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01:14 - 18.05.07
Progress?
I've been having a recurring dream the past few weeks. In it I am back volunteering with one of the earliest parent councils that I served on for my sons' elementary school. Feisty, would be an accurate characterization of most of the Moms. There were Dads involved, but they usually only showed up when we needed to call on the "handyman" personae. Looking back I guess I can understand their reticence to be involved other-wise. I chaired the group back then. The trick with dealing with all those strong personalities was keeping our goals front and center in their minds. Not always an easy task. Anyway, at this point in time we were having a work bee; creating materials for an upcoming family night it appeared. We offered parenting workshops, as well as social time, so that a bit of community building could occur among the families, you see. Besides it was fun and quite rewarding when we could all pull together.

At one point one of the women took a phone call. When she returned she was in a rage. Why hadn't we helped her? Huh? Well, we all knew one of her family members was in North Africa - no we didn't and the circumstances wouldn't have fit her family at that point in time, since they were all born and raised Canadians. That family member apparently had run into some trouble with local customs or authorities and she kept insisting - the volume of her voice increasing to a scream - that it was our fault that they were now in jail. We tried to calm her down enough to get more details - such as, which country, for starters. "The one with the oasis." Huh, again? The group started talking among themselves trying to figure out what was going on and what to do to help, but by that time that one woman was in hysterics. Jumping up and down and screaming - oi.

There was a temporal shift for me at that point to current time. Her children are of an age where it might be that one of them may have opted to travel there, but I think she would have let me know. We do still talk about family issues. The actual problem seems to stem from current time, not the earlier incident - which never really happened anyway. Maybe something has happened with one of her children and she is castigating herself for some factor in that past time that might now be coming into play with respect to the trouble. Maybe she was thinking that if only she had parented a different way back in that earlier time, then this wouldn't be occurring now. Assuming, of course, that something is actually occurring. It is just a dream after all. Isn't it? Maybe I should send her an e-mail........ or maybe not.

I've been signed up now for one job that is task based. The company posts the jobs as they are available and the first person to sign up gets the work. Fine by me. To prepare, I've gone through some of the training modules and read some of the experienced workers' comments. It actually looks like interesting work. The problem is that though I signed up a few weeks ago there hasn't been any tasks posted for this city since. One step forward and then a couple back I guess. Worked in their database again today. Want to be ready, don't you know - just in case....

Next up called the one agency where I interviewed a while back. I had been corresponding back and forth with the interviewer for a few weeks and then she stopped responding. Deciding that either she felt I was being too pushy or maybe that she had taken a holiday I backed off. This week was week three of absolutely no communication, yet the newspapers are still claiming there are a lot of jobs out there. Decided I'd better make voice contact to find out if there was a problem. I had hesitated longer than I should, because I am still having some difficulty dealing with the posting of my electoral district you see. Remember the one woman who worked in my office, who called a while back, is a civil servant in her other worklife too. She was the one who had held forth for a long time about the politics driving the decision to let nearly 40% of the electoral districts be posted as vacant, when they weren't. She pointed out that with that broad of a stroke, it was definitely a political decision that had no bearing on the individuals - like me - who were in those EDs. Intellectually I can deal with that, but it is still hard not to take it very personally - especially when one has done so much extra work to make certain the job was done well. She, my staffer, had noted that statistically it took about two years for a worker to fully deal with a termination, such as I had experienced. I'm not certain where she drew that information from, but it was comforting in a strange way. Anyway in real time right now, it means I'm still a bit tetchy when it comes to issues of rejection. One of those inevitable side issues when job hunting. I wasn't certain I wanted to hear that the difficulty placing me had something to do with me, myself. I thought that one of the barriers might be the wage range I've asked for. I need to be certain that I can at least cover my monthly bills - right? I can't afford to pay to go to work nor do I think I'm physically capable of going back to carrying two jobs. The battery is recharged, but I don't want to drain it so that I'm back being sick again.

All that was sort of whirling around in my head, when I decided to take the chance of asking straight out what the problem was. Turns out that the interviewer I dealt with is no longer employed with the agency. There was "a sudden and significant restructuring of the company" just recently and a number of staff are now gone. Not only that, but apparently all the files (like mine) were not passed on to the remaining workers. Ohhhh. The woman who took my call was able to pull up an old copy of my resume - sounded as though it might be two or three years old - and said they actually had some jobs for me, if I was available to start immediately. Hmmmm. I asked why she wasn't able to draw my current resume from the collective database of the company, but never did get an answer for that. No point arguing the issue, but it means going through the entire interview process again. Oh well. Scheduled that for next week. It frustrated me that no one had called any of the people whose files had been abandoned when the other staff were let go, but that likely wasn't the fault of the remaining staff, since the woman who spoke with me apologized repeatedly. Even so, I was feeling very sorry for the woman who had worked with me initially - she had been so professional and yet pleasant too. Nice combination. And another lesson, I guess, that sometimes what is done to one in a workplace isn't tied to one's work ethic or ability. It's all about the corporate bottom line. Humans don't really matter.

So now I have two interviews - another agency I had contacted told me to "come on down" - the morning after this long weekend - Queen Victoria's birthday, eh wot and what a feminist she was too. As well, I'm hoping that some tasks will be posted for that other job next week so that I can finally get some money coming in. I'll be grateful for just enough to pay the bills - at least for a while. Continued reading and exercising trying to stay positive and productive while waiting for something to emerge. There must be a reason for the way things are unfolding - right dear diary? Good night.

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