Diary of a Wolfeman

I’ll never understand why city, county and state job applications require such stupendous amounts of information. Today’s award for ridiculous requests goes to Clackamas County for saying “List ALL of your previous positions after the three most recent. Attach additional sheets if necessary.”

All? Excuse me? Do you really think that job I had mowing lawns when I was 10 really has any bearing on the position I’m applying for? Okay, maybe if I was going for Parks and Rec or something, but a computer tech? Cut me some slack here!

Personally, I can remember the names of the companies and what I did for them back to the beginning, but specifics like addresses and dates of employment are long gone from my memory. Frankly, some of them I would like to forget what I can remember of them.

Sorry for the lack of real content lately, folks, but I have been busy with some real-life concerns.

As I said, last week was spent in the job-search preparedness class out at PCC. this was an 8-hour-a-day thing that lasted all week. Not a complete waste of time, but I could have condensed the information I needed into a much smaller timeframe.

Now it’s back to the regular full-time job search, which I have been doing since way back in March. I’ve gone on a couple of interviews, but so have 3 million other IT guys, so it’s no real surprise that I haven’t been hired yet. It’s some tough competition out there right now, and employers are quite happy that right now they can get a guy with 4 times the qualifications they need for half the price.

When I’m not job-searching, I have been watching a lot of Stargate: SG-1 lately, since my girl works at the library and has been scoring us entire seasons on DVD. My regular watching habits were pretty hit-or-miss, so it’s nice to be able to see them all in order.

The only book I’ve had a cance to read lately was Marque and Reprisal by Elizabeth Moon. It’s the sequel to Trading in Danger, and both books are good quality space opera. The story follows Kylara Vatta, the daughter of a shipping conglomerate, through her life from being thrown out of the Space Force Academy and back into the corporate fold. Her first assignment goes haywire, and things pretty much get screwed from there. In the second book, things are getting more screwed, but she still manages to pull through – mostly by the skin of her teeth.

Unlike some other authors recently reviewed by Greyduck, Elizabeth Moon knows how to get her protagonists to do something stupid, and them beat them up for it.

Ok, back to the salt mines…

Y’know, there has been one really persistent comment spammer hitting me for the past few days, and I just don’t know what is more ridiculous: the fact that he continues, even though he has never successfully posted a comment, or the fact that the URL he puts in the comments doesn’t go anywhere. And he’s ostensibly posting for a flower-retailing website.

I mean, if it was cheap Viagra I could understand. But flowers? I think he’s smoking the wrong ones.