Celebrity

It seems I have developed a fan base at work. This week I switched from working swing shift, which I have done for over a year now, to the grave yard shift. My boss said that operators had already started putting in requests for transferring to my shift. I thought he was joking. Turns out that one gal from swing is coming to my shift in early June and two others are putting in requests to switch.

All this reminds me of several years ago when I was sending out resumes to video game companies. That was a real hellish period for me. Looking back on it, I have realized that it drove me insane. It wasn't the nice kind of insanity I have constantly whirling around me. The job hunt hell drove me into a maniacal frenzy to the point that I had lost my ability to think rationally. I knew that any one of these potential employers would be lucky to have me. None of them could have wished for a better employee. Yet after 1,000 applications to companies all over the world, my skills had met with nothing but rejection. It had driven me to insanity.

There was an underlying block to my job hunt at the time. I had very little in the way of industry relevant skills and had no way to get them without being hired on by a firm in that industry. The one thing I had above and beyond everyone else was the full knowledge that I could learn the skills quicker and in short order do them better than anyone else. It sounded like a wild boast when read back from the pages of a cover letter. To make matters worse, people were constantly lying about being that sort of person when they were not.

Eventually I found myself in a situation where my need for a job was beyond urgent. Finally I went to a temp service and lied! What kind of manufacturing experience did I have? Oh, I worked for this company and that company operating these types of machines. So the temp service sent me to a potential employer and I lied again. Now I'm the one maintenance guy they would hate to lose. Stories of my abilities get circulated around the plant with mystery and awe. They say I fix machines as though by magic (which unbeknownst to them, I have actually done). A person who has been in maintenance there for over a decade loves to regale people with the story of how I kept the entire plant working all by myself one night, never once needing to ask for his assistance even though I had been instructed to do so should a situation arise. Someone pipes in that he's run the floor by himself before. "No, you took care of all the minors while Jake was busy with a major malfunction all day. He has actually done it all by himself."

All this because I always do the best I can... and I lied.