This doesn’t have a lot to do with the post. I just saw Johnny Mnemonic for the first time this week. And the vibe seems to match the post’s title. Source.
Pardon the interruption to our regular service. When I first thought about writing a post this week, I was going to say I just tended to leave my week post until too last-minute and didn’t want to do another checking-the-box style one like last time. However, my energy levels have been really unreliable lately.
I found out why on Thursday and Friday. Turns out what I thought was some weird chest congestion thing was actually pneumonia! It hadn’t laid me out, so I didn’t think it’d be anything that gnarly, but one urgent care visit and then an x-ray appointment later, here I am. I’m on antibiotics and currently in the realm of freaking out about any little temperature change my body goes through. Mostly because the urgent care nurse was like “hey if it gets worse or you get a fever, go to the ER.” Which is a great way to send my anxiety into overdrive. Whee. Thankfully, it’s been a few days and while I’ve run slightly hotter than my usual, I’m still just at normal human temperatures. The antibiotics have started to kick in and I’m trending towards feeling better generally, so fingers cross the positive trend continues.
So yeah, I feel better about being lower energy lately. I still have had days recently where I got a lot done, but I’m forcing myself to just rest all day so I can try to fully shake this off and not prolong it. I’ve already had it for 2+ weeks, thinking it was just allergies or something, so I’d like to wrap this shit up. Also to not be contagious again, so I can do such fancy things as “go to the store” and “buy a donut.”
Plus, pneumonia? What is this shit? As I said to a friend, it feels like if I’m getting this I should be some 1800s arctic explorer. Everyone seems to be taking turns getting sick these past couple months, so I guess it was my turn. Hopefully this is the last time for a while. I have enough other shit going on and draggin’ me down.
Speaking of! That library job I wrote the Hurry Up and Wait post about ended up being given to someone else. At least I think I made it to the last round of candidates? I made it beyond the point in the last post, and they went forward with checking in with my references. It sucks because I thought they were just dotting I’s and crossing t’s before offering me the position only to find out it was still a competitive point in the process. I emailed asking for feedback just in case there’s anything they can tell me. In part because I want to look inside the black box of the hiring process and because if it turns out I really blew something in the interview (or one of my references secretly hates me), it’d be good to know!
I’m pretty sore it was a three week wait between “hey we’re going to start checking your references” and “sorry, we went with someone else.” And I submitted my application in November originally, and they first contacted me about doing an interview in mid-December. So the whole thing took like 2-3 months. The most recent three week wait during the reference check was the worst because I stopped applying to other jobs, because I wanted to know for sure about the library job first. So I ended up just losing three weeks of job searching, essentially. Granted, if I’d known from the start it’d take three weeks I might’ve kept going anyway, but in theory I thought I was going to hear from them any day. Yeah. I’ll still apply there again, for sure, but I’m not super impressed with the process process from an applicant perspective. sigh
I do have a couple of mildly-promising leads this week, though. One place I cold-applied to wants to do a phone interview. A friend from high school got in touch and referred me to a position at his company, so I’ll be talking to the recruiter there, too. I’m a bit nervous about doing phone interviews because of being sick, but my throat’s not doing too bad and I’m not coughing much. I managed a 30 minute call with my mother without real trouble yesterday, so I should be able to take on a couple of 30-ish minute calls without too much trouble. Hopefully one of them works out. The company my friend gave me a referral for is apparently the best one he’s ever worked for, and the job would be adjacent to work I’ve done in the past in a way that would let me learn a bunch of new skills and move out of the just tier 1/2 tech slot. That does mean that I don’t have a lot of the skills already, though. Which could be a problem! But I’ll talk tot he recruiter-person and see what they think. And if it doesn’t work out with me, while referrals aren’t exactly transitive one of my old co-workers at the pet insurance company might be a good fit, so I’ll tell her to at least apply to it even if I can’t help her skip the line.
So that’s a lot of the news that’s worth reporting. My habit checkboxes are going to be a fucking wreck this month, but honestly after finding out I was sick for most of the month I’m pretty okay with that. Mostly. Kind of.
Fingers crossed that stuff gets better. Preferably sooner rather than later.
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