sticks and stones

6 October 2007 in 9-5, the everyday

I was thinking the other day how four months ago, I was still desperately job-hunting. I remember reading posts online about job satisfaction and career paths and interviewing. In my full-time search, I’d had many terrible interviews, convincing me that whatever job I settled for would be disappointing. I’d resigned myself to that, honestly, unsure of how that would really play out.

If you’re at that point right now, or anticipating being at that point, please don’t get discouraged. A great job can pop up when you least expect it. The position I have now is everything I wanted it to be: I write and edit every day, I have plenty of opportunity for growth, it’s challenging, it’s close to home, it’s fun.

So it can happen to anyone. I recommend patience and persistence and definitely following up with every single lead, but really: in time, it’ll happen.

Having said that, let me also remove any totally rose-colored views of what the perfect job will be like. As I said, I love my job and I couldn’t be happier. YET: there are drawbacks with absolutely everything in life. For me, at this point, there is one big drawback: nasty, obnoxious words.

To maintain some privacy at this anonymous blog, I don’t write about where I work. Suffice it to say, though, at my company, many people evaluate everything I and my assistants write, and they have opinions on it. Most of them are very professional, constructive opinions, which I’m thankful for. Sometimes though, we get the high-maintenance, I’ve-got-something-to-prove, pain-in-the-butt responses that are less about the writing and more about US. That stinks sometimes.

I also deal with a lot of freelance writers, and this comes with its own problems, as I’ve written before. This week, it involved a woman threatening me with a collection agency or lawsuit for not responding to her previous e-mails. (E-mails I’d never received and that she was not interested in forwarding to me.) She wrote that I was young (she’s never met me, but I guess could tell by my voice on the phone?), defensive, and worthy of chastisement from her teenage children. I’m serious. Because she hadn’t gotten paid for her total of four or five assignments, she contacted me one and only one time with a vicious hate letter. I explained that I don’t handle payments but that I would check with the department that does; I assume they didn’t get her invoices if she hadn’t gotten payment. Her response: “Are the people at your company unable to open an envelope or to click on an e-mail?”

Cold.

Back to the positives, though: I have the authority to remove this woman from our database of active writers, which I did. She should have been removed earlier, according to the notes. I know she’s a jerk, and thankfully she’s an exception. But this situation, coupled with a few minor crises earlier this week, makes me so glad it’s the weekend.