Review: "The Blacklist"

Enjoy Yourself

This morning after the third snooze, we heard these lyrics:
"Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think."

It's not really a song about having to pull yourself out of a warm bed in the morning, but those lyrics fit.

"The Blacklist"

Last night we watched the first episode of "The Blacklist," a crime drama that Robin's co-workers talk about a lot and that I had never heard of.

It seems to be a TV show about Hannibal Lecter working with Clarice Starling to catch bad guys. Clarice does it because they really are some pretty bad guys. Lecter seems to be doing it to groom Clarice to follow in his footsteps. And we see evidence that Clarice might just be up for that.

Both Clarice and her husband seem to think that she can be an FBI agent but put her family first--haven't they watched any TV at all? Some of Clarice's co-workers think Lecter is in it to try to get their intelligence--also idiotic; he clearly knows more than they do on every issue. So I don't like any of the characters, even if the evidence that Clarice's husband isn't what he appears is planted rather than real.

The whole episode was scary and stress-inducing. I think the show is just going to be unpleasant. Robin wants to try watching another episode or two, though. Just in case.

The Job

I still have no information on today's training and have e-mailed my old instructor to see if he knows. My new boss was talking about possibly carpooling, and though I don't think she'll actually get around to organizing that, if I haven't heard anything by 11:30 or so, I'll head over to the office in case people are meeting there.

Blog Entry of the Day

Toilets Are Supposed To Flush. That's Pretty Much It. - This entry from Step Away from the Mall is probably my favorite on wants versus needs.

"Seriously?!?! I know it’s ugly but I 'need' to do the kitchen and baths?!?! And yes… they mean 'need.' Like they wouldn’t move in until it were completely done over.

"The good news is that I’ve heard things like this so many times over the years, that I’ve almost perfected the response:

"...The stove and oven only cooked food! And the fridge only kept my food cold! I have to rip it all out and start over! I can’t believe the woman who owned it before me and raised six kids here wasn’t arrested for child abuse. ..."

It's a pretty amusing response.

Possible Job Change

I got an e-mail from an old co-worker telling me about a new job opening. I had seen that opening but thought I'd remembered that it had one of those impossible job duties. Plus I already have a job. Plus I'd be qualified for my pension in only one year, and it seems rude to leave that soon, though some people do.

But then I remembered about deciding to go for jobs where people actually want me. And I still haven't been told the exact location of the required training that is happening right now for that job I currently have.

So I wrote to another colleague in the same college as where the job opening is and asked her if she thought I would be a good match for that job. She said, "Yes! I don't know why I didn't think about it. I am not sure if I will have any say in who gets hired, but I can certainly put in some REALLY good words for you. They are closing it today (maybe before 5-not sure) so apply quickly."

And I thought that however impossible any job duties are, they will be impossible for anyone who has them. And I don't have to leave after only one year. And even if I do, I will make sure to have an awesome job manual ready for the next person. And it's only 30 hours per week, so I could still do some work for my current employer and I could still help the colleges on the side if they needed me.

The pay is super low ($15.38/hour) but that's 50% more than I'm making now (or actually, not making now since I'm missing the training) and it's negotiable. And I wouldn't have to eat into my Roth IRA at all and could probably even grow it again.

So I applied. It's really hard to do a whole application in one day because of proofreading/molten brain issues, but I took an early lunch break to give my brain a rest plus my second contact looked over an early draft and gave me a piece of advice.

However, I didn't finish in time to go to the office of my current job and see if people were meeting there. Oh, well.

As usual, I really think I could get this job. But, unlike all the other jobs I applied for, the person doing the hiring knows one of my references (the one I quoted above).

This job is even harder to describe than my job as degree audit specialist. It is Flag Petitions Coordinator, another bureaucratic job. It's part hanging around in committees trying to approve courses for certain new-ish university-wide requirements. And it's part boring updates - doing overrides to the degree audits of students who use other courses (such as transfer courses) to fulfill those requirements, letting the students and their advisors know when you've finished, and keeping track of the updates in a database. I actually know enough that I could probably take initiative in several areas right away like adding fields to the database, begging colleges to submit good-sounding courses to the approval system, and being a liaison between bigwigs who decide things and college staff who have to implement these things.