I have a new job, too. I have been doing the rounds of what feels like every recruitment agency in town, and I finally got to the stage where one of them arranged an interview with an actual employer for me. I was offered the job this afternoon, about two hours after the interview finished. I told them I'd consider it and call back tomorrow, but half an hour later I decided I'd better just go for it, and phoned to accept.

At least the time with all the other agencies wasn't wasted, because most of them made me do competency tests on various software packages, and now I have official printouts of my results to show to the sort of employers who would rather see a percentage score than an example of your actual work from a previous job.

My typing proved to be a lot better than I thought -- I'd been telling everybody "around 50 wpm" in interviews, but now I find it's 76. I can also now claim "expert" level in Word and Excel, "advanced" level in Photoshop, and "expert" level in PowerPoint despite the alarming fact that my total experience with PowerPoint was the five minutes I spent messing around with it the night before the interview. It came with my computer, but I didn't even know what sort of program it WAS before this. Nonetheless, I managed to get a score of 93%, thus proving that anybody who takes recruitment agency scores as an indication of genuine ability needs their head examined.

So, anyway. Don't ask me what my new job is, because I went around their office and had everything shown to me and explained with diagrams, and I still have no freaking clue. I'll be doing ... stuff ... for some sort of ... company. They use phrases like "quality solutions" or "process productivity client strategic networks" or something. Then they asked if I could do that, so I said yes.

It pays four dollars an hour more than I'm getting now, and it's a consistent 40-hour week with the same start and finish times each day, which is worth another $10 an hour to me just in itself. After the constantly changing shifts of the past year, this is going to feel like a paid holiday.

I don't know yet when I will be starting, because I have to see how little notice I can get away with where I am now. Two weeks at the most, though.

Brunnen-"maybe by then I'll have figured out what these new guys want me to do"G