Mortaine’s Blog

I had a job interview this morning in Milpitas, which went fairly well, I think. It’s always hard to tell– is it a good interview if it takes 2 hours?

Last night during dinner, the phone rang. We hate to be disturbed during dinner (who doesn’t?) and John almost didn’t answer the phone. But I answered, and it turned out to be someone from a job I had applied to a month ago. Well, he wanted to see if I could come in for an interview this week, and I made an appointment for this morning at 10 AM. Yay!

I actually know someone in the company, another tech writer, so I was glad to talk to him after the “nervous” part of my interview (talking to software developers who don’t know how to interview a technical writer). They all said I had a lot of varied experience, which was something they appreciated.

Anyway, after 2 hours and talking to another tech writer, I finally left. It was very nice, but I had the unsettling feeling that, as their first interviewee, I wasn’t hitting the radar screen very hard. I’m going to contact the person I know inside the company and see if there’s any way I can follow-up without being a pest. Also, I’m going to mail each person I spoke to a personal thank-you note for spending the time to talk with me today.

In unrelated news, tonight is Game Night, the fun-filled weekly evening of competitive play! Tonight, we have enough players for Cranium, which is a pereniial favorite. Cranium is a really cool game in which your team has to successfully complete four tasks (creative, performance, logic, and word) and then solve a final task (of a type determined by the other team) to win. The tasks for each of the groups are on individual cards. A creative task might be a “win lose or draw” kind of contest, or it might be a similar contest, but with your eyes closed. Or it might be “win lose or sculpt” where you have to sculpt the thing into playdoh. For performance, you might have charades, celebrity impersonations, “name that tune,” etc. One time we played and Ken did this really bad Dances with Wolves charades where he tried to mime a wolf and dancing. We did not guess correctly, but then we may have been guessing wrong on purpose just to see him prolong the humiliation.
But game night doesn’t just happen on its own, you know. I have to make the Jello shots hours in advance (I just put them in the fridge right now), clean up the house, do the dishes, vacuum, and make sure the guest bathroom is presentable to company. It’s not that I have to do these things before game night (well, the kitchen was in kind of a state), but rather that there are some people who are coming over tonight whom I would rather not have see the house in its normal state of disarray.