The joys of the job search

I love looking through the job postings on www.indeed.com.  After a couple weeks perusing the hundreds of daily postings, I've identified a few ways to avoid listings that are guaranteed to waste my (not so) precious time.

1. Avoid job titles including the words casualty, armed, and infectious.
2. "Independent Consultant" really means "we're not going to pay you."
3. If you don't know what the acronyms stand for, you're probably not qualified for the job.
4. Mystery shopping gigs and work at home ploys are ultimately scams.
5. Anything posted by NES Staffing is likely to be an identity theft scam, as they immediately send you a request for a background check that asks for your Social Security number.

     Apparently the most sought after professionals today are Speech Language Pathologists.  There are at least twenty postings a day from various school systems desperate for SLPs.  Nurses and doctor type people are also in high demand.  There were two postings today begging for Urologists.  I have to respect anyone that devotes their career to the care and preventative maintenance of people's peepee systems.  I wish I knew how to administrate a network or develop an SQL JMS thing while having MQ experience, because the people writing the job listings seem to want people who know what those things are to do their jobs for them.  I bet I could BS my way into an interview by making up a resume with a bunch of cool acronyms in it but if they put me in front of a computer and asked me to actually Java something I'd probably poop my pants.  I don't want to poop my pants.
     I was supposed to go for a job interview today at some photography place in the mall where they pass hundreds of kids a day over Santa's lap for some generic Christmas nostalgia at a reasonable price.  Some kind of benevolent power must have decided to intervene on my behalf by sending down a clusterfuque of random bad luck that prevented me from getting to the mall on time.  First, paving on I-89 cut traffic down to one lane which cost me about ten minutes.  Then I realized the directions I had printed out were flawed after I ended up at the river and not the mall.  By the time I figured out how to actually get to the interview, I was half way across town and five minutes late.  I should have factored in rush hour traffic in downtown Manchester, which apparently includes pedestrians running amok across the intersections and every light turning red as I approached.  Needless to say when I called the photo studio to inform them of my tardiness, their reply was essentially 'yeah....we'll call you sometime.....to reschedule.....'.  Oh well, I have a feeling that I would have wound up in an elf costume handing out candy canes to blubbering hordes of adorable precious children.
  The interview I had yesterday went surprisingly well.  The people in the garment laundering industry seem to be uniformly awesome.  If everything goes my way, this job has the potential to be the absolute opposite of sucking.  I'm trying to stay positive but not get my hopes up too much.  Wish me luck!

Check out my parents' new baby kitty!  I named her Cupcake and apparently it stuck ;).