Dis-Organisation part 2

In the previous episode our hero found himself without a job, with the end of the year fast approaching...

Whereupon he got an unsolicited email revealing that he had inherited millions of dollars from a previously unheard-of distant relative in Nigeria - no wait - different story. 

Whereupon he got an unsolicited email from the administrator of a training program for junior doctors asking him if he would like to take part. (Ok I'm not going to write this whole damn thing in the 3rd person - get ready for an illeism purge - yoink!)

So I got an email from the people running this training program asking if I'd like a job. As with my experience at the end of 2012, I have no idea how they got hold of my details or why they chose me, but when someone offers to give you money to buy candy, you say YES!

I was told that they would be having interviews in a couple of weeks, but a couple of weeks later I hadn't heard anything, so I shot an email off to the person who had contacted me, asking wassappnin? And I got back an autoreply saying she didn't do that job anymore.  Uh oh.  I contacted the person who had taken over from her, and he had never heard of me.  Furthermore, they were interviewing candidates in a few days.

Somehow I cajoled him into adding me to the interview list, rocked up to the interview, told a bunch of outrageous lies and half-truths, wept shamelessly while pleading for mercy, and got the job!

I had a friend a while back who was doing some recruitment for the public service for a largish group of people to get involved in a special project. She had had to take over the job from someone else halfway through, who had already sorted the applicants into PROBABLEs and OVER-MY-DEAD-BODYs.  So she took the PROBABLEs and proceeded to offer them jobs and train them and send them off to do their work, all the while thinking to herself, "Boy these people are idiots.  I'd hate to see the ones who were rejected."  At some point she began to get the same feeling of dawning realisation that you may be experiencing even now, and pulled the rejected candidates' paperwork from archives, only to find that they were highly qualified, motivated and intelligent people who would have been great for the job, and she realized that she had gotten the two piles of applications mixed up and had given jobs to the OVER-MY-DEAD-BODYs.

So it goes to show - never give up. No matter how shambolic the recruitment process, no matter how unqualified you are, you can always shoulder your way onto the payroll if you have persistence.

Unless you actually are qualified and good at the job with plenty of relevant experience.  Then you're fucked.

Dis-Organisation part 1

So, once again, I found myself without a job. This happened after internship, as I have previously documented.

Once again I applied for a year of general training. And once again I crashed and burned - worse, this time, because I wasn't even deemed worthy of interviewing by ANY of the hospitals I applied to. This perplexed me. I don't wish to cast aspersions on my colleagues, but there's some fucking numbnuts out there that seem to have no difficulty at all getting jobs despite presenting a clear and present danger to the lives of their patients and the mental health of their cow-orkers.

So I rang up the hospital to find out what was going on. They told me that I wasn't ranked high enough for interview; I asked why. They said that my aggregate score was not high enough; I asked which scores. They said that my referee reports were very good, my CV was very good, but my cover letter was only average. Well excuse me.

Apparently the cover letter, or to be more accurate, the assessment of the cover letter by an embittered HR manager, is just as important a predictor of success as a doctor as the opinions of said doctor's actual supervisors and their previous record of achievement.

Fuck.
That.
Shit.

Admittedly, I have nobody but myself to blame. Labouring under the delusion that recruitment would be a rational process, my cover letter basically said something like:

"Dear Hospital, give me a job. I don't want anything special, just don't screw up my paychecks too egregiously. Sincerely, PTR. p.s. I am not a numbnut".

And presumably they get a lot of cover letters like that because this was assessed as average.

I'm unsure precisely how one would write an above average (or even exceptional) cover letter. I suppose a below average one would contain errors of fact, spelling, grammar, and so forth. I could get the Hatchling to dictate mine:

"Dear Hossabil, I am a goktor. Do you want moneys? I want moneys. I give you a cuddle. ROOOAAAAR!! No, you not roar. I roar. Sincerely, PTR"

Hmm, that's actually pretty good. Perhaps that would actually be assessed as Exceptional. I don't wish to cast aspersions on the cognitive capacity of the typical embittered HR manager, but they don't seem like the fluffiest pavs on the table. But to be honest, given the aggressively proactive manner in which some of my colleagues promote their own career interests, I suspect the Exceptional cover letters read like this:

"Dear Hospital, any o' you sumbitches don't gimme a job, I'm not only gonna kill him, I'll kill his wife, all his friends, and burn his damn house down! Sincerely, PTR"*

If I was an embittered HR manager wishing to perpetuate the employment of antisocial personality types in the public hospital system, I would cry from happiness when I got a letter like that. Seriously, try it yourself next time.

So - that's the story of how I came to not have a job. Next - the story of how I came to have one again (or so it seems).

*With apologies for plagiarisation to the writers of Unforgiven.

No more gaps

I kind-of promised a few posts back that I would explain how I came to have my RMO (or residency) job this year.  It's a long, fascinating story in a short and boring kind of way.  And it goes a little something like this:

I wanted to do a year of General Training this year.  General Training means you're in no specific training program.  This is because:

• I am indecisive, and can't commit to a future career,
• I am cowardly, and am too afraid to apply to a training program in case I am rejected,
• I wanted to do some more psychiatry,
• I wanted to do some anaesthetics, and
• I am lazy, and didn't want to have to do any study any time soon.

So I applied for a year of General Training at the hospital I did my internship at.  Naturally, as an outstanding and handsome young doctor I was hired and my every wish came true - not.

What happened was that four thousand other people also had the same plan and the hospital decided that they should hire a bunch of bozos so they could be closely supervised before someone got hurt - meanwhile the superior interns such as myself were thrown back on our resources since we could so obviously cope with it.  Or something like that.

So I was stuck without a job. The process in the arse end of Australia is that we get three preferences for different jobs throughout the state.  The advantage of this is that if you don't get your first preference, they know that you're a hopeless dud and they throw your application in the bin while laughing maniacally and sucking on a giant cigar.

Then after about a month of bitter self-recriminations, I got a phone call out of the blue from another hospital that I hadn't applied to.  They wanted to interview me for a job.  So I said yes, sedated all my patients, and drove to the other side of the city for the interview.

The interview went for half an hour and mostly consisted of the 3 members of the panel discussing between themselves what would be the best route for me to take in the mornings to bypass the rush-hour traffic. The other bits consisted of them hanging shit on each other, and in one case almost falling off his chair.  They asked me the expected questions, prefaced with "I'm sure you'll know the answer to this one but we have to ask", and then after I started to answer they would interrupt me and say, "Yeah yeah yeah, blah blah blah, that's great."  I was watching out of the corner of my eye as the departmental secretary filled out her evaluation form, just running down the page ticking all the boxes marked EXCEPTIONAL in a perfunctory way.  Seriously.

It was pretty clear to me that somebody had unexpectedly quit their job and they needed a replacement pronto.  Somehow they had got their hands on my resume and they liked it (I know this because we discussed some of the research I did in my prior life as Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile) and decided to offer me the job as soon as they saw I didn't have three heads and wasn't a serial killer.

Which is all great.  Except that halfway through the interview I realized (by peeking again at the evaluation form) that this wasn't an interview for General Training.  It was an interview for Physician Training.  (For Americans, this means Internal Medicine.  For non-medical people, a physician is a medical specialist like a cardiologist or a neurologist.)

Physician training is intense, scary, competitive and I had repeatedly told many people that there was no way I would do it.  So when they offered me the job, I accepted it.  I accepted it because:

• They pay me a salary.

So that's what's happened.  I got a job I didn't want by not applying for it at a hospital I didn't want to work at.  So far, all things considered, it's going pretty well!

Handle with care

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for a job.  Which sucks.

Have had far too many awkward conversations with people who assume that I've got something sorted by now and are then left feeling embarrassed and unsure of what to say when I reveal that I'm languishing at the bottom of the heap.  Sigh.

I try to be philosophical about it.  The reality is that there are X jobs out there for which Y people are competing.  And Y is bigger than X.  So someone is going to miss out.  Hopefully it won't still be me standing when the music stops in November, which is when the last round of offers come out.  After that, it's a free for all, and I don't know what will happen.

Funny thing is, it hadn't occurred to me that I wouldn't be in top X/Yths of the cohort.  As far as I know I interviewed fine, and as far as I know my referee reports were fine, and my resume was fine too.  After dwelling on it for too long at night you start to develop conspiracy theories.

Such as: my referees hated me so much that they gave me good term assessments in order to lure me into asking them for references, in order to write me bad ones and destroy my career.  Actually I kind of admire those evil bastards for being so Machiavellian.

And this one: the admin officer at the hospital deliberately shuffled my name to the bottom of the list because I've been such a pain to deal with during the year due to my incessant demands for special treatment.  Because I'm heaps demanding, right?

Or this: I smell.  And the interview was in such a small room that I nearly killed the panel.  Could be.  Nobody ever tells you when you smell.

Every day I check my emails.  Nothing.  Well, nothing but ads for cheese festivals.  Maybe I can get a job as a cheese-guy.  It might mask the smell...

Anyway, if you run into me in the next little while and I look grumpy (grumpier than usual), you'll know why.