Day 34

I made a job-costing mistake today. It was simple: I didn't listen to the career coach's advice and kept my old email address on my resume. After all, who really wants to manage more than one address anyway? And I wasn't going to make my friends all change their address books. On second thought, though, maybe I should.

A while ago I sat in on a career seminar with a self-proclaimed "career coach." I really thought the guy was full of himself and spent the five hours drawing unicorns in the margins of my notebook. When we were finished, I was given my resume with his comments on it and asked to review it for later. I laughed at his notes, though, because they were mostly about my email address.

Last week I applied for my dream job. It was a management position for a bar at one of those beach resorts. Just think, all the booze you can drink, you're paid to wear sandals and not button up your shirt, sunbathing while working is encouraged, and all of your living expenses are paid-in-full. What could be better than that.

I was amazed to get a call for an interview from the agency I went through. You see, I didn't so much as apply for the job as I did sign up for a round of random interviews. The resort job was just one of the 10 positions I was interviewing from. And I was selected at random, not chosen for my qualifications. But hey, an interview is still an interview.

Everything was going well, and I seemed to have it in really well with the resort owners. They promised to email me their decision by the end of the week. I was thrilled and could see no reason they would not hire me. I spent all this past week waxing my surfboard and packing for the tropics. The position would start next month, so I'd take time off from my graduate studies and finished them off in a year or so after a nice long vacation.

I didn't get an email like I was promised today, so I called the number the owner had listed on his business card. I got right through and asked him what the problem was. He told me simply that he could not email me and because he had no further contact information, was forced to move to the next name on the list. Then he said something I'd rather not recount here before hanging up the phone.

Maybe the career coach was right. I shouldn't have listed "hotandsexymanmeat@domain.com" as my email address.

Day 34 of 100 - Summary: Listen to the man you pay $200 an hour for a 5-hour presentation