Buon Giorno di San Valentino! (That would be, "Happy St. Valentine's Day", for those who are curious. ;o) )

Thank God for the cats as a diversion and as something positive to focus my mind on. Because on the job front, I have been meeting frustration after frustration.

My employer finally has received permission to create a PERMANENT job to do the tasks that I've been doing for the past 16 months. I applied for it. So did two other people who are employees here, and one external applicant.

I had my interview. The other three persons, as of Friday afternoon, had yet to be interviewed. As my supervisor's boss is out all this week, it's not certain when the other candidates will be interviewed, nor when the decision will be made.

It's absolutely not known whether my 16 months of experience already doing the work will be outweighed by the fact that two of those other candidates are currently employees of this company. Even though those other people might have to be trained, from scratch, to do what I already know how to do.

Two things are certain. One is that when this permanent job is filled, my temp job will MOST DEFINITELY be phased out at that time. I'll either be here for good or I'll be gone for good.

The other thing is that I might not even be here THAT long. They might not be allowed to keep the temp job open while they wait for the permanent job to be filled. As of Friday afternoon, I am here on an as-needed basis, not as a continuing temp worker.

So I filed for unemployment today, giving Friday as the "end date" of my job, because that's when my job status changed. Right now I'm not in a long-term temp position. I'm a temp who's only here because there is a project being worked on. When the project is over, either I'm outta here forever, or I'm outta here until they say, "Congratulations, you've been selected to fill the permanent job". One or the other.

I can't believe I lost my long-term temp job EVEN THOUGH there's work to do. The higher-ups (not people I work directly with, I believe) won't assign me the duties that the worker in the permanent job would be performing. They're going to let the permanent people who are CURRENTLY doing those things keep on doing them, even though they have work coming out their ears, instead of restructuring the jobs NOW to let me ease their workload.

Interestingly enough, one of the hiring considerations for the permanent job is that they DON'T want someone who'll come on board and then move on in no time. I can understand why a company would want a certain level of commitment from the people who are working for it. But I wish I could get a crumb of that kind of commitment in return... such as letting me continue working here, doing the tasks that I not only am already trained to do, but COULD be doing to make life easier for the permanent employees, between now and the time that the permanent job is filled for certain.

As for that special project that is the only reason I'm even HERE today: it's stalled temporarily by the lack of archiving boxes. Those should have arrived today, but so far they're not here. Once the boxes arrive, it's a question of working hard to get the archiving done, knowing that the better I do, the faster I'll be putting myself into the jobless limbo until I find out who is getting the permanent job. To quote Dean Martin, "Ain't that a kick in the head?"

I think I'll un-decorate the rest of my cubicle today. I have some boxes I could keep the Bobblehead Committee and other items in. Then I'll be able to take them home on a moment's notice.