Unemployment rant

It’s getting close to 3 months of unemployment. If you can find where the time went, can you let me know? I’d like it back.

The job hunt has been sporadic, and is currently on hiatus. I don’t know what happened, but all the ads for MySQL DBAs disappeared. Not that there were many. I applied for a few a while back that wanted someone with knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL, and never got any responses. Because obviously knowledge of one RDBMS doesn’t make it easier to learn another (Oracle, sure. But MS SQL? C’mon). (My apologies for confusing you non-IT people. It’s too boring to explain.)

So I haven’t applied to any DBA jobs in a while. It’s just kind of insulting. Most of them don’t even mention MySQL anymore, anyways, so I don’t see the point of writing another cover letter of forced enthusiasm only to be ignored again. And I’d rather hang myself than have to work in a Windows environment. No, really.

I think the problem is that disregarding the savings account depleting, I’ve actually enjoyed this time off. Except for the regular doomsday reports about the economy, which are ruining my buzz, yo. But when my phone rings, I often don’t bother answering it unless I’m expecting a call. I love that. I really love that. After all these years of on-call work, there’s something so satisfying about ignoring the phone. And getting a full night’s sleep without the worry of a 3 am phone call. Some of you will, sadly, understand this.

I’ve had a few recruiters and potential employers contact me, after finding my resume on some site. One job sounded promising, except for it being in Victoria, but the CEO (or owner, anyways) was calling me every 15 minutes for several hours (as I happily ignored the phone). And then the next morning at 8 am. 8 am! After that, I decided not to speak to him on the grounds that if this was how he was to me before I’m working for him, I didn’t want to experience what working for him was like. Then again, I didn’t want to move to Victoria anyways (been there, done that, got the sweatpants with “UVIC” written on the ass).

There’s a job in Toronto I’d be perfect for, and it’s been advertised since the summer (if not earlier), but I got no response from them when I applied in September. I’m just going to chalk it up to either sexism or them having something against west coasters (jealousy, perhaps). But then, it would be just another on-call DBA job for a high-traffic site, and as I said before, been there, done that.

I could apply for a Java developer job. There are tons of those advertised right now, more than anything else in IT land. However, I’m a sucky coder. I admit it; I’ve admitted it before. Actually, I’m not horrible, but I’ve never had any mentoring on it and the few team leads who glanced at my masterpieces told me how unimpressed they were, but without telling me why, which was oh, so helpful in improving my skills. Hey, my stuff worked, it had good error handling, it was well documented. It was just not designed right, in that object oriented fashion that’s the whole point of the Java language. I know, I know.

So there’s no point applying for such a job, unless I want to go for a junior-ish position with a massive pay cut and start over. If I were interested in being a coder I’d do it, but I still have hopes for database-related work. Although they’re diminishing over time.

I’m still crossing my fingers for the job I wrote 2 tests for (and had 3 phone interviews! Stress!) but they’re waiting on their head office to approve hiring me, which means I’m in a limbo state of maybe sort of might be hired someday. This is certainly better than being rejected outright, obviously, but I can’t celebrate this either. It’s sort of an employment cock-tease, and I’m feeling frustrated and unsatisfied.

My contract work is ending this week, and after that, there’s nothing. I may never work again (you never know). Really, besides the lack of money, it’s not that bad. I’m surprised at how much I don’t miss having a job, given how I over-dedicated myself to the last few. I had always assumed that life would cease to have meaning if I wasn’t working. I guess this is what it’s like to be recovering from burnout. At least I’m feeling much better now.