Anticipation.....

Anticipation. God how I hate anticipation, and I’m not talking about that Carly Simon song. Okay, I hate that song too, but I’m talking about the real anticipation here. And I don’t care if you are anticipating something good or something bad, anticipation sucks. Okay, it probably sucks more if you’re anticipating bad news, but….. do you get where I’m going with this?

The reason I bring up anticipation is because I have been living with it for the last week, in reality for almost two months now. About six weeks ago I interviewed for a new job, and considering that this was a retail management position – and this was the beginning of December – there were a lot of other things going on to slow down the hiring process. It was after the first of the year that I heard back from the District Manager who had first interviewed me. She liked me, so now it was on to the HR Director.

Of course that interview didn’t get set up for almost two weeks, so there was more anticipation there. That interview went well, I thought, and I was pleased at the end of the interview when the HR manager said she wanted me to do an on-line assessment. I figured, why have me do an assessment if they weren’t still interested? And the assessment was one of those where they have about 200 questions and you answer if you agree or disagree with the statement. Of course agree or disagree is too easy, so you have to totally agree, kind of agree, sometimes agree, and so on. Of course following this assessment there are a whole new set of anxieties. Did I answer that right? Will the answers I provided eerily match those of the Unabomber? Why did I say I kind of disagreed when I only sometime disagree on question 24? Anticipation.

The good news is I didn’t have to freak out for long. I got a call the next day to set up an interview with the Zone Manager, a gentleman in charge of over 150 branches. Hey, they wouldn’t waste THIS guys time if they weren’t interested, right? Or maybe he just had to have a conversation with someone whose test scores showed a level of psychosis unmatched in company history. So last Friday, I had my final interview.

Now I’m on top of the world. Sure, the anticipation level has just been turned up to eleven, but I felt so good about that interview, and I knew my phone was going to ring Monday with an offer. Except it didn’t. More anticipation, but hey, Monday’s are busy days at the district office, of course they weren’t going to call on Monday. What was I even thinking? Idiot!

But then they didn’t call on Tuesday. Well hey, maybe she’s in meetings on Tuesday, surely she’ll call on Wednesday. But she didn’t, and going into today the anticipation had been replaced by a creeping sense of dread, and as the day wore on it was being replaced once again by nauseousness.

Now I’ve interviewed for jobs before that I ended up not getting, and in some cases it really wasn’t such a big deal, mainly because I could take or leave the job I was applying for. And I am currently employed, so it wasn’t like I HAD to get this job or my family would be on the streets. No, what caused so much anticipation this time was the fact that I REALLY wanted this job.

And at 3:00 this afternoon, I got it. You are now looking at – okay, you’re not really looking at me, but you know what I mean – you are now looking at the new General Manager of Borders Books in San Luis Obispo, CA (See picture at right). Sure, I’ll miss Target (where I am currently the Logistics Manager), and I’ll miss the fact that my current job is two miles from home while my new job is 25 miles away. I’ll miss the fact that I currently fill my gas tank once every three weeks. But I am going to love my new job. Books, Music, DVD’s – all things that I really love. And I sure as heck am not going to miss going to work at 3 am to oversee a truck getting unloaded.

Who knows, I might even go out and by that Carly Simon CD? Nah…….