Thirty-Minute Units

Let me begin by saying that my Grandma Bock is having heart surgery today, and any prayers and/or good karma you can send her way would be super-appreciated. Let me reciprocate in advance by issuing my best wishes for you and your families… Now on to some foolishness…

Have you ever thought about how easy it would be to live your life if you only had to deal with it for 30 minutes a week? Simple! Maybe something embarrassing would happen, like you spill coffee all over this report you’ve been working on. Oops! Then you have to bribe one of your friends into staying up all night with you to put it back together at the last minute, but *phew!* you get it done in the nick of time and you’ve got nothing else to worry about for seven more days.

Decided that the website needed a new title; one that wasn’t geographically driven, so here it is. Thought it was fitting. That photo is courtesy of my Grandma Markowski, it’s me on my General Lee Big Wheel. I remember having that Big Wheel, which I’m sure I really, really wanted, and then right about the fall of 1982, I desperately wanted a different one. Fairly typical of how I’ve handled the “having” of “things” up to this point:
Want the thing
Want the thing
Want the thing
Get the thing
Not everything I romanticized the thing to be
Want a new thing that will meet expectations
Lament the thing I have, pining for the thing I can’t get

I’ve gotten back to looking for work hot n’ heavy, went out and filled out some applications at various locations up and down Bluemound yesterday. One of the places I stopped was my neighborhood Brookfield Best Buy, and after I filled me out the application in their online form, a 20-page personality survey followed.

If you know me, you know that I’m not particularly good at lying. Not to say that I haven’t lied, or won’t lie at some point in the future, but you can usually tell when I’m lying. Anyway, I did as suggested by the form, and I answered the questions as honestly as possible, making a few stretches here or there, but never into completely untrue territory. All questions had four possible responses: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, and Strongly Agree. Don’t even get me started on the strict diametric opposition of the potential responses.

So I finish their little test, and they were interviewing people right away, had this “job fair” or whatever going on. I sit down to wait for someone to talk to me about the job. There’s a kid getting interviewed, I swear to God, he was not even 16.

The young woman at the counter asks who I am, explain my situation, (“I desperately require employment, please oh please,”) and she goes to download my application goods from their computer. She explains to me after a moment that, based on the responses I gave in the personality survey, I “don’t fit the criteria for what they’re looking for right now.”

Oh.

But “I can try it again in 30 days.”

Thanks.

So there’s that. I’m gonna go and see if I’m more of a “Circuit City”-type guy. Who can say?

But anyway, being told you’re not “Best Buy material” (I mean what are they looking for??) is a little bit… disheartening. The day’s events led me to think about what would be the Top Five Most Demoralizing Events In My Life To This Point, Omitting Any And All Rejections By Members of the Opposite Sex, Since I Haven’t Even Really Made Any Overtures In That Department for Nearly Four Years, And Honestly, They Only Intensely Bothered Me For A Short Period Immediately After Anyway:

5. The third rejection in a period of six weeks for a job within the M&I Corporation (November 2001)
4. Being considered “over-qualified” for an administrative assistant position (April 2002)
3. First ‘F’ on a test in grade school (6th grade, math)
2. Flunking the Best Buy pre-interview Personality Test (September 2003)
1. Getting passed over for a teaching assistantship after a successful first year of graduate school (March 2003)

You may notice that most of these relate to my professional ineptitude, which I really hope I can figure out how to turn around in the near future.

That’s all.

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