I'm just a cut price person in a low budget land

Where am I in job-hunting, besides demoralized? Well, and disheartened?

So the job I interviewed for at 8 in the freaking morning got back with a rejection very fast, and I don't remember if I already reported that or not. I haven't had any interviews scheduled since then. That's maybe all right, though; it gave ma a window to take my Interview Shirt for dry-cleaning. It's the shirt I got married in, and wore to my aunt's funeral and now it's gotten a lot more use than it had been having. Added together through the year it's probably had more than twenty hours of wearing without washing and, you know, a lot of that was during the summer, with the air conditioner off and me nervous. Nothing you could tell over the screen, but one recruiter had a position that wanted an in-person interview and, fine, then, that'll need to be cleaned for that. Fortunately dry-cleaning is less expensive than you think, if you're not a woman getting women's clothes cleaned. They tried to also give me a reusable laundry bag that I guess is for people who have a regular laundry subscription with them? The bag had got attached to my shirt by mistake and that's fine, I don't need that clutter.

And, despite it all, I keep getting recruiters interested in getting me to work for the State of Michigan. I'm flattered but also wonder how long it'll be before we hit where someone recognizes me from before. There are a lot of positions, though, and presumably a different applicant pool for each of them (on the other hand, look how many of those pools I'm in), so if it really is coming down to a coin toss between me and another person you'd think someday it would come up heads. But I'm also getting to feel like the State of Michigan has decided it has no use for me and I'm wasting good energy pursuing these spots.

I seem also to have hit a strata of recruiters who are extremely insecure, phoning me if I don't answer an e-mail within ten minutes and, with one of them, letting the phone ring twice, then hanging up, then calling to ring twice a couple minutes later, and again. I am told that it is au fait for people to skip leaving messages because a cell phone will report the number of the last caller but, I mean, why would I return a call to a number I didn't know from someone who hasn't told me they intend to call? What is the reasoning here?

I'm also a little tired of being recruited since it seems like every recruiter wants to talk at length on the phone even for things much better done as e-mails or chats. Like, I understand wanting to have some tangible evidence that you're communicating with some person, but I keep getting asked about industry acronyms, all of which sound the same, by people who are apparently holding their phones as far from their mouths as possible. So I'm doing my best to answer ``what is your [ inaudible; presumably experience ] with [ inaudible ] services?'' and I ask them to repeat it two times before giving up and just claiming it's some plausible-sounding number of years. It would be so much faster if we could just chat on LinkedIn or something but somehow that's not how things are done.

I have altogether too few pictures from the October charity pinball tournament but I'll share what I have that's anything.

The trophies bunny_hugger made for the Fear and Trembling tournament. Can you spot the one she worried looked terrible because the gravestone wasn't balanced right? (No.)

Tragically the tournament opened with this clear case of plagiarism.

The painfully quirky vending machine; please note that among the items are bottles of bab oil and of syrup, like you'd want to give drunk people in a bar that has carpeting. The syrup is no longer there but the baby oil is.

bunny_hugger, a peacock, getting The Flip Side ready for a playoff match.

Getting ready to actually play the game. And you can see some of the year-round decorations of the bar.

The tape is one way to make up for The Flip Side not having a tilt: if they shove the game to where the legs are past the tape lines, the game is over. This does mean you need someone watching play constantly since otherwise you could do a lot of mischief. (Also, lifting the machine off the table is forbidden, even though it's all right in normal play to whack a game hard enough it lifts up, as long as you don't tilt. But otherwise you could just lift the machine so it's physically impossible to drain.)

Trivia: Automobile and airplane engine maker Daimler employed 1.8 workers per machine in 1914, when the Great War began. By 1918 it employed 2.4 per machine. Source: The First World War, Hew Strachan. (The data point is one about how Germany did not have effective controls to be sure that German manpower was not effectively distributed among critical industries.)

Currently Reading: Our Space Environment: Opportunities, Stakes, and Dangers, Editors Claude Nicollier, Volker Gass.