Going to Shake Myself Right Out the Door, Going to Thank Myself When It’s Finally Over

Well, faithful readers, I had an interview yesterday and I think it went fairly well. I definitely had the good vibe going on during the meeting, and I left feeling pretty good about it when it was all done. I usually don't get worked up or scared of interviews since I make sure that I'm prepared and rehearsed and I typically do fairly well during them. Admittedly I get nervous, but not out of fear of the actual interaction, but because of the importance placed upon it and what can be gained (or lost) by the whole ordeal. This was for a position doing something completely different than what I am doing now, so I was worried going into the interview that I was going to completely blow it. Sure, that's a fear that a lot of people have going into interviews, but in this case I feared that they would realize that I was unqualified for the position, expose me, and then ridicule me openly for even wasting their time with the interview.

That fear wasn't completely unfounded. The questions were a nice blend of your typical interview questions along with technical questions related directly to the position. So, I would get a softball like "What are your greatest strengths?" followed by "How do you define a public improvement fee and how would determine upon which businesses this fee should be levied?" Or I would be asked a creampuff like "What do you feel has been your greatest achievement?" right before being hit with "Define a Use Tax and explain the steps you would take in auditing a company to ensure their compliance with this tax"... um, ok....

So, I completely BS'd my way through those questions, but I think I knew enough from my current work experience and through the classes that I have taken to at least give satisfactory responses. I never hesitated or backtracked, and I did my background research on the position, so at least I sounded confident even if I was ignorant. I did get one "good answer!" from both of my interviewers (it was a dual attack), so that was cool I guess. I don't know if I did well enough to get the job, but I left with no regrets or feelings that I performed poorly. I applied to another position with the same organization (they even asked me if I did apply to that position) so even if I didn't make the cut this time, hopefully they will remember me doing well for next time. It couldn't hurt...

And by now you have probably figured out that I applied to a tax auditor position (cue "Taxman" by the Beatles). Yes, if I get the job I will be the bad guy that people love to hate. But, hey, I've been the bad guy for the past 7 or 8 years, whether I was collecting unpaid bills or in my previous job turning off phone lines. I take it with a grain of salt. Someone has to do it, right? It pays, it is a heck of a lot closer to my house, and it will be extremely good experience down the line. Just doing this little job search now I have seen a lot of really good paying accounting jobs high up in companies, but they almost all require auditing experience. With my financial experience I have now along with that auditing experience (should I get the job), I will be sitting quite pretty in three years. If I get my CPA on top of all of that, then I'm headed for the big time for sure.

Yes, I've completely sold out. However, I sold my soul for the corporate world long ago when I left History grad school and went into business school so there's no turning back now...

Anyway, I don't know if I'll get the job or not, but at least I'm out there trying. It sure beats sitting here and being miserable. Ironically, the Big Boss Lady is going to be in town today to give me my annual review (they now have to do all reviews in the first quarter regardless of hire date, so mine got moved up from the summer. yee haw!). I wanted to tell her not to bother, but who knows how long this job search might last and I'm not ready to tell the company to kiss off yet. At least I'll get a free lunch out of the deal...

Oh, finally, I have heard the new Modest Mouse and it is good. Very good. I still like The Moon & Antarctica better, but I for sure wasn't disappointed. I totally dug it and recommend it to all. I recommend all Modest Mouse albums to all. They rule.

Lookin' Real Hard and I'm Tryin' to Find a Job But It Just Keeps Gettin' Harder Every Day

Well, faithful readers, it's time for an update on the job search. In the closing of my last post I mentioned that I had received a call from a reputable company local to Fort Collins regarding a good position that I was very interested in. After that initial phone interview, the human resources lady on the other end advised that if I hadn't heard from the hiring manager by the 14th to give her a call on the 15th to get a status update. Well, readers, I spent the time between that initial call and the 14th researching as much as I could on the company and the position so I could make sure that I was fully prepared for that second interview. On the 14th I sat here with my phone and packet of info ready just waiting for the call. Alas, the call was never to come. So, mid-morning on the following day I called the HR lady back to get the status check. She advised that since the hiring manager had been traveling internationally the previous week he was currently trying to catch up and was behind in the interviewing process. The position was indeed still open, however, she advised that there were several internal candidates also vying for the open spot. I was relieved to hear that the non-callback was not a snub, but I admit I was a bit disheartened by the news of the internal candidates. Although I feel I am a slam-dunk as far as their required qualifications go, an inside person always has an edge since they already know the inside workings of the company (not to mention the hiring manager personally, most likely). The HR lady said that she would probably know more by today and would give me a call to let me know, but here it is a little bit after noon and still no call. Lame. I really liked that job, too.

So, I was feeling a bit dejected because of the events detailed above and the day-to-day at my current place of employment wasn't making me feel any better. It has gone beyond the point of petty annoyance and frustration. We on the financial staff have been instructed to engage in a procedure that at the very best is extremely bad accounting and at the worst in violation of Sarbanes-Oxley. This information was passed on to me by one of my sales rep friends with a kind of "can you believe this?!" message attached and I immediately forwarded it onto the Big Boss Lady and the other financial members noting a handful of red flags and expressing my extreme reservations about following this procedure. The response back I received from the BBL basically said, "this is the new procedure and this is how we will be conducting it" along with some more instruction. Not a single one of my red flag examples were addressed. One of the other financial managers said that she completely agreed with me and that she would also express her dissent in writing as well and then print out a copy for when the federal investigators show up. Good advice...

So anyway, I was kinda bummed out on my drive home yesterday when my phone rang. I expected it to be the mrs., but instead it was for another job that I applied for. They wanted to know if I was available next week for an interview. Heck ya! I was totally back in my upswing. Funny thing is, though, that when I was applying for this job I thought there was no way that they would even bother considering me for it since I didn't really have the experience to back it up. But apparently I BS'd enough in my cover letter to convince them otherwise. Pretty groovy. Once again, though, competition will be very heavy for this position. Even more than the other position that I was called back on. So, I am now trying to do as much research as I can for this job to make up that experience deficit. Keep those fingers crossed...

And finally, this one is for Sassinak. I get sent the Merriam-Webster word of the day every morning and Sass for sure would grok why this is pretty darn cool:

The Word of the Day for February 16, 2007 is:

grok • \GROCK\ • verb: to understand profoundly and intuitively

Example Sentence:
No matter how many times I try to explain it, my grandmother just can't grok what a blog is and why anyone would want to read one.

Did you know?
"Grok" may be the only English word that derives from Martian. Yes, we do mean the language of the planet Mars. No, we're not getting spacey; we've just ventured into the realm of science fiction. "Grok" was introduced in Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The book's main character, Valentine Michael Smith, is a Martian-raised human who comes to earth as an adult, bringing with him words from his native tongue and a unique perspective on the strange, strange ways of earthlings. "Grok" was quickly adopted by the youth culture of America and has since peppered the vernacular of those who grok it, from the hippies of the '60s to the computerniks of the '90s.

Just a Window From the Room We’re Bound to; If You Find a Way Out, Oh Would You Just Let Me Know How?

So you all are probably wondering where I've been. Well, you might have been wondering where I've been. Ok, so you most likely stumbled onto this website by accident and noticed that I haven't posted in two weeks before clicking "next blog" or the back button. Well, there has been a lot going on in johnworld the past few weeks and it has been difficult to get a post off. I will try to recap what I can...

First off this job has been totally sucking lately. This will come as no surprise to those faithful readers who remember when this blog was dedicated to just that subject. Faithful readers might also remember last summer when I complained to my boss about how they expected of me to do a high level job without the high level title and they finally gave me that coveted title. The elation didn't last long, however, once I found out that only my title was promoted and not my paycheck. When I brought that issue up to the Big Boss Lady, she said that we would meet again in January when they do the budgets and we could re-visit the issue.

Well, for those of you who haven't checked a calendar the past five or six weeks or so, last month was January. So, knowing that she was planning to come out to Denver I asked her for a private meeting during her visit. She was coming with her new boss in tow since he was new to the position and we had yet to ever meet each other. From here on out he will be known as "Herr Direktor," simply because, well, he is a Director and he has a German last name. Nothing else is implied...

Anyway, in preparation for her visit I wrote up a two-page argument of why I deserved an increase in salary. I made sure that it was very professional and cited the company's own published directives that state that they must pay me not only in line with others in comparable positions within the company, but also competitively and in line with those in the external job market. In research of evidence to support my argument, I discovered that not only was I getting paid approximately 20% less than the median of all people at my pay grade level within the company, but also I was being paid actually less than the minimum amount that the company had to pay me based on their own salary directives. Those numbers were pretty much equal to what my external market analysis exhibited, again showing that I was getting paid at least 20% less than the median of people performing the same job as I am for other companies.

Please keep in mind these facts: I have a master's degree in business. Each morning I voluntarily drive an hour (on a good day) on my way to work and another hour (on a good day) back home just to work here. I think my job sucks. So basically, I am commuting 2 hours each day to get underpaid to perform a job I am steadily growing to hate. I could provide a pretty long list of people who will testify that I bust my rear end every day for this company. Why am I giving my maximum for a company that is literally giving me the minimum in return?

I made sure that my written argument was very professional, backed up by numbers, devoid of negative emotion, and I cut out all that stuff about hating my job. The Big Boss Lady pretty much anticipated what I wanted to meet with her about, so she brought some numbers of her own. She acknowledged that I was making less than the minimum and agreed to bump me up immediately. Wow, that's a couple hundred bucks spread out over a year, but I appreciated the gesture. Basically she told me that she had budgeted me a 5% increase effective in June and that was the most I was going to get. That still would put me well below my market value, internally and externally. I told her that I would accept that if she could get me out of the daily commute and let me work from home. I would come in one day a week if I had to, travel more to HQ and to customer sites, and do whatever it took to make it work. She said that she knew of no one in the company who worked in Finance who worked remotely. I reminder her that since I work for corporate and not Denver, that I have been working remotely for the past 3 years and have proven it works. I literally drive 55 miles each day to sit at a computer. I don't actually work with anyone in Denver. The only change would be the drive. She said that she couldn't make that approval and would discuss it with Herr Direktor. Meeting over.

After that, I spent a couple days with the Big Boss Lady and Herr Direktor in town. We had a couple meals out and I got to meet the new big boss. He didn't seem like that bad of a guy. I found out that we even went to the same school in Wisconsin, although I finished up at Colorado State. The day after they left, however, he called me up and asked me to find a private line. First, he told me that there was no way that he was going to let me work from home. His argument was that if he let me work from home then everyone would want to work from home and he would have to subjectively decide whose commute was worse, who deserved it more, etc. I reiterated the fact that I was already working remotely, but he wouldn't hear any more on the subject. Then he turned down my request for a salary increase request. He proceeded to tell me that the only way I could make more money was to accept a new position elsewhere. I told him that I had been offered opportunities to relocate before and that the answer would always be "no." My family and I had an extremely financially and emotionally damaging experience the last time we moved for a job with the company (to Minnesota) and that we would never leave Colorado again.

Then he told me that I was in a "unique position" here with the company. I had a recognizable name and that the CFO and VP of Treasury often discussed me for promotion when openings came up. In fact, he had just spoke with the CFO that morning and if I was interested in an opportunity in Boston I would get an automatic 20-30% increase and get bumped up a pay grade. No, we aren't moving. Plus, the cost of living in Boston is like 50% higher than here, so I would actually be making less... Then he pretty much said that if I stayed in Denver, I could expect the same piddly increases each year and basically go nowhere in my career. He said that he knew I had a "hard choice to make" and ended the call.

The Mrs.'s response to that was, "no, you just made the choice a whole lot more easier" and she was right. She pointed out that if a CFO and VP of Treasury in one company were impressed by my work, then a CFO and VP in another company would be impressed by my work. If they make no attempts to try to keep a good employee, even meeting me halfway, what reason do I have to stay with them? They have not given me a single one.

On top of all of that, this job is just getting more and frustrating by the day. Since about last summer when our customers' distribution center went to a new computer system, things have really hit the fan around here. It has been a huge source of frustration for everyone and despite my trying to bring up the ugly subject of correcting these problems very many times my pleas for change have been ignored. Another result of this conversion is that my job has ceased being a "financial" job. I no longer do credit or financial statement analysis, I don't do collections, customer contacts, number-crunching, or any kind of actual critical thinking or decision making whatsoever. I spend my day auditing thousands of sales order line items for accuracy to make sure that our invoices don't get bounced back from their system when we electronically transmit them over. This isn't finance. This is quality control. Plus, once corrected, all of these line items just get bounced back again for some other reason, making us have to start the whole thing over. We haven't been paid for almost $12 million dollars of invoices dating back to June of last year. No one but me seems to care about this issue or the crazy interest expense that we are eating because of it. Tack onto that the fact that my computer was down for the past week because of an IT person's error that she couldn't correct and I am getting pretty fed up with the whole deal. I am totally wasting my potential. I definitely need more.

So, faithful readers, I am currently on the look out for greener pastures. I have a pretty narrow search, though, because my job needs are pretty high. The position has to be in Fort Collins, or very close to, so I can get out of this horrible commute. No more 4-hour drives when it snows and no more rollover accidents to contend with each week. The job also has to pay at least as much as I am making now or more. I am hoping for more, but since the overall market in Fort Collins is a lot smaller than Denver, I will take equal pay if it is in a good growth position for a good company. There has to be good health and compensation benefits as well, because admittedly, I have pretty good ones now and they would be hard to give up, especially with the girls to consider. And finally, I want to get in with a good, reputable company who treats their employees well and there is a strong possibility for growth. A company headquartered locally would be optimal, so I don't have the constant pressure to move that I have had to endure for the past 3-4 years. I know that's asking a lot, but it's not impossible. I just have to be patient and the right position will come. In fact I got a call back a few days ago from a decent-sized company HQ'd in Fort Collins for a position that looks really good. It was just a preliminary phone interview to screen me before passing me on to the actual hiring managers so I'm trying not to get too excited yet, but admittedly I am excited nonetheless. The market is pretty tight here, so I'm most likely up against some good competition for the spot. If you could all please keep your fingers crossed for me and send some good vibes my way, I would super appreciate it. In the meantime, I'll keep you all posted on how the search goes. I promise...