Are you the Gatekeeper?

I had to travel for work yesterday which is the reason for no post.  I hit the road a little before 8 AM and didn’t get back until nearly 7 PM.  One semi-cool part of the trip was that it was to the city I was born and raised in… the place that I still consider ‘home’ in a lot of ways.  I was supposed to hook up with some friends for lunch, but we had a bit of crossed communication and missed each other.  Still, despite the fact that we didn’t eat at the same time, we did eat at the same place.  Chease Steak.  Yummy.

I ended up being on site for a bit longer than I had figured I would be.  I was planning on maybe 2 hours on site.  I had 2 other sites to stop at, so 2 hours was kind of my window.  I ended up being there for more than 4 hours, so one of my stops had to be dropped from the schedule and rescheduled for my marathon trip coming up in 12 days.  THAT trip is going to be fun.  I have 1800 miles to drive, 7 offices to visit, and 3 days to do it in.  Yeesh.

The drive home last night was interesting.  About the middle of the day, I felt a cold coming on.  I got the tickling in my throat going and my sinuses started pushing on the inside of my head.  Couple that with a week now of not getting more than 2 hours of sleep per night and I was struggling as the road stretched on before me.

At one point, I had all the windows rolled down and the radio cranked.  I was belting out the lyrics as loud as I could.  When that failed to keep me awake, I started making up my own words.  Let me tell you… Paradise by the Dashboard Lights just isn’t quite as good when you change it to Bowl of Rice under Buffet-bar Lights. 

It did make me giggle though.

I spent some time considering some things while I was driving and struggling to stay awake.  One was work.

I am very fortunate in that I really enjoy my job.  That hasn’t been the case for most of my working life.  The pay I make isn’t great, but I enjoy my actual job… mostly because of the people I work with.  They are a great group of people.

Still, the city and whole area that I live in is boring as hell.  There is quite honestly nothing to do.  Single people, like me, are an oddity because people get married very young around here… due to a lack of anything else to do.  Once they are married, their lives consist of going to work and going home where they just sit in front of the television until it is time to go to bed… because there is nothing else to do.

I wish that I could pick up my job and plop it down in another city… somewhere that there are things to do.  Mountain climbing, beaches, museums, zoos… I don’t care.  Just something.

Out of sheer boredom, I did start glancing around to see what all is out there right now.  Of course, the answer is “not much.”  I did find a few jobs at a few major gaming companies.  The jobs were not for developers or any of the other jobs that most people want.  The jobs were for IT specialists.  Two of the jobs I found… the job descriptions could have been photo-copied from my current job description.  I applied for them several weeks ago…

And haven’t heard a thing back.

These days, resume writing is like a contortionist routine.  It isn’t the fault of company HR people, but they simply cannot know and understand the full specifics of every single job that a company has.  As a result, many companies now use data phishing for their resumes.  The phishing software scans all resumes looking for key words and matching them against a pre-set percentage.  Resumes that meet that percentage are flagged for investigation.  Those that don’t are tossed.

There are nearly as many different phishing applications as there are companies in the world.  Trying to anticipate how the software is going to work is where things get challanging.  Suppose a company is looking for someone with experience in supporting a LINUX environment and my resume happens to say that I have experience supporting Fedora and Red Hat.  Most phishing applications will flag me as having no experience with LINUX even though Fedora and Red Hat are both LINUX.

However, the reverse is also true.  If a company is looking for a specific version of LINUX and I just happen to say that I have experience in LINUX, the software might cast me out because I didn’t list which versions of LINUX I am experienced in.

I am starting to feel like it is a guessing game.  Applying for jobs is becoming completely impersonal.  This particular gaming company will ONLY take applications online and doesn’t even list contact information.  So, I can’t call and discuss the position listing with anyone.  All I can do is execute my best guess as to what the software phish is going to hunt for and do my best to re-write my resume accordingly.

In this case, I can only assume that I guessed incorrectly.  I can go down the job postings line by line and check off every single requirement and desire as something that I have at least 7 to 12 years of experience in.  However, by all indications, the phishing application tossed me out as being completely unqualified due to an incorrect word choice.

Such is life though. 

By the time that thought process had completed, I realized that I was 100 miles further down the road than I had been when I first started contemplating.  I was tired and I was struggling to stay awake.

Fortunately, right about then, the 80’s classic Van Halen song Panama hit the radio and I set about re-writing the words as Pants And Bra.

And I giggled… a lot.