When I got home today, it was uncomfortably warm in my apartment.
I wonder what it's like in here when it's actually hot outside.
Anyway, I meant to write about these past few days:
Saturday: I'd rented a car for a few days and visited Chrischi. First though, I drove to my parents to unpack. I'd planned to stay at their place for several days so I had several bags with me, mostly clothes.
Anyway, after a quick stop at my parents' I continued on to Chrischi. We ended up watching half of the first season of
True Blood, a fun HBO TV series. It's a mixture of mystery, horror, comedy, romance and nakedness. Hard to classify really, but fun to watch anyway.
Sunday: Slept at my parents', then drove to Lübeck to visit Steffi at work. She'd found out a few days earlier that she's going to be out of a job again in a few months. Europcar are finally going through with the re-organisation they'd planned to do for more than a year. You might recall that Steffi was originally coerced into transferring from Lübeck to Husum last year with this very re-org being the reason.
Anyway, her successor in Lübeck got the note a few days ago for both his positions in Lübeck and Kiel. Tough luck for him, he doesn't have the tiniest clue as to what to do now.
Where was I ... Right, I visited Steffi at work. We played some games, chatted, Bine came over to say hi, and a few hours later I drove back to my parents'.
Monday I had a job interview at
ISA in Hamburg. I'd left my parents' place way early to make sure I'm not too late for this. I ended up finding a parking spot right in front of their main entrance though, so I waited in the car for about half an hour calming myself with a dose of ProgRock.
The interview ended up being surprisingly pleasant though. It was conducted by an IT guy, and a trainee was also present. I was asked about my motivation to change careers into IT, about my experience in the field, etc.
The interview lasted for about half an hour, which I later realised was quite short. But they do plan to do a one day internship with those applicants they're interested in, so that'll be a chance to get a more in-depth impression of me. If they even choose me. I sure hope they do, I'd really really like to start doing my apprenticeship with them.
Tuesday: Slept in, got up, packed my stuff and left my parents' in the early afternoon. I had another job interview, this time at
SPI in Ahrensburg. This interview was a lot more intense. At first I thought that the interviewers were out to discourage and criticise me for some reason, but it guess they were just very well-prepared for the meeting and wanted to see how I'd deal with this sort of "interrogation".
The interview itself lasted for about 45 minutes, after which they asked me to fill in a personality test for them to get a more precise idea of what I'm like. They assured me that the answers I'd give wouldn't have an influence on their final decision as such. The test would just help them find out what kind of person I am and whether I'm actually well-suited for the position.
I'll probably get an answer, and results for the test, early next week.
Wednesday sucked. Without going into the specifics, I caused a huge problem for one of our big customers. Well, "caused" isn't quite true in fact. Nicole assured me today that none of it was actually my fault, that I did everything "right". Anyway, it bugs the hell out of me that I let a customer down like that, and I spent most of the night wondering how to do it differently if something like that ever happens again.
*shurgs* The problem is, I can't do it any differently. The only way to avoid something like that happening again is to stop serving customers altogether ...
And now, for some randomness ...
I keep wondering, how do people wearing their hair down keep it from being in their face all the time? Or in their mouth, in their food? Any suggestions?
If you check my last.fm profile you'll find that the past few months I've been listening mostly to the bands
Votum and
The Aurora Project. Both are absolutely brilliant and I highly recommend them to everyone, even though I'm pretty sure most of you have quite different musical tastes than me. Anyway, if anyone reading this likes Pink Floyd, Riverside, Porcupine Tree and / or Sylvan, check them out.
I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of
Anesthetize (whew. At least I can write it. I'm still not quite sure how to properly pronounce it). According to the website, Porcupine Tree hope to send them out early May. If I had my way it'd be in the mail tomorrow.
Actually, scratch that. If it was then I'd end up getting just a note telling me to come pick it up at the post office on Monday, since it's both insured and too big for my mailbox anyway. If that were the case, I'd have to wait 2-3 days to get my hands on it, knowing full well that it's just sitting at the post office all weekend. Now that'd be sucky.
I ranted about one postage option you can offer on ebay.de. It's cheaper than other options, but requires the use of a
Packstation. I'd offered that once, but the buyer didn't know what it even was, choosing that option for postage anyway.
Even though I said back then I wouldn't offer that option again, I did, hoping that I'd just had bad luck with that one customer.
But, of course, I didn't. Instead, it seems that people are unaware of the requirement to even choose a postage option at all. They just click through the whole procedure and leave it at whatever ebay.de defaults to (and that appears to be whatever's the cheapest). So, in future I'll either not offer it at all, or make it more expensive so that ebay defaults to something else. Kinda beats the whole purpose of it being a cheap way to have stuff delivered of course.
*shurgs*I forget the last thing I wanted to write about ...
Feel free to educate me on the correct use of "I forget" vs "I forgot" btw. We Germans are kinda weird and never "forget" (Germans: Think about it, how often do you really use present tense "vergessen"?)
bed!