Must be nice to hope for the things you wish to want.

Well, I had my first official "we've bypassed you for other candidates" e-mail today. I kind of knew going into this process a little bit that it wasn't going to be free of stings and bruises - I could only hope that it's free of insanity and amputation. Still, it kind of bummed me out and I was in a head hanging mood for a little bit.

Unlike past rejections, I was able to get back on the horse relatively quickly. I applied for two more positions today. I finished reading the Career Changers guide to cowards, and managed to fit a bike ride in. I have to remember that this process is like how it requires thirty roses to extract one drop of floral oil. As long as I continue to stay motivated and work at it, I should be able to find success.

One of the positions I applied for today had a very, very long application process. It took probably three hours to navigate through everything. Not that you couldn't breeze through it in about ten minutes, but to meticulously comb through what you've entered, proofread every letter that's entered, ends up requiring a substantial amount of time the more pre-packaged information an employer requests.

It makes sense - if you're looking to get the bast candidates, well, the best ones should be able to power through the endurance tests. Still, when you've got some detail-oriented bordering on obsessive compulsive tendencies like me, it gets to be somewhat of an ordeal to ensure that everything you typed is spelled correctly and using proper grammar. It's all the worse when you don't realize until about 3/4 of the way through that if you just copy it from the web browser into your word processor and let the processor check it you can save substantial amounts of time. Lesson learned.

I've now plowed my way through about three books, and most of which have discussed you need to think, act, and operate outside the box to get a job. Passive job searching and clicking on job postings probably isn't going to be enough if that's all you do. Tomorrow I'm going to meet with a friend/mentor and discuss some of the potential choices that I've made, and we'll see if my ideas and the books ideas are on the same track.

1 hour bike riding

1 hour reading the Career Cowards' Guide to Job Searching

6 hours preparing resumes, cover letters, and applying