Interesting Relegations

It seems that each December I have a bad tendency to burn my bridges and run, though the burning and running is purely coincidental, the effect is the same. Almost exactly one year prior to this past December, at a job that I liked I made the terrible mistake of replying to an email that I should have ignored and/or reported. It just so happens that this reply contained a foible with something to do about my affiliate website http://www.coinsales.net. Naturally, I didn’t expect that the email would go through, but nevertheless, it did, and boy was that a mistake.
If I were to have sent this email out of malicious intent, there are several things I did that I would not have done. Namely, use my legitimate website, use my legitimate IP address, and use my legitimate email address. Later that day, when checking my email, there were thousands of reply emails from everyone and their monkey’s uncle asking to be removed from a non-existent list. I think the real problem was when I sent another email, not replying to the original message but to the originally targeted email address, saying, “Spammity spammity spam.” So, later that day I received a phone call from a fella from the IT Security team that I used to work so closely with. When he first questioned me about it, I played dumb, then after about 20 seconds of prodding, I confessed. Of course, it did me no good, apparently there were several rumors flying around that I hacked into the server using my access and set up this terribleness to do what I did. It was of course, a rumor, yet I had nothing to disprove such allegation. Naturally, because this caused all kinds of havoc, the (then new) head honcho was apparently ranting and raving and wanting to fire me, and rightly so, I did something stupid, though, it would’ve been nice to have been given the opportunity to make amends.
I was asked not to come back.

Lately, I’ve been scrambling (unsuccessfully) to procure a full time position, and frankly it’s my fault that I’m in this situation. On 18 December 2006 I submitted my resignation to my boss at Square D, letting him know that after the first of the year, I would not be coming back. Normally 10 days notice is sufficient, but I thought it would be courteous to give them a few more days. I guess I burnt that bridge too, though my boss got me an interview within the company, he told the fella who interviewed me that I didn’t give him any notice. While, that’s not true, it may have felt that way since my boss was gone on vacation the final week in December. Yet, it would not have been very beneficial for either of us had I continued past the first of the year. I woke up every day feeling like I was going to be sick before I headed to work, that’s never good. Plus, I was doing something completely unrelated to anything regarding engineering. Well, not quite, but I have a hard time believing that software engineering has anything to do with engineering, especially since Merriam-Webster defines engineering as, the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to people, neither of which have anything to do with software, the only thing “engineering” about it is that it’s “made useful to people.”

So, as a matter of course, I’ve been relegated to underemployment for nearly one year after my graduation. It’s almost kind of funny; since I have a Master of Science and two Bachelor of Engineering degrees, it’s nigh impossible to get any low-key part-time jobs, e.g. Best Buy, CompUSA, etc.; and since I’m a white guy I don’t exactly help companies fulfill their “equal opportunity” quotas.

The really terrible thing is that I’ve applied to nearly 50-60 places and obtained only 4 interviews, of those, only two led to offers, one with Square D (which really wasn’t an offer since I had no part in negotiating my compensation, but at least it was a job for 4 months), and another with FedEx Express, where I still work every weeknight. It’s not exactly what I had in mind for me as far as doing for work after I graduated, but it’s a paycheck (read: keeps the wife from selling my internal organs on the black market) and it has great benefits (read: pays for the organ replacement just in case).