think much about the job until I heard that, and now I just want to work for them--I'll be writing letters to our client's, answering any of their queries, and I can't wait to start working.

So, whatever it is, if it doesn't sound good at first, I'm sure you'll be able to manage it. And if they don't have the sense to hire you, well, I'd tell them what they'd be missing out on.