The Curse of Job Interviews
Over the years I admit to having endured many job interviews. A round number would be fifty, so far. In contrast, my wife has had maybe five job interviews, her being one of those odd, steady types who can keep a job for a rather lengthy amount of time. Her career aspirations have always been quite narrow, in that she has enjoyed the one steady 9-5 position in the federal government that she started 25 years ago.
Of course, my career has been nearly opposite of hers. I got my doctorate before I reached 30 years of age and for some time there I was moving from one college teaching position to another every couple years. I call it "trying to move up the ladder", but my therapist has called it "geographic escape." You see, all of this moving took place in my drinking days. Through all of that, my wife was able to transfer to different offices with the same position, thank goodness.
Having started a teaching job in a new place, I usually became unhappy with it in a matter of weeks. And this happened almost every time I left one teaching job to begin another at a different school, in a different state. In seventeen years we lived in eight different states, one advantage of which has been our ability to see and do a varied number of things. Where most folks take vacations to visit a different locale, we happened to pick up and move there.
Once I became sober, and as my son was entering elementary school, it made good, steady sense to stay where we then happened to be, and we've been here for eleven years. Had we had our son earlier than we did, all of that moving, I'm sure, would have caused him and us a lot of unease, and he probably wouldn't have become the good guy that he has become.
Once I became sober, I eventually learned to deal more effectively with life simply as it is and where I happened to be.
But, the title of this was about job interviews and I've probably had more than my share, in my constant yearning for something greener on the other side of the country. True, some of the interviews I had were successful, but 90 percent of them were not. Why those few were successful and the vast majority not successful is something I've been trying to understand for years. With my history of depression, even back as a young kid, my facial expressions were very subdued, my smile usually slight and rare. In short, I wasn't constructed to be a salesperson, primarily because my personality didn't develop to be the hard hand-shaking, big phony smile type of guy.
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