As many of you know, I have been unemployed since I ceased my activities as a traditional full-time student in May. Unfortunately, this period of time neatly coincides with the months that I have been married, meaning that my wife has never had any financial support from her husband... and that's been kind of sad and a little bit rough as far as money goes. As many of you have been told over the years, teaching does not pay well.
Anyways, I've been looking around for a job for quite some time now, and the market in Longview, to put it politely, sucks. I've had a couple of calls, even an interview in Mt. Pleasant (which is an hour away), but nothing by way of a seemingly-good lead, other than the local company that's been giving me the run-around for roughly 1 1/2 months.... that is, until this week.
I had heard that Plug 'n Play computers on the loop was hiring about a month ago, but when I went there, they'd already filled the position. So, it was much to my surprise that I heard over the weekend that they were hiring again... and lacking anything better to do, I went to check it out. It turns out that the manager, Brad, has had terrible luck with employees. He's had 6 of them in the space of 8 months and only once has he had 2 at the same time. Four of those 6 were just clueless and inept... not really bad employees as much as they were bad hires and incapable of doing the jobs for which they were hired. The 5th employee was capable, just lazy... more willing to invite his girlfriend to the store and sit with her rather than do work. And the 6th... yeah, he robbed the store blind. So to say that I was overqualified in comparison with my BS in Computer Science, experience in technical work, and good references by reputable people was an understatement. Fortunately, Brad wanted what I had, I wanted what he had (a job at a company that really wants to grow), and we both got along very well. Still, there was the matter of convincing the owner (his father) that it was worthwhile to pay me a bit more than the average "pimple-faced" technician. That took the rest of the week and saw the hiring of a very intelligent and capable business-man to handle the marketing side of thingsl. So, on Friday, I got the official word that I was hired, along with another LU grad so that we'll have 2 guys to do technical work and a guy to do marketing.
Usually, I'm not very excited about work... I've had some bum jobs and even the good jobs have been rife with bad co-workers or nasty customers. But this job, I'm really excited about. The challenge is more than I've faced at any other job, but I'm really anxious to prove myself, help this business get off of the ground, and help build it into a competitive brand. So yeah, if you need software, hardware or computer labor or you know someone who does, send them my way and I may even buy you lunch.
note: at the moment the web site is down (one of my first projects) or else I would give you a link. More on that on Monday, after I've worked a day.
Posted by Vengeful Cynic at September 3, 2005 02:36 PM | TrackBack