Tuesday afternoon we had an emergency staff meeting… We are all being invited to resign. All very odd, as they do want to keep 3-4 people, but did not tell us until yesterday afternoon which ones (though it was generally possible to guess). I hope, for the sake of the company, that they actually talked to the people they do want to keep. For my own sake it doesn’t really make a difference. As I have been thinking of finding a different job for a while anyway, I’m not really in any doubt of what to do – in a way they are doing me a favour by forcing me to get off my butt and go out and do some serious job-hunting. I would have preferred, obviously, to have a new job before resigning my old one, but one can’t have everything.
So: Anyone want to hire me? I’m very employable, really. I can code (though this web-page isn’t the best proof of that, as I haven’t had the time and energy to add any fireworks – I might get around to that now). I can work with anyone (at least I have yet to meet anyone I couldn’t work with). I can also work very well independently (in fact, I’m quite happy to be given tasks such as: “Code this by the end of the week” and be able to go off into a corner and become absorbed in the gobbledygook of ints and inxs and fprintf and malloc). I can write quality technical documentation (and I don’t fill it with parentheses, either, that’s just my journal/letter style). I love workshops with clients to determine requirements. I have pretty extensive knowledge of the testing process, from unit test to print and mail testing.
In addition to all that, I can serve up a decent analysis of any Shakespeare play you like, explain why alien* species are a serious threat to the biodiversity of almost any country today and ask intelligent questions regarding practically any subject (even football, though I more often make wilfully stupid observations on the subject of football, not being a great fan and being rather sick of the subject’s dominance at lunch).
The one thing I can’t do, at least not at all well, is sell stuff. I’m not a sales person. I can do my utmost to perform well and please the clients once the deal is clinched so that they will want to talk to someone about buying even more stuff, but I cannot do the actual selling bit. And that, of course, is why I have been thinking about getting a different job for a while – to a large extent, consultancy is about selling and it is wearing me down a bit. That and the fact that there has been very little work to do (there is a reason, after all, why they are downsizing the office…). Some days I am bored to tears.
Hey, if you do think you might want to hire me, mail me and I’ll send a CV. I guess I should put it up on the web. OK, it’s on my to-do list.
Music in my head: Just ask the lonely (Vonda Shepard – hey, makes a nice change from yesterday when I had “Kaptein Knudsen” stuck up there for hours on end)
* Alien as in “not native”, not as in “from outer space”, in case you were wondering.