A Man With A Future

Today hasn't been a good day. A day when I knocked another three or four seconds off the running time in the post below, despite it being much hotter should have been. But another kick in the nuts on the job front means I'm seriously grumpy. The brief rundown: in mid April I applied for a lab supervisor's job at a prominent company headquartered in Calgary. Called for interview the first week in May. Do interview. Do fine. Hear nothing in the timeframe the interviewer mentions. Eventually email to ask "what's happening?" to be given the response "we're not going to fill that position through lack of work for the lab, but I've forwarded your details to my manager who'll be in touch shortly". The next day, I'm invited back.....for an interview for the same position. Slightly confusing. Back I go. Have interview with a second person and gave coherent, thoughtful answers. I was again assured I'd hear something within the next week. Two weeks later: nothing. I emailed the second guy back. Tumbleweed. Left it two more weeks, sent a slightly more direct email this time last night, get a reply this morning: "We've given the job to an internal candidate, however I've sent your details back to HR for any similar opportunities".

Off the top of my head, I've applied now for jobs in labs-technical, labs-research, labs-management, consultancy, health and safety, technical writing, academic (yes, the situation is such that having said I was getting out I acutally applied for an academic job), patent agency, sales, environmental and others. I'm either not taken seriously because I'm overqualified, or rejected out of hand for having no direct experience, despite the fact that's what the whole grad school thing is all about, taking an unfamiliar situation and then hatching a plan and getting on with it, learning as you go. To not be taken seriously is annoying in the extreme.

If you look at the "hall of fame" on my previous research group's website, pretty much everyone got a job in the local oil and gas or chemical industries.When I decided to do Permanent Residence, I partially bore this in mind. When one person moves, another person in the old boys' network fills in the gap, and so on. This is how, I found out a month or so ago, that the actual position I'm talking about actually became vacant.  Yet my experiences with the same network are less than stellar. My unsuccesful interview at another company that I had last May I am, in hindsight, ever more sad about not getting. That job arose because the line manager contacted my ex boss since her husband used to work in the same lab I did. In keeping with the less-than-good luck, some wonder, once-in-a-blue-moon wonder applicant gets the job. I ever more frequently wonder about what might have happened, Sliding Doors-style if I'd got that job. A nice place to live, a car - thus not having to go through the Wednesday night Wacky Races to get to football on time, more trips to the mountains and such. Sigh.

I'm just annoyed that, what, 17 years of really hard work, trying to do the right thing and be a good labmate, and not stab people in the back and clamber over them has essentially got me nowhere near my career and life goals by this point. My belief in this is fundamentally shaken at the moment. Pretty much everyone I worked with in Leeds or Warwick - while not to suggest for a second that they've advanced by foul means -  or that I know from elsewhere is now happily embarked on careers, engaged, married, children, either arrived or on the way. Facebook is a never-ending procession of photos of all of this. And I'm still scrabbling about. I remember, when I was still in school, that once upon a time during one of the A-level years that there was some cock-up with my school bus pass about a week before term started, and someone from school would have to bring it to me. Imagine my shock later that afternoon when the headmaster turns up, and is briefly invited in to give some impromptu pep talk about how promising I was and that it was a big year coming up and the sky's the limit etc etc. Mum, if she's reading, may remember this since she was there. Being out of work for 13 of the last 25 months and on unemployment benefits are somewhat lower than the sky, don't you think? It's not exactly how I envisaged being 35 would be.

There's a scene in Alien 3 about halfway through where Charles Dance's character - a doctor, fallen on hard times (ha!) - muses "Once upon a time I was considered most promising. A man with a future". He's then attacked and dragged away by the Alien. I'm trying to work out what the Alien represents in this situation: life? chemistry? A PhD? People without PhDs? General Canadian recruitment practices? The protectionist Canadian system, as exemplified by having to prove my qualifications are the equivalent of Canadian ones?