The Waiting Game

The good news: It appears that the turnover with my former company has gone smoothly. Over the last five years, we've always had trouble with employee resignations. Seeing that I was leaving my day-to-day duties to a team of people, it was pretty important that everything got taken into account in order to ensure their uninterrupted services. Apparently, everything did... and all it cost me was about a week's worth of job-hunting.

The bad news: It's been just over a week since my formal departure, and I am now thoroughly bored. Most of my reading material nowadays appears to be made up of blogs and the like; As a result, I get a lot of inconvenient waiting times on a dial-up connection. Add to that a lack of inspiration that I normally get from work, and it looks like I'm going to have to look for something constructive to do very soon.

On the job-hunting front, I've spent the last nine days sending application forms to nine different companies, and only one of them had the courtesy to send me a confirmation letter. That puts them a notch up in my estimation, yes, but I'm still wondering about the HR practices of the other eight companies. Isn't it supposed to be standard procedure to confirm receipt of any online application (even if it is an automatically-generated e-mail)? Or have things certainly changed since the last time I was on the job market?

Ah, well. I suppose I shouldn't be complaining. Interestingly enough, five years of constantly being on the job have given me license to apply for positions that require "extensive experience" in a managerial position. People would most likely ask why I would leave a company that has been my heart and soul for the last five years, but I believe that a change of pace and scenery would constitute a good reason for that. Hopefully I won't get beaten out by anyone who has more charisma than brains; I hate it when that happens.

Right now I'm doing cleanup -- not the same cleanup I was doing for five years' worth of files and papers in the office, but a general cleaning of my other idle pastimes. I've got over a thousand archived e-mails in my personal inbox, for example, and I suppose that now's as good a time as any to throw away the old, outdated ones.

For now, however, the only thing I can do is wait... and watch. Some people say that waiting is always the hardest part, and I'm starting to believe them.