Dream a little dream for me

If someone had asked me during the long job hunt last year:
"Amy, what would be your dream job?"
I would have responded:
"I'd like to work in Payroll/HR for a big company. Not doing the hiring and counseling stuff, but managing benefits, keeping the paychecks accurate, maintaining the payroll records. I liked doing that in D.C., although the three unions and weekly payroll was sometimes stressful. But where, oh where, is there a job like that in the sparsely populated North Country?"

This week, there is an opening at my bank with a job description that pretty much matches everything I want to do. Every single thing listed in the "Major Responsibilities" is something that I already have experience in.

There are some obstacles though. It's a good paygrade, which means that everyone who's been putting in time as Tellers or in Data Entry will be interested. And technically, they're only looking for one year of experience in accounting/HR. So many people will meet the minimum qualifications. I would be very doubtful if there's anyone with as much Payroll experience as me, but someone with a little experience who's been with the company longer may get a chance to ahead of me. So I'm trying to relax about it and not start cleaning out my cubicle yet. But I really, really, really want it.

The Employee handbook is 142 pages

Was I too vague yesterday? Yes, I got the job. The ins and outs of how that happened so fast are still a mystery. As is the fact that I somehow managed to have my first day of work be the day before I was offered the job.

Now, I am filling out forms. Lots of forms. Three cheers for:
-Employer sponsored Health insurance starting immediately
-Vision and Dental
-Pension and a 401k with decent matching
-Flexible spending accounts for daycare and health
-discounts on loans and mortgages
-Paid holidays and Personal time (I'll even get paid for Christmas!)

Hip, Hip Hooray

Working 9-5

Yay!!!!! I can finally delete all the job search sites that I've been looking at for the last 2 1/2 years!!!!

Spoke too soon

You can ignore my last post. Someone in my department gave notice yesterday. All the bosses were in a meeting this morning, and I was not surprised that the first thing my supervisor did when she finished was to call me over and ask me to stay. It is still just a temp job, until a permanent replacement is found. However, it seems that if it was up to her, or the majority of my co-workers, the replacement would be me. I kinda felt bad for the woman who's leaving, because people were talking much more about my future prospects than hers. But she hadn't been there long, we actually started the same day.

Cross you fingers that no one who's already employed by the bank applies. No one has the last two times it's been open because it's near the bottom of the payscale. Then hope that HR doesn't have requirements that would exclude me no matter how good by recommendations are. In the meantime, I'm still employed.

And to add to this cheery post, here are some Christmas card rejects.

Easy come, Easy Go

The temp job has proved to be a temp job. I really like it there, my co-workers really like me, but there's just no permanent job for me. Last day is next Friday. So, onto plans A,B & C.

We're going to keep the kids in daycare for as long as we can afford it. Which gives me the freedom to just take any temp or part-time job that comes along. Kelly Services got good reviews of my work, and I'm also going to try to get into the bank's on-call teller system. That would make me an internal candidate for any future openings at the administrative offices.

Also, someone's advertising for Admin and HR people for permanent and temp jobs, and offering a wonderfully high wage for it. It must be Wal-mart getting geared up to do hiring for the new store, which is quickly rising up out of vacant land outside Potsdam. I don't really want to be a Wal-mart person, but the idea of working for them during a hiring blitz is intriguing.

Huh?

I set up an interview for Tuesday and they want three letters of reference. I don't think I've needed that since I applied for college, and yet the prospective boss indicated that it was the most normal thing in the world and required by the company. Ugh.

Most of the employees are nurses and health care workers, so I can see the point there. But I've never been asked for this for accounting jobs. They seem content with just running background checks.

So now I have to come up with a member of the community ("like a teacher, or politician"), and two employers. And I know that Hyatt employees aren't supposed to do letters, they're very much in the "let's avoid lawsuits by only verifying dates of employment camp". Plus, Hyatt employees don't stick in one job for long, so I don't even know if I can find my former bosses.

Should I just cancel the interview?

Banker's hours

This is going to take some getting used to. Working 40 hrs again, and trying to sort out the kids, the dog and dinner in a short period of time when I get home. At least I don't have the insane commute anymore. Although I now have an insane amount of paperwork to look through from Pre-K, Nathan's daycare and Claire's daycare. I'll have you know that most of the artwork goes straight into the garbage. Although I am keeping some of Nathan's best attempts at writing his name.

The job is pretty cool. Not at all what I was expecting. The office is termed "Deposit Operations" and there are four departments with 8-10 people each. I'm in Reconciliation, and the people I work with review IRA accounts, ATM transactions, Debit card disputes and more that I haven't seen yet. The woman I'm replacing is on maternity leave, so I'm expecting to be there 3 months. They're not teaching me the complicated stuff, but the "grunt work", which is fine. My immediate boss has made a good impression on me so far, although it's pretty hard to fall lower than my last boss. Hopefully she'll be like my first controller at Hyatt, who was a hard worker, but took time each day to check in on us and joke around a bit.

Whether it will turn into a permanent job is a big question. Another woman in the data entry dept said that she'd been there as a temp for none months and no permanent jobs had opened. But I don't think she had any prior job experience, or much interest in the job, since she's now leaving for her completely different dream job. So things could be different for me. At the least, I'll make the best impression I can in case there are openings that the boss can recommend me for in the other local offices. I'm afraid that they do a lot of their hiring by promoting tellers.

In other news, the pig farm is now a cow farm, and they're being quite noisy on their first day home. Claire is thrilled, and wanted to go out and wave to them for a bit.

Kelly Girl

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the lost job last week. I obsessively checked websites for job leads, and even began to wonder if I could make a living off mturk at .10 a job. All that's behind me now, at least for the next two months.

I'm not sure why I wasn't registered with Kelly Services earlier. Maybe it was bad memories of a summer spent opening mail for Publisher's Clearing House when I was a Kelly Girl in 1991. But I sent them a resume Friday, took the skills assessment tests yesterday, and on Monday I start a new job. I'll be working for a bank, but not in a branch. Instead I'll be working for "Deposit Services", which I guess means handling the paperwork that flows from the other 130 branches in the area.

Technically, it is only for two months. But the recruiter said that they have kept a lot of people on permanently. I was amazed that I could set daycare up this fast, it will be annoying if I have to pull them out again.

And because I'm a history buff, here's a 1910 postcard of where I'll be working. Somehow, I don't think it still looks like this.

And on.

And the job search goes on. And on. And on.

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

Things you should not say at a job interview.

"I'd like a job with less stress."

God, why? Why did I say that? aaarrrgh.

In context, it makes sense. She saw all the experience I had on my resume and wanted to know why I was looking at this job, especially since she'd just told me the sadly low pay rate. She was just trying to make sure that I wouldn't take the job and then leave in a few months if something better came along. So I was trying to be reassuring that this is a job I want, and instead I said something stupid that makes me sound lazy.

I'm hoping that I recovered. I tried to make it seem that it was stressful because of the 50 hour week (which Hyatt expects of management) and horrible commute. But I should have also stressed that since my degree and experience don't match, I was only expecting semi-entry level job offers when I moved back.

I do want this job. Even though the pay was lower than what I thought was the lowest I would take, it comes with so many benefits that it will work out in the long run. Free tuition for the kids at any of the four local colleges is a pretty nice perk too. Even if they only went for a year or two before transferring, it would be so worth the low pay now.

God, I hate phone trees

Applying for unemployment is a thoroughly unpleasant experience, I don't recommend it. My first claim was denied because I'd only worked one quarter of the past five quarters, so I didn't qualify. I had to re-apply when July 1st rolled around to prove I'd now worked in two quarters. Then I spent a good 45 minutes, spread over four days trying to call to "get credit for my 'waiting week'", only to discover I'd been calling a week too soon.

Tomorrow I fax some paperwork to verify that I did work 2 quarters after all, then I guess I have to fight my way through the phone tree again next week. Which puts me a month behind when I should have been collecting benefits. And in the end, I'll be surprised if I get more than $2000 when all is said and done. Better than nothing I suppose.

And although I'm not in the least bit interested in going back to work when the sun is shining and the beach is calling, I did send out a resume to a job tonight. I remember how all the job postings seemed to dry up last fall when I decided to start looking, I don't want to make the same mistake.

Que sera sera

Monday morning, I found out that the receptionist/HR coordinator was leaving.
Monday evening, I was offered her full-time job.
Monday night, I crunched the numbers and decided I'd probably lose money if I took it.
Tuesday morning, I declined the job.
Wednesday, they gave the girl leaving the hard sell to get her to stay.
Friday, she accepted, with the caveat that the give her more help.
Monday morning, the woman I replaced was back training with Dawn.
Monday evening, I was fired.