Taking stock

My letters should start reaching the desks of various Quality Assurance managers today, but I haven't scheduled any follow-up calls until next Monday and Tuesday. In the meantime I submitted a résumé to yet another company yesterday, and I printed up an application for a "dream job" today. (Other people may see it as a "pointless menial retail job", but it's actually something I've always wanted to do.)

I decided to sit down today and tabulate all of the résumés, job applications, and letters of inquiry I've put out there. And...well, maybe I shouldn't have. It's a pretty depressing list, because as I look at each job I remember the hopes and anticipation associated with it, the way I tried to imagine myself in each position. That's a hard thing. For the past eight years I had built my niche in the DVD industry, inventing and redefining the job I was doing as I went along. For six years before that I did something that others had already invented and defined, but that had never been done before in my company.

Now I'm faced with an unknown future in an unknown environment, so projecting myself into each job takes a supreme effort. It's exhausting, frustrating, and, over and over again, disappointing.

But I have to keep trying. What's the alternative?

The following employers are currently hiring locally: Dollar Tree, Office Max, McDonald's...

In other news:

I reprinted another post on my spin-off blog A Monkey in the Garden. I like that blog. It's just my nature and gardening posts, so far all with pictures. I still have quite a few posts that I can reprint there. I may have to edit a few to remove non-gardening content, but that's OK. Maybe I'll go find something else to reprint on Unknown Failure, too. I also need to call to get an update for Beyond the Needle, and someone has asked for a write-up on A Blog of Nanticoke. I should give some attention to NEPA Blogs, too.