Thursday, June 26, 2008

Gainful employment

The interview today ended early for the best possible reason: the interviewer thought I was so perfect for the job that she didn't feel the need to ask any more questions. They had had me fill out an assessment which included doing some samples of the sort of work I would be doing, and apparently I had the highest score of the applicant pool, an 8 out of 9. And I have the right experience, right computer setup and this job fits well into my schedule. So apparently she didn't need to know any more than that.
At the end of the phone call, the interviewer told me directly that she was planning to recommend me for hiring and told me to make sure I could clear my schedule to do training next week. And sure enough, right now in my e-mail inbox is a job offer. So huzzah!

What a relief. I've been progressively more and more sick of Ebay, and Ebay was returning the feelings by continually implementing new policies designed to drive me away.* It's like Ebay is turning into one of those passive-aggressive boyfriends that tries to break up with you by being a jerk so you'll break up with him. Well, I'm happy to oblige.

But now I can afford to give up Ebay, since this job will be offering a decent amount of hours for a decent rate of pay, enough to substantially boost our monthly bottom line. Plus, there are ways I can increase my pay rate, as well as the opportunity to do more work for this company, in addition to the current project. I'll be rating Internet search results, basically providing a human eye to look at what searches actually produce so search engines can be improved - pretty cool and right up my alley.** And it's like they designed this job for the mother of a small child in mind - it's 20 hours a week, and while I have to work four hours every day, they don't have to be consecutive and it doesn't matter when. I'm planning to put K in some sort of daycare three days a week, both to get her out of my hair and give her the chance to play with other kids, but even if she can't go to daycare for the day, I'll be able to work anyway.

So yes, we're pretty happy here tonight.


*The latest one? They'll keep track of what computer you usually use and if you log in and try to make listing from a different one, they'll make you verify youself. WITH A PHONE CALL. No, this won't be inconvenient for people who use public computers for their main internet access, particularly in places where phones aren't allowed. You know Ebay, all of my online banks have extra layers of protection that just involve extra passwords and special pictures. They're actually convenient in addition to being secure (and protect the user from spoofing, which your current plan doesn't). But of course, doing something that would actually be better for your users is something of an alien concept to you, isn't it?

**In the interview, the interviewer asked if I had a problem with potentially seeing porn sites, since I would be looking at a ton of websites every day and they coudln't guarantee what the content would be. I said I didn't have a problem with it, since I've been searching the web for 14 years now and I'm quite used to random porn encounters. But thinking about it later, it occurred to me that it's been literally years since I've regularly had an innocent web search turn up porn, something that used to be a necessary evil of Internet searches, even with search terms like "all day kindergarten" or "syphilis." Innocent searches used to turn up porn because porn sites would include lots of common terms in their metadata so they would come up on otherwise unrelated searches. But since the advent of Google's approach to searching (rating relevance of sites based on how much they're linked to as well as the terms they include), that doesn't work any more. All hail the power of Google.

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