Friday, June 03, 2005
MetablogTonight is an all-nighter, joy of joys. I have another upcoming "progress" meeting on Tuesday, and it's the usual mad dash for results. The frequency of the meetings has increased so that I now officially have meetings faster than I get pay cheques. That is fundamentally wrong in my book, but what can you do?
So the last thing I need this weekend is an unexpected stag do. Some old school friends are getting married, and after months of saying he didn't want one, the groom rang me up to say he was holding one in 5 days time. Fortunately the stag do will be a quiet affair (the bride's father is attending, so strip clubs are probably out. Although having said that...). The plan is a few beers, a nice meal, then a few more beers until closing time. Rather brilliantly, my best mate is teetotal and is driving from my parents' home town to the stag do and back the same evening. So I am simply catching the train to my parents' house on saturday, and will be picked up sober, and dropped off less sober that same night - no clubbing or foolishness - and I'll be back in the lab, hopefully feeling moderately chipper, exactly 26 hours after I left.
Unfortunately, the only way this can possibly work is if I run all of the stages of my experiment back-to-back, hence me staying here until at least 7am. I'll be back in early afternoon, to finish off, then back in saturday before I catch my train. Sleep? What's that?
The waiting continues.
I still haven't heard back from that job. Today I sent an email politely enquiring when I could expect to hear back from them. No reply this afternoon, although someone did point out that it is school half-term week at the moment, so they could be on holiday with the kids (if they have them).
In the meantime, I have applied for another position. I should at least get an interview since the interviewer actually knows me from that conference I attended a few months ago. They grabbed me after my talk, insisting that I come and see the poster describing their project. So they remembered me well when I emailed informally for more information about the post. So it was application form time again - 7 pages this time!
Unlike the last form that I filled in, this one actually requested information usually found on your CV, such as exam results etc. Bugger. To be brutally honest, my A level results were shite, and when I got my PhD I quietly dropped them from my CV. It's a cliche to blame the teachers, but it is telling that my grades went from straight As all the way through secondary school, down to bare passes for my A levels, before I went on and just missed out on a first in my bachelor's degree. Hmmmm. The poor A level results are probably why I didn't even get a reply from Oxford and Cambridge when I applied for a PhD there, when my references etc from Universiy were first-rate.
Anyways, there is fuck all I can do about it now, and hopefully they'll chalk it up to a bad day on the exam.
More annoyingly was the need to "state why you applied for the job, why you are suited for it and what you feel that you can bring to the organisation". That's an interview question surely? Not only that, I also had to fill in a load about my current job, the practical skills learnt and my managerial skills. WTF? I'm a junior postdoc! I have no authority whatsoever. I have no one to manage. So the best I came up with was my need to balance workloads and liase with people in multiple labs etc etc. I also mentioned that I used to divvy up work between me and another postdoc and that I help clueless students occassionally.
Oh well, I should at least get an interview. And the minimum salary advertised is more than I am on now, so no worries on that score - although looking at the location I would probably need a car to get to work.
What's up with Haloscan? It seems to be unable to count the number of comments left. For last week's Twat, the counter read 5 comments for about 2 days - I logged in and found 8. And it's not just my blog, or that post. Weird. Touch wood, it's behaving now but it is a little annoying.
# posted by SaneScientist @ 3:18 am
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