Monday decided early to be one of “those days” and started out by artfully arranging a traffic accident that caused me to be 20 minutes late in getting to work. While I am appreciative of having a job to go to after several months of unemployment and temp work, it just so happens that I hate my current job. After I got to the office, I managed to slop chocolate pudding (which I NEVER usually eat) down the front of my WHITE blouse … which I was able to (mostly) sponge off … but I then had to walk around the office with a large wet splotch centred perfectly on my chest for the next couple of hours. Did I mention that I had an interview scheduled for that afternoon? . . . I got to my interview on time but didn’t know that the building which housed the law firm did not have a parking garage in their actual building, which is pretty typical in downtown Houston. It is standard procedure to park in one building in their multi-level garage, ride the elevator into the basement, hike through the underground tunnel system to reach your own office building, take an escalator to the lobby, hike another stretch, then get an elevator to the 30th floor. So, I parked at a metre and frittered away all of my quarters on a two-hour allotment. I may have mentioned that Houston has only two temperatures: Hotter Than The Ninth Circle of Hell and Colder Than An Eskimo’s . . . nose. Which brings me to the point where I had to walk through the streets of downtown Houston in 100°F wearing a black business suit and closed-in shoes. It was a shame that I was not carrying any groceries because after only one block I could have roasted a chicken, fried a pound of bacon, and passed out nice hot cups of tea to the homeless. Not that the homeless would have appreciated a hot cuppa unless it consisted of 99.9% grain alcohol. I finally arrived at the 36th floor looking no worse than I would have if I had just stepped out of a sauna, just in time to be ignored by the receptionist while she finished up an urgent personal chitchat about her annoying hairdresser. I pretended to browse through that day’s Wall Street Journal, knowing full well that were I to dig out my reading glasses the receptionist would immediately require my non-reading attention. Reading glasses are a necessary evil for most people once they reach a certain age. I am sure that one of these days I will refrain from having to chirpily announce every single time I put them on “These are just reading glasses!”. The problem is that the glasses are ONLY good for reading — I can’t look at anything else and see clearly, so I find myself wearing the glasses on the end of my nose and peering granny-style over the top of them when not actually reading. Which brings us right on time to: The Testing.

Despite my proven work experience, my slick résumé, my outstanding references, and the tests I have already taken at numerous staffing agencies, some law firms still feel the need for the tautological redundancy of testing me again . . . just in case I have recently forgotten how to type, spell, match my shoes to one another, etc. The first batch were written tests on grammar, spelling, and suchlike. Job candidates were given a generous time allowance of about one hour to complete the tests. I breezed through them in something like 10 minutes, scoring 100% on each. Woo.Hoo. Then onto the typing test . . . which SUCKED!!!! [Warning: soapbox speech about to commence] I HATE typing tests as they are simply not an accurate testing tool. Typing tests originated with the typewriter and are based on typewriter-style skills. The vast majority of modern typing tests do not in any way take into account the actuality of computer keyboarding. ALL professional computer users correct themselves as they go along . . . and don’t get me started on the use of speel cheekk. This particular POS test actually penalised the use of the backspace key and scored it as an error!!!! You can see where this is going, can’t you? I got something like 30+ errors and a speed score of about 60wpm. Luckily, I had a copy of my www.typingtest.com test result score (96wpm). Fortunately, *their* tests are designed for computer users! Anyway, then it was onto the MS-Word test … which turned out to NOT be the usual test of overall knowledge of Word (basic, intermediate, advanced). Instead, it was this goddeawful, convoluted hash of modifying pre-formatted styles. The test had a 3-page written instruction manual (I kid you not). My brain just short-circuited and I could not for the life of me figure out what I was doing. After about 15 minutes of blundering around, I gave up and trudged shamefacedly back to the evil receptionist. Who informed me that Interview Lady was on a call and would be with me shortly. Ten minutes later, I realised that my metre only had about 40 minutes of credit left. Evil Receptionist kindly enquired as to whether I would like to air my claustrophobia again by taking the elevator back down 36 floors in order to walk several city blocks in the wax-melting heat to replenish my parking metre only to turn around and reverse the route before they finally released me for another jolly round of urbane warfare. I acknowledged my sincere appreciation of her offer and declined while politely suggesting that she inform Interview Lady of my limited availability.

I bet you are shaking your head at this point, but … as soon as I met with the Interview Lady I told her right up-front about my rotten day and the mess I made of the tests. Within minutes we were both just laughing fit to bust. She said not to worry about it and we proceeded to have a lovely interview. It turned out that the type of work is what I want to be doing, however, Interview Lady repeatedly told me that the attorney is a “yeller” and that he can’t keep legal assistants because of that whimsical little habit. Despite it all, they have been trying to recruit me ever since, to the point of offering to create a short-term marketing position just for me . . . which is also, unfortunately, not what I want to do for a living.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Humour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.