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two days back in the US
Not a lot to say though.
Yesterday was nice out, so I walked the mile to Safeway and back, picked up some bread and stuff to make sandwiches for lunch. People were surprisingly cheerful and polite at Safeway. Maybe it's a suburb thing.
Mike and I went to Ikea in the evening, and I got a bookcase and a desk, both fairly cheap. The bookcase is so I have somewhere to unpack my stuff into, with doors on it so it's cat-proof. I never really *lived* here before so it feels very weird and foreign to me in some ways. Probably it's partially the whole "OMG SUBURBS" aspect.
I've been playing a lot of Kanji Kentei DS. It says I'm about 8-kyu, which is equivalent to a Japanese elementary school 3rd-grader. Yikes. (Carl tried it tonight and was rated 3-kyu, or about the same as my smarter 9th-graders at my JHS.) At least this qualifies as my "at least 30 minutes a day studying Japanese" and feels pretty fun still.
Today I did nothing much during the day, I didn't even put together the Ikea bookcase yet. I just felt very apathetic. I did, however, send out a few more job feelers -- my goal should be at least one job feeler per day I think -- and something bizarre happened.
See, at 2:50pm someone called my phone. Unknown number. No message left. No corresponding email. I see it around 3:10 so I call back like "Hi, my name's Deanna, I'm calling back to see what this number is."
The person on the other end is like "Well, I didn't call you. Are you applying for a job here?"
"Maybe?" I'm trying to think of a polite way to say Who the hell ARE you? "I have been applying for jobs recently, yes."
"Well, what job would you have applied for?"
"Probably as a writer?"
"We don't have any writing jobs here."
"Maybe it would have been as an engineer then. I've sent out a bunch of resumes recently, so--"
[click]
The phone call ends. I'm trying to figure out whether my phone had trouble or if she hung up on me. I call back and identify myself.
"Oh, it's YOU again."
"Uhh... yes, it's me again. Look, what company is this and why did you guys call me, then? Maybe a recruiter passed along my resume? I really don't know."
She gives me a name and a cell number for some other lady, and also does tell me the name of the company, which is NOT related at all to anything I've applied to. I had sent out an app for a place that said they had a week-long writing job to do ASAP, which is what I had suspected this was -- after all, usually people email rather than call, I thought, but for something to be filled ASAP maybe there'd be an exception?
I call the other lady. The other lady is like "I have been calling candidates today... for a receptionist position. I've never heard your name before."
WTF.
So I apologize to her and decide that I don't want to work for this place regardless.
Still, it was a somewhat depressing first "contact" of sorts. Let's hope the rest go better.
In the evening, Mike and I drove west-side and went to Oren's house, where we had dinner with him and his girlfriend and Carl came over too. It's pretty crazy how Oren found a nice house in Ballard right near the rest of the gang. Carl and I played Kanken DS and Mike and Oren played Soul Calibur, so it really wasn't that unlike hanging out in college...
Whee.
Yesterday was nice out, so I walked the mile to Safeway and back, picked up some bread and stuff to make sandwiches for lunch. People were surprisingly cheerful and polite at Safeway. Maybe it's a suburb thing.
Mike and I went to Ikea in the evening, and I got a bookcase and a desk, both fairly cheap. The bookcase is so I have somewhere to unpack my stuff into, with doors on it so it's cat-proof. I never really *lived* here before so it feels very weird and foreign to me in some ways. Probably it's partially the whole "OMG SUBURBS" aspect.
I've been playing a lot of Kanji Kentei DS. It says I'm about 8-kyu, which is equivalent to a Japanese elementary school 3rd-grader. Yikes. (Carl tried it tonight and was rated 3-kyu, or about the same as my smarter 9th-graders at my JHS.) At least this qualifies as my "at least 30 minutes a day studying Japanese" and feels pretty fun still.
Today I did nothing much during the day, I didn't even put together the Ikea bookcase yet. I just felt very apathetic. I did, however, send out a few more job feelers -- my goal should be at least one job feeler per day I think -- and something bizarre happened.
See, at 2:50pm someone called my phone. Unknown number. No message left. No corresponding email. I see it around 3:10 so I call back like "Hi, my name's Deanna, I'm calling back to see what this number is."
The person on the other end is like "Well, I didn't call you. Are you applying for a job here?"
"Maybe?" I'm trying to think of a polite way to say Who the hell ARE you? "I have been applying for jobs recently, yes."
"Well, what job would you have applied for?"
"Probably as a writer?"
"We don't have any writing jobs here."
"Maybe it would have been as an engineer then. I've sent out a bunch of resumes recently, so--"
[click]
The phone call ends. I'm trying to figure out whether my phone had trouble or if she hung up on me. I call back and identify myself.
"Oh, it's YOU again."
"Uhh... yes, it's me again. Look, what company is this and why did you guys call me, then? Maybe a recruiter passed along my resume? I really don't know."
She gives me a name and a cell number for some other lady, and also does tell me the name of the company, which is NOT related at all to anything I've applied to. I had sent out an app for a place that said they had a week-long writing job to do ASAP, which is what I had suspected this was -- after all, usually people email rather than call, I thought, but for something to be filled ASAP maybe there'd be an exception?
I call the other lady. The other lady is like "I have been calling candidates today... for a receptionist position. I've never heard your name before."
WTF.
So I apologize to her and decide that I don't want to work for this place regardless.
Still, it was a somewhat depressing first "contact" of sorts. Let's hope the rest go better.
In the evening, Mike and I drove west-side and went to Oren's house, where we had dinner with him and his girlfriend and Carl came over too. It's pretty crazy how Oren found a nice house in Ballard right near the rest of the gang. Carl and I played Kanken DS and Mike and Oren played Soul Calibur, so it really wasn't that unlike hanging out in college...
Whee.
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