a girl's best friend

So I’m looking for a job. I’ve been reluctant to openly discuss this on here for several reasons (it’s why I stopped blogging for a while), but it’s time to come out. The whole job search process completely took over my life this summer, but I hadn’t let anyone at work know and was worried about potential future employers reading anything here. During one interview someone mentioned that they had read my blog, which completely caught me off guard, even though I often mention blogging in my cover letter.

I’ve had seven interviews and have turned down two potential offers. I was lead on for a while by Carnegie Hall, from whom I actually received a rejection letter yesterday (why?). I cut things off with a tech company that builds automated customer service instant messenger "bots" – the company had a weird, unpronounceable name and then suddenly changed to different, equally weird, unpronounceable name. I interviewed at a non-profit where the guy interviewing me looked me in the eye and said, "What do we sell? We sell awareness."

The best story, though, comes from an interview that never happened. A couple of weeks ago I got a message from a woman who wanted me to come in for an interview, but I couldn’t make out the name of the company. After going through my sent messages, I realized that she was calling me in response to a vague ad doing web production for an e-commerce company (which I figured could fall anywhere from really interesting to really illegal) that I had applied for the day before.

When I called her back, a man with a British accent answered by saying the last four digits of the phone number I had called. He was quite suspicious of me until he realized who I was and then transferred me to the woman who had left the message earlier. She asked about my availability and set up an interview for the following Monday, reminding me twice that I would need a government issued ID to enter the building, but offering no information about the company or the position. After she emailed me directions, I checked out the domain name from her email address and found out that I would be interviewing to work for an online diamond retailer. (Maybe it's because Julia and I have been watching a little too much of Spike TV's mediocre Blade series lately, but doesn't that guy look like he's a vampire going in for the kill?)

Already sensing some shadiness, I decided to Google her name. Here’s where things get really weird: the ONLY result was for some foreign-language site that appeared to be commemorating the victims of the tsunami disaster, and she appeared to be listed AS ONE OF THE VICTIMS. Had this woman stolen someone’s identity? Was she a ghost? After some research (can you tell I need a more challenging job?), I figured out that the site was in Swedish, and used an online Swedish text translator to translate the one line of text on the site, which yielded the following result:

"Here is all that has lit a light for the hit in the river balance disaster."

That clarified nothing. I spent the weekend trying to decide whether to call off the interview or not. Julia thought I was crazy for even considering going to the interview and helped me paint a mental picture of a huge international slavery/black market diamond ring. But my friend Jackie almost convinced me to follow through just to pitch the whole thing as a New Yorker "talk of the town" piece.

The following Monday at work, my friend Jenn called her Swedish husband to have him translate the text. It turns out that the woman merely lit a virtual, online candle for the tsunami victims (hence the "all that has lit a light" translation). I kind of wish I never found that out – it really kills the story. I still cancelled the interview, though. Something told me this was not the beginning of positive employment situation.