Saturday, January 9, 2010

When it rains, it pours.

During one of the Tampa Bay area's coldest cold snaps in many years, the heat portion of our central heat and air unit crapped out. Temps were predicted to fall to the high 20s last night, but only got to 34°. I was able to pick up a little room heater/fan at Target that seems to be helping a bit this morning. Luckily, it hasn't gotten too cold in the house; it's 62° currently. Warm slippers and sweatshirts are helping to stay comfortable. My cousin runs an AC repair company and is coming out to take a look at our unit. Rick's AWESOME! Hopefully it will be something simple and we'll have the normal heat tonight since it's supposed to be colder overnight tonight. Actually, we probably won't run it until the morning since we usually just pile on the blankets at night anyway. Depending how much the inside of the house cools off today, we may run it a bit this evening just to take the chill out and stay ahead of the cold.


Had a job interview yesterday in response to a resume I submitted earlier this week. It went ok, but it emphasized how much my actual technical skills have stagnated while I was supporting primarily in-house applications for the last 5 years. I acknowledged that with them and explained that with a little bit of refreshing, I should be back in the game. I have 7 more years' experience than they're looking for with some supervisory experience thrown in to boot. All in all, I think it went well and hope they're willing to overlook my rustiness.


I tracked down the email address of the guy in charge of the dept (and who led the interview) and sent him a follow up email on the way home thanking him for the interview. I also answered one of the questions that I couldn't in the interview. I told him that having half the answer in the interview was bugging me on the way home and I researched it to come up with not only that a fix was possible, but a couple of methods to do it. I mentioned in that scenario that while I may not always have every answer, my experience provides me the skills to track it down.

Keeping my fingers crossed. If I land the job, I may get less money than I'm seeking, but it will be better than unemployment and we can get medical insurance again.  
 

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Interview Update

The interview went pretty much as I expected: "expand on your background, what types of jobs are you interested in, what's your salary range, what locations would be acceptable, etc..."


It went fairly well and the recruiter seemed optimistic; she doesn't expect to hear much the remainder of this week since most of her clients are just coming back from the holidays, but she believes she'll start seeing requests next week. She said that in the meantime, I can take advantage of a training site they have in order to familiarize myself with some IT apps/utilities/concepts I haven't worked with before and to refresh myself with some that I haven't worked with in a while. All-in-all, I'm encouraged.


Of course, it also helps that shortly after returning home from one interview, I got a call in response to a resume I submitted a few days ago and now have an interview scheduled for Friday morning at 9. With any luck, this type of response will keep up and lead to something pretty quickly.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

I Have an Interview Tomorrow!

It's just an informational interview with a recruiting firm, but it's a start. The recruiter I spoke with on the phone today said that based on my resume, she couldn't see why clients wouldn't be interested. I'm really hoping this leads to something pretty quickly.