orikes | Employment

Believe it or not, I am employed again. This seems rather improbable considering I have only been out of work for jsut over two months. After all, I was begining to believe I needed a six month intervals between jobs.

The advertisement for the position came up in one of my jobs earches on 'Photoshop'. It was listed as a Tech Support position for Kodak and they were looking for people with experience with Windows, Macintosh, digital cameras, and Photoshop. Figuring it was worth a shot, I sent in my resume. The recruiter called me first thing Monday morning of last week. She sounded excited about my resume, but they usually do if they want you to go on an interview for them. I took it with a grain of salt.

She called towards the end of the week to set up an interview for me this morning at 11am. I showed up on time, but the woman I was supposed to meet was a half an hour late. She was very apologetic, and rushed me up through the maze of the Kodak office building to where their floor was. She then handed me off to the supervisor who did the actual interview. I really hate interviews. I'm usually too honest for my own good. I stumbled through his questions as best I could, trying to seem confident and knowledgeable without sounding like I was faking it. After that, they had me take a little test to just prove that I was comfortable with Windows. To be honest, the test was harder than I expected. I got all of the questions right except for one, but I had to use the help feature to answer a couple of them. (By the way, how do you shut down all background applications at once in Windows '98?)

Anyway, after that, they had me listen to some actual phone calls to get a feel for whether or not I would want to do the job. The calls I listened to were pretty straight forward. One man was trying to review his pictures on his printer first, but they would download to the software instead. He needed to be told to hit 'cancel'. The other was a woman who hadn't installed the software correctly and couldn't figure out why her pictures wouldn't download properly.

When the interview was done, the original woman walked me out and I went home to call the recruiter. She wasn't in, so I left a message saying, "I think the interview went well, but I'm not sure. I never can tell with these things."

The recruiter called me back a little while later laughing. She said that they had called her while I was still there and said they wanted to offer me the position. Apparently etiquette said they had to let the recruiter do the offering and couldn't say anything while I was still there.

I think this is the first time I've ever been hired the same day I did an interview. I wish all my job searching had been this easy!

The job pays pretty well. This will be the closest I've gotten to what I was earning at Kinko's back in 2001. It is just down the road on the most direct bus route near my house, so transportation won't be an issue either. The call center is open, Monday through Friday, 9am to 8pm, so no matter what my schedule ends up being, I will have normal weekends and not have to be to work -too- early in the morning. I'm hoping I get a 10-6ish shift. Will make getting picked up for gaming on Fridays a little tougher, but not impossible.

It is a temp job, and the supervisor told me that it's very rare that they hire people on as full Kodak employees, but hopefully it will last long enough for me to gain a little more stability.

Anyway. Woot!