marlyse.comme, myself and my life
Monday, April 5, 2004
Meeting
Put out my resume onto monster.com a few days ago and via RSSjobs I created a few monster.com searches which I followed with my RSS reader.
Very clean and no annoying web advertising into my eyes, no hopping around on various sites, just all in one clean window.
Anways, last Thursday evening I saw a job opening for an Art Director at a local business (roughly 20 minutes drive) and I submitted my resume, even though I have considerable hesitations to take on a full time job - I am so used to freelancing and the freedom of being only a parttimer or self-employed, not sure how I’d fare in such a cage of work hours. But, I thought, having a talk doesn’t hurt.
So I got a call on Friday and had a meeting today with them. And guess what, they are actually also very interested in a parttimer or putting out work on a contractor basis!
Very nice man, and I am quite intrigued by the possibility of this job.
But I learned two very important lesson: NEVER rely on somebody else to make the interview perfect and NEVER NEVER NEVER try installing software for an interview shortly before hand.
As most of my stuff is on the web, I had asked about internet connection. No problem, my interviewer said. At the last moment before the interview I thought, well, what if it does not pan out?
So I “quickly” wanted to install MySQL on my powerbook and put mancoStudios / marlyse / jandjbuilding all onto it and show it locally… “just in case”. Ha! What is actually an easy install turned into a nightmare, and of course it was not up and running by the time I had to leave. It took me the whole evening to straighten out everything and to cleanly install MySQL plus MyPHPadmin on my powerbook.
So when that didn’t work, I thought, if their net connection doesn’t work, I still can show it via my cellphone data connection - it would have been slow but doable - but then, while packing the bags for the meeting I realized at the last minute that since upgrading to OS X Panther (10.3) I never installed the Verizon Wireless driver and never setup the powerbook to run with my cellphone.
So much for not going with my usual ‘good’ routine of packing and preparing my bag well in advance (I at least would have caught the cellphone flopp).
Well, what do I worry, I told myself - so I will show it via their internet connection. Yeah, right.
Of course then there was a problem with that! First, the meeting room with the ethernet hookup was already taken and busy and in the interviewers office there was no hookup. We talked about all the other things and then he went, kicked out the people in the meeting room and we went there to view the sites.
Ever notice how slow a Mac boots up when you need it to be fast? All that RAM testing and initiating of all the little odds and ends and gagets I use. I might actually need to create a user just for when going to a client, and ensure in that setup to have nothing, absolute nothing launch which I don’t need. It used to be possible under OS 9 to control this aspect under various Location settings, but I haven’t found an easy way under OS X for that.
While getting through the slow boot-up and cancelling Quicken’s request for my master password, TimeLog popping into the foreground with insight to my recent jobs and clients and me quickly quitting it too, I am beginning to get associations of farmsluts, a tremendously funny short-movie.
But we get through this too. Relieved I think that we now can get down to business. Of course not. Even though I could hook up to the internet via their ethernet cable I didn’t get a connection. My interviewer thought it might be his router or something, I wasn’t so sure, but too much in a rush to think it through. I checked the TCP/IP settings and had an incling that those have translated from our home connection and that I need to change there something to adjust to the different environment, just didn’t have enough time to test it, as the interviewer’s attention began slipping.
Lucky enough I did have some prints with me and I did have mancostudios.com locally on my powerbook, so I could show some but not all what I though was important and all in all it was frustrating, as it was not a smooth presentation. But by now the interviewer felt he knew enough of my abilities and was interested enough to have me go to the next level of this hiring process.
So much for being well prepared.
Meanwhile I’ve setup a special Location (external ethernet) in my system preferences and ensured that my TCP/IP settings would work in a similar situation. Also MySQL and myPHPadmin have been cleanly installed.
What I will do to totally avoid similar experiences - thanks Bear for the suggestion - is to create a slideshow with screenshots of my sites. This is a perfect solution, allows me to talk about what I want to talk; select screens or not; no need for an internet connection nor an ethernet connection; not relying on paths to PHP files working locally and nobody will ever go through a full site in the first place, and like this I can just present a selection in a smooth manner.
Next to all of this, the interview was actually really cool, and I even managed to find my way to that location without GPS and without getting lost.
1 Comment »
Leave a comment
Well, it landed in my SPAM folder at first, but the approach was uncommon enough that I’m copy/pasting the email here and so give them what they would like - a link to them on my site - even though that site so far does not have ANY creative jobs section next to showing a ton of “dummy entries” (but does have a few “true looking” jobs listed) and thus would be out of question for myself:
Comment by marlyse — Tuesday, March 21, 2006 #