Phone Interview

Awooo! The Hunt is On.

The past three weeks have seen an unprecedented level of pandemonium, procrastination, and hospital visits.  Let it suffice for me to say that I appear to be in good working order and that no one should be alarmed.  I even made a good series of drawings when I had to stay up all night before the EEG--every neurological exam has a silver lining, right?  Those will go up soon.

The big project now is finding meself a job for the ol' summer.  I tackled my college's career office website for the first time tonight.  That was a mistake.

I fumbled through the labyrinthine website and found a job search engine.  After lightly restricting the search results to "during the summer" and "in the United States," I scrolled through 132 consulting jobs with increasing rage.  I think the problem is that I'm not interested in grown-up things like "implementing media campaigns" or "providing financial advisory services".  My interests are a bit more elemental, like "eating" and "not dropping crumbs on myself while eating".

I tried to prod the search engine into giving me something that wasn't consulting by putting in keywords related to my interests.  The formerly infinite job list erased itself.  "Share and Enjoy!" smiled the career counselors from their homepage.   After another twenty minutes of fiddling with the Advanced Search Options, I ended up with a handful of things that didn't sound awful--but none of them were paid.  I let out a velociraptor screech and dragon-kicked my computer across the room.

What am I looking for?  Well, my IDEAL job would probably be Humor Filter, if housing was included.

To help myself out, I decided to brainstorm a list of my skills:
--I can read really fast
--I can walk on my hands
--I can run long distances without getting bored
--I can speak French proficiently (and I hope to be fluent by this summer)
--I can curl my tongue and make a lot of startling faces
--I can draw cartoons in response to realtime stimuli (and I've got more coming soon)
--I can make people laugh
--I can write and edit very well under pressure (according to my parents, it isn't really good that I've discovered this about myself)
--I can beat almost anyone in Bananagrams
--I can organize and take responsibility like nobody's business
--I can wake up early, no problem
--I can hang out in the woods at night without getting scared
--I can cook really good fried eggs
--I can bellydance a little bit

Huh, that's not so bad.  What I'm NOT good at is managing my time and finishing things by their due dates.  Sixteen and a half years of schooling have gradually numbed my reaction to deadlines to the point where I have basically become immune to them.

"I lose 1 out of 10 points if this is late?  Ehh, that's not so bad," mumbles my complacent brain.  And another night of frivolous time-wasting slides by.  I think the part of me that used to be afraid of academic consequences up and died sometime during my freshman year.  That would explain the smell, anyway.

Unfortunately, potential employers think the ability to complete tasks is really important for some reason.  So I'll have to try attacking the job hunt from a different angle.  I'll do that later.

Wanted: Humor Filter

I wonder if there is a market for the job of “Humor Filter.”  Sites like StumbleUpon work pretty well in that they allow you to make a list of your interests and then present you with content from those categories, but of course, not EVERYTHING that turns up is as relevant or as amusing as you want it to be.  What if you could actually hire a person with similar interests to trawl the funnylands of the Internet and present you with the best finds?

Before I was really into 9gag, I simply creeped on the user page of one of my friends and looked at the things that he had Liked.  He has good taste.  I enjoyed having my humor filtered through a reliable source, and told him so.  Then I realized that I, too, was already kind of a Humor Filter for my dad.  He is a real grown-up and has grown-up things to do all day—but I don’t.  I’m a college student.  I live in a training wheels version of real life.  Spending all day scavenging the Internet for scraps of entertainment is perfectly normal.  When I find something that makes me weep and drool with laughter, I send it to my dad.  And he sends back words of appreciation.

I think this could be a very profitable job.  The trick is to find a client who has 1) the same sense of humor as you, 2) not enough patience to spend their entire life clicking “Next Page,” and 3) bags o' cash.