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In addition to sending off a resume yesterday, I put five dollars into an office Powerball pool. A coworker of mine does these pools when lottery jackpots get high enough, so all I have to do is decide if I want to participate.
Since I did them around the same time, I told George "it has to be better than working on a resume."
That got me thinking about the differences. The odds are better in job-hunting; however difficult and frustrating it may be, you aren't looking at millions-to-one. The investment is less in sending out a resume--a first-class stamp only costs 34 cents, as against this $5/person pool. George seems to think that if he does this at all, he wants us, and him, to have lots of tickets. And since he was willing to drive up to Connecticut, he gets to decide how it works. (He would anyway, under the basic "you created this project, you're doing the work, you get to decide how" principle.)
But with the lottery, however long the odds, if you win you win, and the question then is what to do with the money. The prize in sending off a resume is a chance to play in round two, the Job Interview.
That's the tough one: at that point it's not just 34 cents, it's time, stress, and the possibility of rejection. And, no matter how much you know that there are umpteen people applying, or that it has little to do with how decent and loving you are, it's difficult not to take being turned down for a job at least a little bit personally. At the interview, you're trying to look your best; knowing that a rejection likely is because someone else did even better, not that the interviewer disliked you, isn't always enough. But it needs doing, so I'll do it. Unless, of course, I go in on Monday and discover that we're all millionaires. That would put "what do you want to do when you grow up?" in a whole different framework, because I could eliminate the options whose main virtue is to pay the bills.
The system ate most of this entry--this is revised, and may be revised again when I get back to the machine where I stored the previous version.
Since I did them around the same time, I told George "it has to be better than working on a resume."
That got me thinking about the differences. The odds are better in job-hunting; however difficult and frustrating it may be, you aren't looking at millions-to-one. The investment is less in sending out a resume--a first-class stamp only costs 34 cents, as against this $5/person pool. George seems to think that if he does this at all, he wants us, and him, to have lots of tickets. And since he was willing to drive up to Connecticut, he gets to decide how it works. (He would anyway, under the basic "you created this project, you're doing the work, you get to decide how" principle.)
But with the lottery, however long the odds, if you win you win, and the question then is what to do with the money. The prize in sending off a resume is a chance to play in round two, the Job Interview.
That's the tough one: at that point it's not just 34 cents, it's time, stress, and the possibility of rejection. And, no matter how much you know that there are umpteen people applying, or that it has little to do with how decent and loving you are, it's difficult not to take being turned down for a job at least a little bit personally. At the interview, you're trying to look your best; knowing that a rejection likely is because someone else did even better, not that the interviewer disliked you, isn't always enough. But it needs doing, so I'll do it. Unless, of course, I go in on Monday and discover that we're all millionaires. That would put "what do you want to do when you grow up?" in a whole different framework, because I could eliminate the options whose main virtue is to pay the bills.
The system ate most of this entry--this is revised, and may be revised again when I get back to the machine where I stored the previous version.