About Yours Truly

I am a people person.

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Oops. Scratch that. I'm a people-hating person.

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Curse those typos.

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In fairness, I do not hate everyone. Mostly everyone, though. Which probably makes it more of a ‘me’ problem and less of a ‘you’ problem. Which, further, is ironic because I’m in the staffing industry, and the staffing industry relies heavily on personal interactions. Or is it personnel interactions? Ba dum.

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In either case, I, a self-proclaimed semi-hermit who lives in her mother's basement (Hey! I pay rent!), has an allergy to idiocy, and goes out of her way to avoid people, am in the staffing industry. What does that mean, exactly? I help people find jobs and/or help companies find people to work at their companies. So, how did I end up with a career that feels all too frequently like Human Resources? I still have no idea, even after putting the circuitous route down on paper.

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I started as a bottom-run stocking peon to help pay for school and worked my way up to store management at one of Those Fortune 500 companies. Then I bailed because I was over the absurdity of corporate red tape. However, quitting as a form of social protest doesn’t pay the bills, so I ended up a peon again at a seat-making foam factory where we made – wait for it – seats! Yeah, for things like military Humvees, semi-trucks, lawn tractors, cranes, etc. Foam-cell Operator was my official title. Classy, right? Queue up a montage of time passing, and I did end up becoming something along the lines of a backup team lead/packager/labeler/forklift driver/robot programmer/quality tester person (hello, pay raises) but eventually decided that the many hats felt a little too much like being a character in a children’s book and opted to move back home.

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Don't ask me how my current employer found my resume online or why they called me. There may be something to that whole staffing industry thing about translating life experience into marketable skills – we’ll get to that eventually. [Sidebar: I once asked my boss why he was interested in my resume in the first place, and he said he’d never been asked that before. Go ahead, ask that at your next job interview, it might get you some points. It will certainly kill some time if the interview isn’t going well.] However, they set up an interview, which I drove five hours to get to and paid twenty bucks for an hour's worth of parking. [Second sidebar: Seat-making companies don’t typically locate their factories in high cost-of-living areas. Sticker shock, much.] Post-interview, I had a job offer, was desperate, accepted immediately, and only later realized that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But, I wanted to move, and I wasn't going to do that without a job. Which I now had. Anything else was tomorrow’s problem.

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Anyway, back on topic: A people-person job. Which, as I stated above, I am not. Let us go a bit further and add that I am painfully shy around people I don't know. A 'sink into the floor so you don't look at me' kind of shy, and I don’t hide it well. There were several people in my small

office that had money down I wouldn't last. My direct boss, I found out at my ninety-day review, didn't think I would come back the second day, the second week, or the second month. I recently told him on my five-year anniversary that HA! I proved him wrong. We then blinked at each other for a moment and somewhat uncomfortably went our separate ways. He probably went back to work. I went to go start this blog in an attempt to figure out how I ended up here.