Furthermore: November part 1

November 4, 2003

Jobhunting

Yesterday I sent a CV into Thoughtworks - a consultancy, but I’ve heard good things about them. Also trawled Jobserve and came up with six leads. Send my CV off to those and got 2 phone calls back within the hour - one from Rakesh at Microcom and the other from Paul and Starfish. I also followed up Lime Tree and Blackley, but Lime Tree has nothing at present, and I’ve not heard back from Blackley yet.

Today I tried to follow up some personal contacts. Sent an email to Tony at APT, and tried to talk to Alex at Omgeo and Don at Heliograph - couldn’t get hold of either one, so have to try those again. More success with John at C24 - I’ve sent my CV in, so I shall talk to him again soon hopefully.

Still no final word from Start about Trayport, and the other four Jobserve applications are also silent so far. I also found another new thing on ECM but the agent I normally deal with is away, so I need to talk to someone else there.

Sunday and Monday

Did a standard circuit on Sunday afternoon. Weather was quite clear — just a little drizzle at times — and surprisingly warm. Just under an hour to get round.

Monday evening I finally got round to going back to the Cantab Hash. Interesting circuit — nobody was quite sure if we’d done it all. Perhaps a bit too much running round the carparks of Cambridge, but good fun in general. Met a few new faces at the Radegund — there may even be someone there who can help me find another job.

November 3, 2003

Carter Beats the Devil - Glen David Gold

(Sceptre, �7.99, ISBN 0-340-79499-2)

I deliberately didn’t read this book for quite some time simply because I saw too many adverts for it. I’m sure this isn’t a good method for judging the quality of books, but I just tend to get a bit contrary when I’m told something is good too many times (similar thing happened when I saw Trainspotting in the shops - I put it down when I read a blurb that said “the best book ever written by a man or a woman”).

In the end though, I read too many positive things about it, and I was in the mood for something light but with some depth to it. Carter beats the Devil is about the magician Charles Carter (a real stage magician of the 20s). Carter is suspected of murdering US President Harding, who dies shortly after seeing Carter perform. The resolution of this mystery is the McGuffin for this tale, but it forms only the skeleton on which is hung a fictionalised biography of Carter’s life.

In some ways my favourite section is that dealing with Carter’s youth, which reminds me somewhat of Robertson Davies’ book World of Wonders — not only because it deals with the early career of a stage magician, but also in the way that, like Davies, Gold manages to combine a light tone with occasional profundity.

Other parts of the book are perhaps not quite so successful — while a book of this kind needs tension in the form of mystery, it sometimes seems that there are too many unrelated events going on at once, so that as the pieces are put together it’s hard to remember what the original shape was meant to be.

Still, this is an entertaining and interesting book, and a remarkable achievement for a first novel. I read it with great enjoyment, and I think it would stand re-reading.

November 2, 2003

Jobhunting

I reached the second stage of selection with Trayport, so I went down to London on Friday for an interview. They were polite, but I don’t think they’ll hire me — I don’t think I would have hired me on the performance I gave in the interview.

I definitely screwed up some technical questions and I think that alone would sink me, but I also found myself saying the wrong things to the more HR related questions. It’s hard to put my finger on it exactly, but I talked too much about negative things that had happened. I also found that they probed to a deeper level than I normally get in interviews — I’d give an answer and they’d want to go down to a level below that. I’m not sure if that was a deliberate technique to unsettle the candidate, or whether it was just that we got off on the wrong foot.

I came home in a bit of a bad mood, and then I got a call from ECM saying that EDS weren’t hiring me either. So not a good day. EDS at least seem interested in talking to me again if a more senior position comes up, and there may be something soon, but I certainly can’t afford to wait to see if that happens.

Objectively, this isn’t really a huge setback — I’ve really only been unemployed for 2 weeks so far, and I have enough redundancy money to last for quite a while yet (months rather than weeks). Psychologically though, it is a bit of a blow. I guess I partly had this hope of going straight into another job (ideally locally) and having the luxury of having some money in the bank. Realistically it’s going to be at least a month of unemployment now, and quite possibly I won’t be back at work till after Christmas.

Also, when you are at work, if you go to an interview and get knocked back, you can always say to yourself that it wasn’t the right job, or that you at least still have your current job to fall back on. When you are unemployed, rejections sap your confidence that you are fit to do any job, and even rejection from something that’s clearly unsuitable is likely to bring on a bit of panic about how you aren’t doing enough to get something — anything — before the money runs out.

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Oh well. Back to the fray on Monday. I think I need to broaden the search a bit — maybe go back to the job boards and see what other agencies have got.