Hi dear friends and followers, thank you, and welcome to my blog
KEEPING IT REAL with FRIZZY LIZZY
Greetings, Everyone, and thank you so much for sharing your time with me! I am thrilled to see you!
Sometimes I have a logjam in my mind, and I don't know what to write. You don't need to hear about my bad times because you have your own to handle, and I can't always think of a funny story that will fill two or three pages. What to do? If you allow me, I will share some short, short stories with you as they come into my mind. Either you'll like them or you will send this feature and me into earlier retirement than I had planned. Here goes!
As soon as I left the military I tried a job selling life, accident, health, fire, and auto insurance. I was trained by the owner of an insurance agency in a small town not very far away from the farm where I was living at the time.
For a variety of reasons, mainly because I was too young to understand the power of being in business for myself, that opportunity did not go well for me. I then found work in a factory in the same locality. I mentioned this job to you earlier.
That part of Pennsylvania has a problem keeping jobs in the manufacturing sector. In 16 months, the plant closed, and I was out of a job and collecting employment insurance benefits. $90 a week is what I was being paid back then. My job was paying $180 a week. The sooner I found work, the better.
I watched the newspaper (there was only one in the region) for advertisements of jobs, and finally I heard of one. It was an opening at a trucking terminal for a freight driver dispatcher. I was not sure what the job entailed so I called my father and asked him. He got me in contact with a man who retired from the trucking industry who told me that it was mentally and emotionally tough work. I did not shy away from that challenge, and I arranged for an interview with a fellow, one Mr. Babb.
It was January, and snow and mud and slush were all over the place, but I decided not to wear my barnyard boots and went with my best pair of dress shoes on instead. They were not polished, but I figured that no one would object. Right.
Mr. Babb met me and we talked for a few minutes. I was not impressed with him. He was a little guy, and I was taller than him. It was possible that he felt intimidated by a woman who was just a tiny bit under 6 feet (183 cm) tall. He decided to show me who was boss by asking me why my shoes were not polished. I was not going to offer excuses like the mud in his firm's parking lot or the winter weather. They made more sense than his silly question, so I asked him if he needed a shoe polisher instead of a freight dispatcher. I never worked a day in the trucking industry.
Over time, I moved to the Washington, DC area where I lived for 28 years and had a fulfilling career. I moved rapidly up the ladder in purchasing, from an inventory control technician to a senior contract specialist.
It was 1985, as I recall, when my second ex and I went to Florida with that other couple that I wrote about a few weeks ago. We agreed with them that we would wander freely during the daytime and meet with them in the evening for supper.
That was my first trip to Florida, and I liked what I saw. The climate was hospitable, and the people I had met were nice. Visions of living there began to come into my daydreams to such a degree that I began to look at the local newspapers to see what kind of jobs were available.
I did find one that interested me. It was for a position as a buyer and production control coordinator. I had performed both of those functions in the past, so I called the potential employer and spoke to the hiring manager and told her that I was in town on vacation, but I wanted to move there.
She asked me many questions to which I had the correct answers. I was a qualified candidate, or so I was told. Then came the fun part: salary. She asked me what I wanted. I replied that I was, and these were my exact words, “...hot shot northern talent. What is that worth to you?”
Her reply startled me, and I told her so. She asked by how much was it too little. I replied that I could hire her part-time, with benefits, for the difference between what I earned up north and what she was offering in Florida.
As you can see, so much of my life revolves around my work. I never had children. It's not that I didn't want them, I just never had any. Mother Nature can play tricks on a body. Without children, I had to do something to fill my life so I became the best I could be at the work that I did. And I loved it. My work got to be more like my play!
I was seldom scared when I interviewed for a job, even if I hated the one I was looking to leave. I was always confident on the outside like I was in this exchange I had with a hiring manager about a job that offered me a 50% raise in salary:
Manager: “There are ten applicants for this job, and you're the first to be interviewed.”
Me: “That's either very good or very bad.”
Manager: “What do you mean by that?”
Me: “It's very good if I impress you so much that the other 9 are just an obligation that you need to perform. It's very bad if I do so poorly in this interview that anyone else could get this job.”
Manager: “You're one of the few people I have met who knows how to go after a job.”
I sent him a letter of thanks after that interview, on the same day. I got that job.
Thank you very much again, dear friends, for visiting my blog. Please share your thoughts with us, if you will. have a great Weekend.
Sometimes I have a logjam in my mind, and I don't know what to write. You don't need to hear about my bad times because you have your own to handle, and I can't always think of a funny story that will fill two or three pages. What to do? If you allow me, I will share some short, short stories with you as they come into my mind. Either you'll like them or you will send this feature and me into earlier retirement than I had planned. Here goes!
As soon as I left the military I tried a job selling life, accident, health, fire, and auto insurance. I was trained by the owner of an insurance agency in a small town not very far away from the farm where I was living at the time.
For a variety of reasons, mainly because I was too young to understand the power of being in business for myself, that opportunity did not go well for me. I then found work in a factory in the same locality. I mentioned this job to you earlier.
That part of Pennsylvania has a problem keeping jobs in the manufacturing sector. In 16 months, the plant closed, and I was out of a job and collecting employment insurance benefits. $90 a week is what I was being paid back then. My job was paying $180 a week. The sooner I found work, the better.
I watched the newspaper (there was only one in the region) for advertisements of jobs, and finally I heard of one. It was an opening at a trucking terminal for a freight driver dispatcher. I was not sure what the job entailed so I called my father and asked him. He got me in contact with a man who retired from the trucking industry who told me that it was mentally and emotionally tough work. I did not shy away from that challenge, and I arranged for an interview with a fellow, one Mr. Babb.
It was January, and snow and mud and slush were all over the place, but I decided not to wear my barnyard boots and went with my best pair of dress shoes on instead. They were not polished, but I figured that no one would object. Right.
Mr. Babb met me and we talked for a few minutes. I was not impressed with him. He was a little guy, and I was taller than him. It was possible that he felt intimidated by a woman who was just a tiny bit under 6 feet (183 cm) tall. He decided to show me who was boss by asking me why my shoes were not polished. I was not going to offer excuses like the mud in his firm's parking lot or the winter weather. They made more sense than his silly question, so I asked him if he needed a shoe polisher instead of a freight dispatcher. I never worked a day in the trucking industry.
Over time, I moved to the Washington, DC area where I lived for 28 years and had a fulfilling career. I moved rapidly up the ladder in purchasing, from an inventory control technician to a senior contract specialist.
It was 1985, as I recall, when my second ex and I went to Florida with that other couple that I wrote about a few weeks ago. We agreed with them that we would wander freely during the daytime and meet with them in the evening for supper.
That was my first trip to Florida, and I liked what I saw. The climate was hospitable, and the people I had met were nice. Visions of living there began to come into my daydreams to such a degree that I began to look at the local newspapers to see what kind of jobs were available.
I did find one that interested me. It was for a position as a buyer and production control coordinator. I had performed both of those functions in the past, so I called the potential employer and spoke to the hiring manager and told her that I was in town on vacation, but I wanted to move there.
She asked me many questions to which I had the correct answers. I was a qualified candidate, or so I was told. Then came the fun part: salary. She asked me what I wanted. I replied that I was, and these were my exact words, “...hot shot northern talent. What is that worth to you?”
Her reply startled me, and I told her so. She asked by how much was it too little. I replied that I could hire her part-time, with benefits, for the difference between what I earned up north and what she was offering in Florida.
As you can see, so much of my life revolves around my work. I never had children. It's not that I didn't want them, I just never had any. Mother Nature can play tricks on a body. Without children, I had to do something to fill my life so I became the best I could be at the work that I did. And I loved it. My work got to be more like my play!
I was seldom scared when I interviewed for a job, even if I hated the one I was looking to leave. I was always confident on the outside like I was in this exchange I had with a hiring manager about a job that offered me a 50% raise in salary:
Manager: “There are ten applicants for this job, and you're the first to be interviewed.”
Me: “That's either very good or very bad.”
Manager: “What do you mean by that?”
Me: “It's very good if I impress you so much that the other 9 are just an obligation that you need to perform. It's very bad if I do so poorly in this interview that anyone else could get this job.”
Manager: “You're one of the few people I have met who knows how to go after a job.”
I sent him a letter of thanks after that interview, on the same day. I got that job.
My work life has taken me places and shown me things that the average woman never thinks of, much less sees. I have been in the bowels of an ocean-going tanker ship and inside of a working lighthouse. I have walked in subway tunnels and on the raised deck floor of a computer room, back when mainframe architecture was still the standard and cloud computing was not yet a possibility. I have been on all levels of an office building, from the boiler room to the roof, and inside the machinery spaces, like the elevator motor room and hoist way. It's been a lot of fun.
But the greatest experience that I had during all of those years is meeting the wonderful people who have made my life that much richer. And I need to thank one man who gave me a tool for interviews that I have never forgotten how to use. His name is Rick Smith, and he was the manager of a machine shop in Pennsylvania. He taught me that the one who asks the questions is the one who controls the interview when I asked him how to handle the most uncomfortable of interview questions: Tell me about yourself.
Please ask if you want to know the answer that he gave me.
Thank you for sharing your weekend time with me. Have a much-blessed Easter weekend!
But the greatest experience that I had during all of those years is meeting the wonderful people who have made my life that much richer. And I need to thank one man who gave me a tool for interviews that I have never forgotten how to use. His name is Rick Smith, and he was the manager of a machine shop in Pennsylvania. He taught me that the one who asks the questions is the one who controls the interview when I asked him how to handle the most uncomfortable of interview questions: Tell me about yourself.
Please ask if you want to know the answer that he gave me.
Thank you for sharing your weekend time with me. Have a much-blessed Easter weekend!
✿ ڰۣ❤In Loving Light from the Fairy Lady❤ڰۣ✿
No comments:
Post a Comment