It was the second day of class today and I'm starting to get a little fed up with it. The chief instructor is one of the short, beady-eyed ogre women that our training group seems to specialize in. She has a loud, metallic, monotonic voice which was giving everybody a headache by lunchtime. And I felt for her poor underling, this dear, old, reed-thin, genteel Southern lady. The two of them were supposed to take turns, each teaching a chapter. But the sweet old thing could barely get a sentence out before the other one pounced on her, and we'd hear, in her grating voice, something like "well that's not exactly right... " She'd then gives her colleague an ingratiating smile as if it would make up for humiliating her in front of the class.

It's a stupid class anyway. They're taking this incredibly complex subject matter, and instead of really explaining to us how it works, they focus on nitty gritty details. The instructor plays around with the software on screen while we watch. Then it's our turn to do an exercise, and the exercise is almost exactly what the instructor just did. So all that's involved, practically, is just reading from the class text-book and typing it into your computer.

I, at least, found a way of accelerating the whole process so that I could explode out of their half an hour early before lunch, and thus avoid an extra half hour of that VOICE. I found that if I just did the class exercise instead of listening to her tell us what to do, I could get it finished, and skip out. So I took a long lunch break, picked up a salad and went back to my hotel room.

I was reading up on notes I'd made to prepare for a phone interview in the evening. I've been job-hunting for months now, but there's little out there, right now. And I've kind of priced myself out of most jobs anyway, on account of the ridiculously generous salary my employer pays out. This one job I was phone-interviewing for this evening was the first truly promising opportunity in six months of looking.

In the afternoon class, I cut even more corners, and got out of there shortly after three. This left me plenty of time to work out before my phone interview at five-thirty.

This was the second phone interview with this company, and this conversation was with the guy I'd work for. I'm looking for a management job, and, in this job I'd initially manage a four-person team of programmers. The guy called right on the dot of five-thirty, and spent about ten minutes explaining the job. On the surface, it's hardly promising: generating lists of credit-card users for marketing campaigns. Ugh. But, with any job, it's not the actual subject matter that interest me, it's more the opportunity to improve things, to develop processes that make things run more smoothly and more efficiently, and to be a constructive force in the work lives of the people I manage and the people with whom I'm a peer. So I was prepared to listen to what he had to say, and to tell him what kind of position I was looking for.

After half an hour, I think we both felt that there was enough possibility of a match that it was worth moving forward with an on-site interview. But I had to mention the salary issue, because I knew there wasn't enough money on the table to interest me. I'd take a salary cut for a truly great job, but not for just an okay job. And that proved the sticking point. So we finally wished each other the best of luck, and hung up. Strike one.

Tomorrow, one more day of class, then a late afternoon flight to Seattle. They're flying me all the way there for what looks like ten minutes of work with a customer. In fact, I think I could do it over the phone! But I'm never one to turn down a free trip to a city I'm partial to. Gonna stay for the weekend and drive into the mountains, if I can find them.