Ick.

I got another cold call from a headhunter this afternoon; this was from an agency I'd dealt with before, but a different agent. In the "it's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it" department, he noticed this line in the "other interests" section of my resume:

• Member of American Contract Bridge League and Kate Buckman Bridge Studio; current rank is Life Master

(That's not nearly as impressive as it sounds, as dagibbs will attest.)

It turns out his aunt is also a member of Buckman's, and I've played against her many, many times. This headhunter also plays, but he hasn't been to Buckman's since the 1970s. I wonder if I've played against him at tournaments.

Alas, the position is a 24/7 oncall support position with American Express, located at Warden and Highway 7. There's no conceivable way I could get to the office if the pager went off in the middle of the night (in fact, getting to work would take about two and a half hours normally), so we agreed that it was not a good fit and he didn't submit me. It was a fun conversation, however. (And coincidentally, I was wearing my Buckman's sweatshirt today...)

Had a lousy night at bowling: 124, 149, 152. That first game was my second-worst game of the year, and the series was my worst. Troy and I have both noticed that since the alley put in new pins a few weeks ago, we're both bowling poorly. The one good thing about tonight was that we were bowling against Troy's team, so at least I had friendly people to hang out with. Alas, one of Troy's teammates won the strike pot tonight - it hadn't been won in several weeks, so it was about $1000.

I had a bad headache when I got there, which probably didn't help. I don't know why, exactly, but I slept an extra hour today and woke up with it. Then I probably exacerbated it by trying to use the computer this afternoon to check my email. I really have to figure out a way of getting my curtains up to block out the afternoon sun.

When I got home around quarter to 11, I sat down to actually deal with the emails that had come in. There were 27 Toronto Trek panelist signups, which I've assigned to various team members, which gives us a total of 32 so far. (Last year, we had a total of 186 panelists.) I hope everyone who tried to sign up before we discovered that the automatic emails to ozreison and myself were being lost in cyberspace has seen the various requests to forward their personal confirmations (which were not being lost) and have done so, or resubmitted the web form. (Damn ISP.) The problem has been fixed now, fortunately.

The track list is being expanded to add Battlestar Galactica as a separate track. We really should have set that up at the beginning of the process, but it was something that slipped past us. Argh. (Well, slipped past me, at any rate. I shouldn't speak for ozreison. :) ) I've tweaked four of the Programming-related web pages to reflect this change; now to pester dx4 into getting them up. (I had a weird dream last night that he was actually back reading/posting on LJ, and I had to go back and change a bunch of posts so that he wouldn't see what I'd written about him. I don't know why, as I've never written anything about him that would make me want to do that. Unlike certain other people whom I cannot name lest I incriminate myself.)

I also had 12 panel suggestions to sort out (why do people submit panels on Survivor for the More Shows track when we have a perfectly good Non-SF track?), and about 20 other generic emails to deal with this evening. There was an interesting one from the SMOFS list: a member passed along this interesting little tidbit regarding Creation Entertainment:

( Rant )

*deep breath*

Hey, montrealais is coming to town tomorrow, so I may not be nearly as verbose online over the next couple of days.

(no subject)

I got yet another cold call from a headhunter this afternoon; this one is for a 6-month contract at CIBC, using CICS, COBOL, DB2 and Easytrieve, all of which I have. Go me!

There might be an issue in that I've previously applied to CIBC via their website, and companies generally don't like hearing from headhunters about people who are already in their database. Though if a company is going to completely ignore people who are already in their database - I'm assuming that they do, as I've never heard back from CIBC and I've applied for well over a dozen jobs there over the years - why do they have such a policy? I would think that getting an independent recommendation regarding someone would be a [Martha Stewart]good thing.[/Martha Stewart]

I had a brain cramp while speaking to him, though; he asked if I'd interviewed anywhere else recently, and while I've only had one interview with an actual employer in all this time, do you think I could remember the name of the company? All I could say was, "they're the credit reporting agency"... argh. I remembered two hours later that it was Equifax...

I had a very nice dinner this evening with montrealais at Zelda's. We chatted about a whole bunch of topics, though I think I was doing most of the chatting, which is why I took 15 minutes longer to finish my meal. (Which, for the record, was meatloaf for the second time this week... I hope I don't get mad cow. ;) )

When I arrived at home, I sat down to tackle the backlog of questions from TT members on the Message Board. I had most of the answers already compiled, or easily compilable (is that a word?) from other emails. A couple of others didn't really require consultation as they were related to Programming, and I figure as Co-Head of that department, I'm probably pretty qualified to respond to them directly. After all, there's not much point in emailing myself and asking, "How would you like to answer this?" :) Three new threads in the Q&A forum now, plus three that were bumped with additional information, and there are still four for which I require more input.

I shudder to think of how long it's going to take me to catch up at TrekBBS this evening, though, as I didn't make it over there last night at all due to being up until 5 in the morning assigning TT panelists to team members...