Friday, November 11, 2005

 

Too Many Miles, Not Enough Sleep

Since my last post, I have been on the road for 12 hours. Coincidentally, I've also slept about 12 hours. I'm back at home, though, and damn glad to be here. I looked for a place to post last night, but the place I was staying didn't have a computer I could use and I couldn't find a coffee shop that had net service either. Unfortunately I don't know Cheyenne Wyoming all that well, other than how to get to Echostar Communications and Little America, two locations I had visited last time I was in Cheyenne Wyoming.

The last time I was in Cheyenne, I was living in Long Beach, California. Having applied for work at Echostar (you would probably know it as Dish Network) times in the past, some of their folks called me to ask if I was interested in a job. I have ample experience in the Direct Broadcast Satellite field, having worked for the other two major providers, USSB and DirecTV.

So they contacted me. I told them that I was going to be in Rapid City over the time that they wanted to interview me, and I could save them a nice chunk of change by driving down instead of being flown out from LAX. Nobody got back to me. I was instructed that people would be getting in touch with me. They never did. I emailed the only guy had been in contact with and asked him what was up. He gave me the email of the woman who was supposed to contact me. I emailed her. She said she wasn't told to call me. Basically, the whole thing turned into a giant cluster fuck.

Eventually we worked out the whole interview thing, and my driving down was fine with them. I was at my parents house when I got a phone call, they wanted me to show up two hours earlier than I had originally planned. This was less than 10 hours than I was going to leave, but I agreed and adjusted my schedule accordingly.

After arriving in Cheyenne, I interviewed. One of the people I was supposed to meet with weren't there. They told me that they call to let me know what time I could meet with her the next day.

I went off to grab some supper before headng back to my room at Little America. I have no idea how long it took me to eat, but by the time I got back to my room I had a message that the woman I was supposed to meet with the next day wasn't in town. Apparently she had no plans of being in town.

That entire interview process was completely screwed to hell. Everything was done poorly and I was lead to believe that I was just a piece of shit for them to do with as they wished.

So when I applied for a recent job at Echostar (a nearly identical one to the ones I held at USSB and DirecTV), it was more as a joke than anything. Like I do with telemarketers, I was hoping to waste their time as much as anything. When I got home from school on Wednesday I had a message from a supervisor at Echostar who wanted to talk to me about the position. Unlike my previous time, this seemed like a really good guy and it was a pleasure to talk to him. After talking to him for a while, he asked if he could set up a phone interview for later that afternoon. I agreed and went back to doing my laundry.

A little while later I was talking to a bunch of managers and after meeting with them they wanted to know when I could travel to Cheyenne for a face-to-face. I told them that would be difficult since Mike and I are travelling to Chicago next week and I really can't afford to be away from school a lot after that.

Around 4:30 on Wednesday I got a call asking if I could come down to Cheyenne on Friday for a 1:30 interview. Since Mike and I are playing in Spearfish tonight I told them that would be impossible. I suggested Thursday. He was OK with that and we set up a 1:30 interview.

Then I let him know how pissed off I still was about my last interview with his company and made him assure me that everyone who was supposed to be there was there. He made the proper assurances and I went on my way.

Wednesday is Dunn Bros. open mic. I usually head down a little early so Mike and I can start playing at 6:45 or so. I stay the whole time so TSA and I can play at the end after he gets off of work. That means I usually don't get home until after 10pm. But I stopped off at my nephew's to retrieve my GPS unit. I had most of the waypoints loaded for a trip to Cheyenne, actually having deleted the waypoints for the Echostar facility and the I-80 exit to get there just a few weeks earlier. So when I finally got home I had another message on my machine asking if I could show up at 1pm instead of 1:30. Fuck, here we go again.....

I rose at 6am after getting to bed after midnight and was on the road by 7am. The drive was uneventful and I arrived at the Echostar gate 10 minutes early for my appointment. I gave my name and was told they were not expecting me. I gave the name of the person I was supposed to meet with, he was not in. At this point I was livid. It was the same damn thing all over again. I stated my reason for being there and was eventually let into the facility.

After that, it was a very normal job interview and tour of the facility. Since I'd done all of this before there were no surprises for me. At the conclusion I had paperwork to fill out, they wanted an actual application, even though they had a resume with exactly the same information on it.

After the paperwork, I told everyone, in the nicest was I possibly could, how pissed off I was about my previous experience with this particular company. The apologies actually seemd sincere.

They gave me paperwork for a drug screening and I headed downtown to piss into a cup. Performing a drug test is no particular big deal to me, though it made me reflect on my own life. My life is definitely not the greatest, but at no point in my life has my job entailed listening to other people peeing then pouring that urine into little viles. There's worse things than being a substitute teacher it seems.

The drive back today was uneventful except that now my right front brake rotor is probably shot. I'd needed to replace the front pads but hadn't been able to do it. Having less than 20 hours advance notice for a job interview 6 hours away didn't help things any.

BOJ

Comments:
Now what are you going to complain about next Tuesday?
 
I'm sure I'll come up with something.
 
You know, jobs suck, why even bother. Teaching anything at all is one of the best things a person can do. Screw money. Do you really need lots of it? Is there a real challenge in working for some dipshit tv outfit? Is there a great deal of satisfaction? Uh-oh, my evil twin is trying to make me say socially unacceptable things. Bye, drive carefully.
 
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