‘Tis the Season for Merriment If Not the Season for (New) Employ-i-ment (LONG VERSION)

It may be the season for frivolity, festivity, and spending dollars on gifts commensurate with your love, affection, and guilt, but you know what it’s not? High time at the ‘ole Employment Corral.

I am here to tell you that the economy is bustling, but it’s slow going down that happy road to employment nirvana right about now. While there’s not a whole lot of “decision” in the decision-making process because of holiday goings-on, it’s what you have to do, your gift if you will, that may lead to season’s meetings.

When I decided to retire from teaching a few years back, returning to the world of media that I love, all I thought I had to be concerned about was making the transition from wearing glasses during interviews to look older to not wearing glasses during interviews so I didn’t look older.

While I am currently seeking a new opportunity and embracing the humbling experience that has me hearing things like “my, that is a mature résumé” and “you have done a lot haven’t you?” it does make me reflect during this season of reflectment. (Is not a word. Is so. Is not. Is so. Now.)

These days when you’re looking for a job, prepare for the Working Before You're Working reality show. This show idea may not go anywhere, but it has motivated me to utilize the very popular holiday song staple 12 Days of Christmas for my very own 12 Days of Holiday Season Job Seeking. In point of fact this list applies to job seeking all year, but I love a good theme, don’t you?

On the first day of Holiday Season Job Seeking my one true prospective employer sent to me:
A 6-page timed cognitive assessment just for me.

On the second day of Holiday Season Job Seeking my one true prospective employer sent to me:
2 online personality tests
and a 6-page timed cognitive assessment just for me.

On the third day of Holiday Season Job Seeking my one true prospective employer sent to me:
3 writing sample requests asking why I consider myself a Marketing Rockstar
2 online personality tests
and a 6-page timed cognitive assessment just for me.

On the fourth day of Holiday Season Job Seeking my one true prospective employer sent to me:
4 real-life work scenarios as writing prompts
3 writing sample requests asking why I consider myself a Marketing Rockstar
2 online personality tests
and a 6-page timed cognitive assessment just for me.

On the fifth day of Holiday Season Job Seeking my one true prospective employer sent to me:
5 online application pages that timed out before I could finish
4 real-life work scenarios for responding
3 writing sample requests asking why I consider myself a Marketing Rockstar
2 online personality tests
and a 6-page timed cognitive assessment just for me.

On the sixth day of Holiday Season Job Seeking my one true prospective employer sent to me:
6 voluntary questions covering gender, ethnicity, and military status
5 online application pages that timed out before I could finish
4 real-life work scenarios for responding
3 writing sample requests asking why I consider myself a Marketing Rockstar
2 online personality tests
and a 6-page timed cognitive assessment just for me.

On the seventh day of Holiday Season Job Seeking my one true prospective employer sent to me:
7 assurances I would be contacted should my skill set be a match
6 voluntary questions covering gender, ethnicity, and military status
5 online application pages that timed out before I could finish
4 real-life work scenarios for responding
3 writing sample requests asking why I consider myself a Marketing Rockstar
2 online personality tests
and a 6-page timed cognitive assessment just for me.

On the eighth day of Holiday Season Job Seeking my one true prospective employer sent to me:

8 form emails thanking me for my interest
7 assurances I would be contacted should my skill set be a match
6 voluntary questions covering gender, ethnicity, and military status
5 online application pages that timed out before I could finish
4 real-life work scenarios for responding
3 writing sample requests asking why I consider myself a Marketing Rockstar
2 online personality tests
and a 6-page timed cognitive assessment just for me.

On the ninth day of Holiday Season Job Seeking my one true prospective employer sent to me:
9 email opt-in messages touting their company’s customer benefits
8 form emails thanking me for my interest
7 assurances I would be contacted should my skill set be a match
6 voluntary questions covering gender, ethnicity, and military status
5 online application pages that timed out before I could finish
4 real-life work scenarios for responding
3 writing sample requests asking why I consider myself a Marketing Rockstar
2 online personality tests
and a 6-page timed cognitive assessment just for me.

On the tenth day of Holiday Season Job Seeking my one true prospective employer sent to me:
10 fill-in frame sentence writing requests asking me why I want to work for them
9 email opt-in messages touting their company’s benefits
8 form emails thanking me for my interest
7 assurances I would be contacted should my skill set be a match
6 voluntary questions covering gender, ethnicity, and military status
5 online application pages that timed out before I could finish
4 real-life work scenarios for responding
3 writing sample requests asking why I consider myself a Marketing Rockstar
2 online personality tests
and a 6-page timed cognitive assessment just for me.

On the eleventh day of Holiday Season Job Seeking my one true prospective employer sent to me:

11 helpful-hints-should-you-get-an-interview-and-please see-our-website emails
10 fill-in frame sentence writing requests asking me why I want to work for them
9 email opt-in messages touting their company’s benefits
8 form emails thanking me for my interest
7 assurances I would be contacted should my skill set be a match
6 voluntary questions covering gender, ethnicity, and military status
5 online application pages that timed out before I could finish
4 real-life work scenarios for responding
3 writing sample requests asking why I consider myself a Marketing Rockstar
2 online personality tests
and a 6-page timed cognitive assessment just for me.

On the twelfth day of Holiday Season Job Seeking my one true prospective employer sent to me:
12 days of nothing but the sound of crickets 
11 helpful-hints-should-you-get-an-interview-and-please see-our-website emails 
10 fill-in frame sentence writing requests asking me why I want to work for them
9 email opt-in messages touting their company’s benefits
8 form emails thanking me for my interest
7 assurances I would be contacted should my skill set be a match
6 voluntary questions covering gender, ethnicity, and military status
5 online application pages that timed out before I could finish
4 real-life work scenarios for responding
3 writing sample requests asking why I consider myself a Marketing Rockstar
2 online personality tests
and a 6-page timed cognitive assessment just for me.

When Diane isn’t crafting pithy writings she calls “sit down, stand up,” she is tenaciously pursuing a new marketing and communications specialist position with a stellar organization which she will find by the end of the holiday season. (Okay, February 2016 at the latest.) 
P.S. If you feel your organization is a fabulous employment candidate for me and you are located in northern California, please contact me with a 350-word essay letting me know why you feel you are a company Rockstar.

Two Weeks: A Reflection

Some people are connectors, some people are splitters, and some people are adapters. 

No, this isn’t the beginning of a well-placed holiday ad on my personal blog, or a creative riff off of “If you were any type of animal which animal would you be?” prefacing an article about icebreakers.

Rather it’s my reflection upon the roles we play in life and how we impact other’s lives positively:  how we light them up, if you will. 

 She’s a connector.

Over the years I’ve caught glimpses of her on Facebook, megawatt smile beaming out, image after delightful image showcasing a good life.  

We went to high school together in the 70’s and resided near one another alphabetically during this decade known for its effective, albeit unimaginative, way of seating children. 

If you sat next to *Brian Beaumont in first grade, you were likely to hold that place all the way through your senior year, which is why I have uniquely intimate details about his hair cowlicks, penchant for biting his nails, and any number of peccadilloes better left under the **Cone of Silence. 

*Ashley had none of these characteristics or habits, but she was distinguished by her brilliant, genuine smile.  And she was nice.  Not just regular nice, but she was uber nice. To everyone.  In fact, she was nice to everyone before it became karmically sound to be nice to everyone.

We shared a few words here and there, but we didn’t hang out.  She may have been the classic hair-parted-in-the-middle cheerleading stand-out beauty dating the football player we all admired, but even then she was more.

It’s her inspirational back story that goes beyond her basic goodness. 

I think it was our junior year when Ashley got pregnant.  Our country’s morality may have been shifting in a more enlightened direction, but not soon enough to save her from judgment and criticism.

At the time our cultural norms were more morality cult, less norm and the colloquial term “getting into trouble” was used to describe her situation.  It could not have been easy.

We lived in a large town that operated like a small town with plenty of tongues and fingers wagging.  Ashley wanted to finish high school with her classmates and walk with the rest of us on graduation day, but I remember there was huge pushback from the administration.

Through it all Ashley was brave, loving, and kind. 

 She attended her senior year at our large, newly integrated school the only teenaged mom on campus, having gone through what must have been both a difficult and beautiful experience, head held high, beautiful smile in place, more mature than many of us would be for at least a decade.

On graduation day Ashley did walk with us, holding her rightful place in our alphabetical line-up. 

And now she’s in a different kind of trouble.  She has entered the final stage of her fight against the cancer that has not taken away that smile, or that ability to connect people, but it has a finite plan for her future.   

She has two weeks.

Two weeks to savor her life, to smile at everyone in her realm, to spend time with everyone she loves.  Two weeks is a lifetime for her.

Even now, as I write this piece, the Facebook postings from classmates she hasn’t seen in a triple-decade are amassing; connecting us to one another.  As it turns out we were all inspired by Ashley.

Which got me thinking. We can also be connectors. 

Maybe we should all look at our lives as a series of two-week lifetime intervals that we live savoring our lives, smiling at everyone in our realm, and spending time with everyone we love. 

It would be just like Ashley to leave that legacy.

*Pseudonym

**Reference to a recurring gag (and apparatus) featured on the 1960’s show Get Smart.

Diane Dean-Epps lives and works in northern California, teaching English to Generation Y-ME?! in real time and writing books in her spare time, to wit:  Maternal Meanderings (Humor), Last Call (Humorous Mystery), KILL-TV (Humorous Mystery), Quiet Boundaries (Poetry), and I’ll Always Be There For You…Unless I’m Somewhere Else?!  (Humor). Her numerous essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including MORE magazine, NPR’s This I Believe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Sacramento Business Journal, and Sacramento magazine. Her blog may be found at:  http://www.mswrite-now.blogspot.com/

Bed Spray By: Diane Dean-Epps, humorist

CLICK HERE TO READ ON SITE

***UPDATE***

I am delighted to report that the founder of the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop, Teri Rizvi, has picked up my humor piece, "Bed Spray" and it now resides on the University of Dayton's website at:  http://humorwriters.org/ AND http://humorwriters.org/2016/06/10/bed-spray/

 Thank you to my talented photographer friend, Sandy Brooke, for providing me with an excellent photo for my submission.

 One of my bucket list items for our European jaunt was to purchase French perfume. I know this may seem like a trite aspiration much like, oh, I don’t know, seeing the Eiffel Tour in Paris, but trite is often where I dwell comfortably.

Therefore, I was dead set on visiting a parfumerie. If I wasn’t able to have a perfume exactly crafted for me I was darned well going to pick myself out something pretty smelling that was perfect just for me and the other 30,000 female tourists who would also choose that scent in one day.

My husband was a good sport, even accompanying me into the store as I screeched, “If not now, when?!” as I dragged him into that adorably appointed, sweet-smelling shop for all I was worth. Coincidentally this is exactly how he ended up in Paris in the first place. (The general screeching and dragging.)

For a woman who looks as though she’s taking a “How to Get Over Your Olfactory Fears” course every time I enter a Bath & Body Works store stateside it was truly amazing how much unfettered fun I had.

 Ah, but in the City of Love I was truly in my fragrance element, I tell you, feeling my aroma mojo, and spraying for all I was worth.  It looked as though we were shopping at Napalm Village I had such a ginormous cloud of spray hanging in the air of that tiny parfumerie.  

Every fragrance I sampled was more lusciously scented than the one before it.  I was Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream, gallivanting about gleefully, only in my production there was an atomizer prop which is a new twist. 

The shop owner humored me by ignoring me.  My husband humored me by smiling and thinking of something else – anything else; a technique he has honed over the decades for maximal marital happiness.

I was willing to pay any amount for one of these eau de colognes, interestingly enough more than I was worth, but of course that’s a philosophical question for another day, e.g., one’s worth.  What is worth?  What is worthwhile? Why do I hear the clock on the wall ticking louder as I think these thoughts? 

(You can see why it was I barely scraped by with a “C” in my college Philosophy class as I had so many of my own essential questions I couldn’t even entertain the notion of addressing those my Prof proffered.  Plus, I had a penchant for parsing out the question itself.  Ergo:  I’m now an English teacher.)

Each time I picked up a tiny French-sized perfume – everything is smaller there, the women, the clothing sizes, the streets, the food portions – I said, “oui” and “wee” to each and every one of those darling little vials, but then the time came to choose one.  “For the love of god any one.” (This was what my husband finally said and I believe it is what the shop keeper was thinking, but in Frenchier language.)

As I made my way over to the clerk I proudly and almost correctly pronounced the name of the perfume I wished to buy.  What I thought was a look of pride from her that my accent was so good, upon closer examination was actually a look of amusement. She smiled not unkindly and said one of the two million and thirty-seven French words I do not know.  It sounded like “leet.” 

I looked at her and she looked at me.  I smiled. She smiled back.  Neither of us knew what to do next. Perhaps I could move us to the next level:  Point of sale.  I tried a combination throat clear and giggle, not quite pulling off whatever I thought that would do. 

I repeated what I thought I heard. “Leet,” I chanted as I made the international index finger squirting motion known the world over for spraying perfume.   She nodded vigorously.  “Yes.  Bed spray.”  Oh, now there were two words I knew, though I had never used them together. 

“Bed spray,” I stated.  She again nodded.  I walked back over to where the air had just begun to clear just as surely as my own thoughts were clearing. 

It dawned on me that what the mademoiselle had been trying to tell me was I had been dousing myself with French air freshener. Bed spray.  Eau de pulvérisation en lit.

I was soaked in French Glade. 

Eau.

_______________________________________________________

This is the second in a series of humor columns chronicling Diane’s “Non-Ugly American” European Tour. Diane Dean-Epps lives and works in northern California, teaching English to Generation Y-ME?! in real time and writing books in her spare time, to wit:  Maternal Meanderings (Humor), Last Call (Humorous Mystery), KILL-TV (Humorous Mystery), Quiet Boundaries (Poetry), and I’ll Always Be There For You…Unless I’m Somewhere Else?!  (Humor). Her numerous essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including MORE magazine, NPR’s This I Believe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Sacramento Business Journal, and Sacramento magazine. 

The Directions (Poetry for the Not-Faint-Hearted)..

The Directions

Butter, sugar, salt

All rubbed into my wounds

At your leisure

A recipe for pain

Cannot possibly be complete

Without artifice of something created

Like revisionist history of my youth

It looks good enough to eat

Replete with the right ingredients

Only something is missing…

The directions

Pass the Polite

I LOVE all things British and, yes, as is the case with everything you love there is a word for that:  Anglophile. (Please disregard your kneejerk reaction to any word that ends in –phile.)

As someone who occasionally entertains the public with roles that require a British dialect I simply cannot help myself when launching into a British accent at the slightest provocation.  Simply asking me if I would like some chips will bloody well do it.  (Not British style chips, but chip-chips. You know what I mean.)

I was shocked to learn that other parents do not require their children to show up at the dinner table with clean hands AND a British accent.  (We also work on the odd Scottish, Irish, Australian, and German accents.  I’m equal opportunity in that way.)

Thus, I’m nothing if not trite – occasionally contrite – because it is true that it has been a life-long dream of mine to visit the UK.  And you know what?  We finally did it, my man and me...I...we...by Jove.  Just recently, as a matter of fact, as my one thousand uploaded pictures on Facebook will attest to. 

Everything Brit works for me and nothing worked for me as amusingly as seeing those Virgin Airlines flight attendants all dolled up as though they just stepped off of an “Austin Powers” set with their bumped up hair.  (It also worked for my Manchester seatmate who unapologetically told me that he enjoys flying Virgin Airlines for the scenery inside the plane as well as the scenery he will enjoy when he lands.)  Who can blame him?  They’re lovely! I fondly call them the “fetching virgins.”

I am STILL bumping up my hair and I get looks as though people can’t figure out whether I’m just THAT far behind the hair design curve or just THAT ahead of it.  Who knows?  It’s luscious! 

And you know what?  Dependent upon where they hail from – Cornwall, Bristol, Yorkshire – I may not even be able to understand them and I don’t even care!  It’s just another slice of delicious.

Almost as delicious as that Mark’s and Spencer Victoria Sponge cake I horked down so fast it appeared I had escaped from Weight Watcher’s camp. I actually growled at my husband yelling, “Sod off!” when he came near me, appearing as though he wished to share my treat. 

Lest you think too horribly of me I did share my macaroons, which he ended up not liking, so that made me look good with the end result being my end game.  All for me. 

Where was I?  Right.  Virgin.

So, even though I may not understand all of the dialects of my beloved English citizens who prefer to spell words oh-so-slightly-differently than Americans I love hearing them, watching them, and interacting with them.  Until our return trip, that is, when we were in the midst of recovering from the sticky wicket that was a cancelled flight out of Rome and into the UK with no visible means of return within the 24-hour period needed to make our return flight home.

Soooo…after our own version of “trains, planes, automobiles” -- add cabs and fast walking into the mix – we made it on time from Rome to Bristol to London, albeit totally knackered, whereupon we were met at the airport entrance by a fetching Virgin Airlines employee. 

Her greeting was an inquiry.  What were our plans were for the day?  

I thought maybe it was one of those bloody surveys from which you can’t ever seem to escape.  She did have a clipboard. It was all I could do not to show her that Americans have their own brand of sarcastic wit that is a real hoot.  Only, I was afraid it would be more sarcasm than hoot.

I will provide you with an actual transcript of the interaction:

ME:  What am I doing today?  (Husband and wife exchange disbelieving looks). Oh, I don’t know.  I thought we’d fly somewhere.  Home.  You know, I’m at the airport, so… I’m flying out of here…on Virgin…

FETCHING VIRGIN: Ah, very good.  And you’re flying out today?

ME:  Yes, we think so.  (Husband and wife exchange disbelieving looks). Are we not?

FETCHNG VIRGIN:  (No response as she soldiers on.)  Are your plans certain, then?

ME:  Are they certain?  (Husband and wife exchange disbelieving looks).  Well, they were until about 24 hours ago, but we seem to be on the right track now. I believe we just went over how important flying out today is to us.  Is there a reason you’re asking?

(My gawd, is this woman clairvoyant?  Or maybe there was some sort of counseling request from Easy Jet made on our behalf to Virgin Airlines in an effort to return us to our “We love Brits” frame of mind again?)

FETCHING VIRGIN: We’re quite booked today and if you’re flexible we thought we’d see if you would change your plans.

ME:  (Husband and wife exchange disbelieving looks.)  If there is anything we’ve proven in the last 24 hours it’s how inflexible we are with regard to not flying home today. No, thanks, we’re fine.

***END OF TRANSCRIPT***

We could have cut out about four husband and wife disbelieving look exchanges and five minutes with less chin wag about our plans and more directness. 

A suggestion for directness in future would be to greet us with:  Are you willing to bump it?  Only when it has to do with hair.