fm6's Journal: God and Malice

No, not the cam girl. (Who owes me money, BTW. Which, despite my own financial problems, I find to be actually kinda cool. It gives me a small claim to celebrity...) I'm referring to something Einstein once said. This was back when his theories were still sort of controversial, and a lot of people were thinking up experiments to test them. Except the experiments weren't as crucial as you might think: there was a school of thought that saw his theories as the only possible way to deal with a lot of nasty paradoxes. Einstein himself was of that school, of course. So when somebody asked him, "What if the experiments prove you wrong?" Einstein replied: "God is subtle, not malicious."

A lot he knew.

OK, I've been unemployed for almost a year, and I'm gonna have to give up my apartment. Not as desperate as it sounds -- I have a house-sitting gig, and after that I can scrounge and borrow until something comes up. My big plan is to hit the road and wander off somewhere where there's a bit of contract work to be had. Job shops aren't enthusiastic about hiring non-locals, but if I can honestly say, "I just moved into the area" (but not mentioning that my place of residence is parked outside) then I might have a shot. I've actually been looking forward to it. See some new sights. I've been in one place much too long.

So I'm triaging my possesions, putting the stuff I can't bear to part with into storage, and getting rid of the rest. Gotta get it done soon, I have to be out of here in less than a week. I told myself that I'd stay offline -- there just aren't any jobs in my area, and I don't have time for Slashdot, so why bother? But I decided I had to check my email. Which told me that somebody had posted a job on the Silicon Valley STC site that I'd be perfect for.

So I hurriedly write a cover email talking about all the ways my skills and experience match this job, attach my resume and writing samples, and shoot it off to the headhunter. So now I'm in job search mode, I can't stop myself from doing my normal daily search. There are a couple of fair prospects, none of them to get excited about. I go through the motions. One listing is for an EDA software company. This is technology I learned a little bit about decades ago, but I have a what-the-heck moment because they want a bunch of technical skills I happen to have. So they get an app too.

Then I decide to call the search firm for that first job. Who tells me, Forget It. The client specified no college dropouts. Doesn't matter how good my resume is, they're not gonna show it to him.

Pretty depressing. I'm trying to mellow out enough to go back to the triage thing, when my phone rings. It's a guy at the EDA software company. He's all excited because I have a couple years experience documenting application frameworks, and in his mind that more than cancels out my ignorance of the tech. The actual hiring manager doesn't agree, but he's going to go lobby her. More news tomorrow.

Aw jeez. This is the best shot I've had so far. I mention the degree issue to the guy and he doesn't have one either! But it's all kind of painful. I mean, if this had happened a couple weeks ago, I could have just canceled all my plans. Or if it had happened a month from now, I'd just sort of reroute things. But no, it has to happen while I'm in the middle of the Big Transition. Should I borrow some money and hang onto my apartment? But I don't know for sure that I'm going to get this job. I've got one enthusiastic ally -- maybe everybody else will say, "Let's hold out for somebody who knows EDA." I don't deal well with this kind of uncertainty.

The job itself is kinda scary, since I'd have to spend a lot of effort learning the whole EDA thing. This guy who is so enthusiastic about hiring me says no, I just have to do a sort of sanity check on the docs for the application framework they're doing. Well, there are tech writers who can BS that way, but I'm not one of them. I need to have a sort of schematic understanding of the stuff I'm writing about. If I get this job (I'm not even thinking about refusing it if they offer it to me), I'm in for a lot of hard work. Oh well, it'd keep my brain from calcifying.