[RANT MODE = ON]

I know people mean well. Really, I do. But there comes a time when they need to STOP HARPING ON MY JOB SEARCH, no matter how much they want to see me find something permanent.

Like when my parents or other relatives or friends enquire if I've found anything, and I tell them "no". If they make one or two suggestions or ask a few more things, that's fine. And I know they care and they mean to be encouraging.

But when they go on and on and on and on and ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON about it, it's not encouraging. It's depressing.

Especially when they suggest two or three places in a row that I have ALREADY APPLIED TO. I wish people would stop asking me if I've tried Ikea, Blue Cross, Temple, the University of PA, and Drexel. They all have more freaking copies of my freaking resume than an army of HR directors would know what to do with.

I wish they would stop asking me if I've tried to get a job at the place where I'm doing temp work. YES. FOUR TIMES. They keep choosing employees from other departments or people from the outside who have specific experience with the stuff their department does. YES, I've been with this place nearly a year, and NO that doesn't appear to give me a foot in the door, or even a toe in the door. If it did, I'd have gotten one of the jobs I applied for by now.

I needed to get this out of my system, after a too-long phone conversation with a family member who just Wasn't Getting It that I needed to have the topic changed to something else after about ten minutes of discussing job hunting.

I do kind of think the light bulb glimmered on for him a little bit sometime during the NEXT ten minutes, though, when he was talking AT LENGTH about his friend's son who had a great job right out of college, but quit to start his own business and he's making a ton of money, he's doing this, he's doing that, he's doing the other thing...

... and I interrupted to ask, "Is he hiring?"

Silence.

"Well, actually I don't know if he has any employees, it might just be him working for himself".

"I'm glad for him, but unless he's hiring, it doesn't help me much".

And then, "You know what you should do? If you had some political connections, you could apply for a government job. If you worked for the state or the city, they have great pay, great benefits, plenty of days off..."

As if you can just go out and get political connections at will. Yeah, I'll pick up a few political connections the next time I go to Pathmark. No sweat. I'll just add it to the shopping list.

Instead, I said: "But I haven't got any political connections, so it's no help to me that state jobs have great pay and great benefits".

I know they mean well. I KNOW they mean well. But sometimes they drive me crazy.

[RANT MODE = OFF]