Pondering and productivity

Lots to do. I have to find press on online customer loyalty and CRM tool integration (aka process management, which sounds like a lot more fun); I have to think up some ideas on how to advertise a fictional train that goes from Chicago to Denver in 6 hours and keep from getting totally bitter that such doesn't actually exist; I have to modify my resume for a job application; I have to go over a class syllabus to a. decide if the work demanded of us on one project is enough for me and one other person to handle while we ignore a third group member who's useless, or if we should beg to be placed in another group and deal with the paralysis that comes from having too many people and no one to manage us, and b. figure out what the hell I'm supposed to be doing on my other project for that class. Like I said, lots to do. I did none of it yesterday due to the lovely hangover I had from Friday, and so that means that today I'm doing what anyone in my position would do: laundry. And buying food. And cleaning the apartment.

But despite all the crap on my to-do list (actually laundry really should be on there too, I'm running really low on the essentials and have to do the thing where you wear stuff that's only there in case of situations like this, because you'd never choose it otherwise), I'm still really bothered about something. In yesterday's rather long post, those who read carefully saw a mention of my discovery that I didn't get a summer internship because of this blog. The internship was at Rand McNally, a corporation for which we'd also done a class project (a fairly decent problem--how to make their website profitable--but we never got the impression that our input was valued much, and that'll really mess with morale). As soon as I heard this, I racked my brain to try and think of what I'd posted; I don't make a habit of being very detailed about what we're working on because we all sign NDA's, and when you cut out all that you tend to forget to mention how much your life is sucking with respect to a particular project. (I know for damn sure that I mention how much life is sucking with respect to projects in general.)

So what could I have said about Rand McNally? I went back and read everything from that quarter, and discovered that I mentioned the company name only three times: once the day that they presented their problem to us, and twice in this post. Now in that second post, I can see how the phrase "I hate Rand McNally" might be misinterpreted. However, in the context of that post (where I also claim to hate analytic techniques, group meetings, and Giordano's thin crust pizza), I don't think it's something that should be taken too seriously. Two lines after "I hate Rand McNally" I talk about moving to a place where there are no group meetings to be a warrior princess. Clearly what I've written needs to be taken with, like, a million grains of salt.

The other reason why they may not have hired me (also due to the fact that they saw I had a sense of humor and simply failed to understand it for what it was) is, if they were just skipping around reading posts like the one just mentioned, I don't really come across as the industrious type. Suave and winning, dead sexy, and perhaps a bit whimsical, but not industrious.

I suppose both are valid reasons for not taking me, and I'm not really sorry that I didn't get the job there. I don't want to work for an organization that's so rigid it can't appreciate my humor to some extent, or at least be willing to let it go, as I'm not publicizing confidential information. I also don't want to live in fear of my employer someday discovering this.

I have a little more appreciation for the value of anonymity, now; blogging isn't any fun if you feel like there are too many constraints.