I declined a job offered

Yesterday I went to Haarlem for a presentation and an interview for a job at HCN on the CASEMA account. It was very interesting to see what kind of people would go for such a job, which was easy to see since we were interviewed in a group. Halifa, whom I know from Stream, was there. Guus too. The job would entail both inbound and outbound calling. But only sales. I had hoped that we would also have to do some information provision or technical support.

During the evening we had the opportunity to listen to some current employees while they were on the phone. Pretty boring.

A couple of hours ago they called me and offered me the job. I declined, which is a peculiar feeling, I never did that before.

Now’s to hoping that I will find another job soon. If I find something it will definitely be better than this.

Today at noon I met up with Fransy. She is kind of worried about her thesis, also because she didn’t get any feedback yet from her supervisor. This means that I had to help her, which I happily did. Her comparison between English and Greek disagreements is original and it looks like it is methodologically sound as well. The only thing that must happen now is that her English is improved a little. Some sentences are grammatically correct, but can only be understood after reading them at least three times. So, she is going to remedy that. Furthermore, some paragraphs were put in the wrong chapters. Suddenly you could come across some interesting remarks about her self gathered data, while these data were not even discussed yet. That should be remedied as well.

But for the remainder I could assure her that her thesis is definitely a pass mark, which should prevent her from suffering a nervous breakdown.

Last Sunday I went into the city centre. I did not like the atmosphere at the uva reading room, guards, ID cards and too many students. So that won’t be my regular Sunday spot. So instead I went to the American Book Centre. There I browsed for quite some time, and also through the books on writing fiction. I found this one book that looks at some popular movies as a starting point to discuss characterisation, plot, creating tension etc., which looked soo very interesting that I couldn’t resist. Everyone wants to be a writer, and I will try to go through this book conscientiously. I even bought all the movies that it discusses on DVD, meaning that I won’t be able to buy anything else (fun) for a while. An example of something that I won’t buy is a new computer. Not even an alphasmart. I found out about this thing in another book at the ABC (I didn’t buy it). An alphasmart is a small computer which can only be used for word processing. It seems ideal. It is much more durable than a laptop, and it is supposed to have a battery life of about 700 hours. The one major drawback is that you can’t save texts to USB. In order to transfer your texts to a regular lap- or desktop you have to use a USB cable to directly hook up the two machines. This means that you really can only use it as a supplement to your regular computer. It is not something which can stand on its own.