>>> Only you can motivate you.  I can't do it, nobody can do it.  Hell, I
>>> can't even provide you with an incentive to make a change.  I'm telling
>>> you what I'm seeing from over here - you fill out an application or
>>> send in a CV and then you wait to hear something.
>> As far as I know, that's how people get jobs. I don't really know what
>> else there is to do.
> 
> Well, I've already given you some ideas - don't deal with recruiters who 
> won't give you the company contact info - deal with the companies 
> directly.  Things like that help.

 From what I've seen recruiters are utterly useless... I don't know if 
they're any use to the company paying for their services, but they're no 
use at all to the people trying to get hired.

>> It's one part not knowing what the hell to try, and two parts just
>> lacking the motivation to keep going in the face of unending rejections.
> 
> Well, you can ask here for ideas of what to try.  As for motivation in 
> the face of continued rejection, all I can say is to think about how much 
> you dislike your current boss/job/coworkers and let that motivate you to 
> keep trying.

Yeah, but that doesn't really work. It would be wonderful if I won 
several million on the lottery, and I could just retire to my stately 
home with a built-in custom recording studio. BUT IT'S IMPOSSIBLE! So 
thinking about my current bank balance doesn't motivate me to buy a 
lottery ticket any more than the current trainwreck of a job I have 
motivates me to look for another one - it seems equally impossible.

>>> It depends on how badly they need to fill the position as well.
>> Well, that's true too. I only got my current job because they were
>> absolutely desperate, and I was cheap.
> 
> And from the job you've gained some experience, which helps you with the 
> next job.

I don't think I really gained anything useful from this job - other than 
being able to _claim_ that I have commercial experience now...

>>> 4.  Lack of good references:
>> Ooo, that reminds me... My CV claims that I have references. I'd better
>> go find some. o_O
> 
> That would be a good idea. :-)

...which brings us back to "I don't know anybody". :-/

Besides, I gather the rules of these things are such that it's supposed 
to be somebody who knows you on a professional capacity? That's going to 
be even more of a problem...

>> Heh. Does anybody else here think I should just get Jim to tell
>> employers about me rather than me tell them? The way you talk, you make
>> it sound as if I'm somehow worth having...
> 
> Well, I have some experience in self-marketing.

[Understatement.]

> That is what a CV is - a marketing document.

Indeed.

> I also happen to believe that you do have real 
> skills and would be an asset to anyone who hired you.

Well, that's kind of the problem. I *like* playing with equations, but 
I'm not actually very *good* at it, unfortunately. And it's also not a 
very useful thing to do anyway. The long and short of it is... I'm not a 
very useful employee. Secondly, even if I had useful skills, I don't 
have any "proof". There's nothing I can easily show to somebody that 
will prove to them that I'm not just talking out of my arse.

> I see a lot of 
> potential in your abilities that you don't seem to see in yourself.

Apparently.

>>> You're still insisting on making the decision for the prospective
>>> employer to not hire you.  That's THEIR decision to make and not yours!
>>> I'm going to KEEP saying that until you demonstrate that you understand
>>> it.
>> Well, I *did* apply anyway, didn't I?
> 
> Yes, you have at times applied.  But you didn't follow up the way I would 
> have done, and that's one significant difference.

The job I was referring to is about the one job where I *did* actually 
follow up (not that it helped), but anyway...

>> This is contrary to everything I have ever experienced in my life, so
>> excuse me if I don't immediately believe it. No disrespect, but every
>> single time I've tried to get somewhere in life, I have failed
>> spectacularly. It seems that no matter how much energy I expend, nothing
>> happens. So when people say to me "take control of life", my resonse is
>> "dude, like, HOW?! It can't be done."
> 
> I can understand why you feel the way you do; I did for many years 
> myself.  It takes persistence to push past it.

I think part of it is having nobody around me to encourage me to 
continue. When I apply for a job, nobody says "well done". When I don't 
apply for a job, nobody says "you need to try harder". Either way, it's 
just me, sitting in an empty room, staring at my computer thinking "now, 
do I spend 4 hours on a pointless and utterly depressing task, or shall 
I go read about non-Euclidian geometry for a while?" You can see how 
that one's going to turn out most of the time.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, to actually get a job you have to 
apply for several hundred trillion jobs. Given that under optimum 
conditions, I might be able to find maybe 3 agency adverts to apply for 
after several soul-destroying hours of searching, it's going to take 
several human lifetimes for me to apply to even a hundred, never mind a 
billion.

> I've seen you fight back in discussions up here
> which is something you hadn't done before.  You're 
> learning to stand up for yourself, and that's a GOOD thing.

On the contrary, now it seems people just think I'm an opinionated idiot.

> Applying that in an online forum is a good first step.  Applying it in 
> 'meatspace' is the next step.

Nah. Telling a bunch of glyphs on a screen "you're wrong" is one thing. 
Telling that to a 300-pound gorilla of a man standing on front of you 
holding a baseball bat? Not so easy.

> I'm fairly certain you can do it 
> successfully, probably in your place of employ - like the next time 
> someone demands something from you that you judge to be unreasonable; 
> telling them to "do it themselves" if it's so easy that they judge you 
> should be able to do it in no time at all when in fact the request is 
> much more complex than they understand.  Might they complain to your 
> boss?  Probably.  Might your boss have words with you about it?  You can 
> almost certainly count on it.  But I've seen you stand up here to similar 
> criticism and hold your own very well - and I'm sure you could explain to 
> your boss.

The irony is, *my boss* is usually the guy who's being unreasonable at 
me. ;-)

Like, currently I'm waiting for the site GM to return from... wherever 
the hell he is right now, so that I can talk to him about that email I 
got. Basically I was told I have to be trained on the procedure document 
explaining how the scientists in the laboratory in Oregon manage and 
maintain their lab water purification system. I decided (and the local 
QA manager agrees) that this is utterly irrelevant to my job. I'm never 
even going to set foot on Oregon, why *the hell* do I care how their 
water system works?! But my boss is adamant that I have to be trained on 
everything on the list he gave me. Of course, I'm just some nobody, so 
no one's going to listen to me, but the QA manager is the kind of guy 
that people sit up and listen to. (He's in QA, after all. These people 
are feared everywhere.) So we'll see how that one works out...

Did you know, the company has a set of 14 "core values". And value 11 is 
"I support the hiring of people who are smarter than me". I feel that in 
the case of the Director of IT, that shouldn't be a difficult task. :-P

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