Hello again HR,
I’m sure you were concerned about my lack of contact, but as. Mentioned last week I was travelling to Poland.
Returning late last night, I was inundated with voice mail messages from Jeremy – some quite incoherent. I can appreciate him working out of hours, but I suspect on more than one occasion he was calling from that party he mentioned. Out of courtesy I called him back.
I was happy to inform him that the last couple of days were incident free and that may have been helped by my travel arrangements. He was quick to mention how many of his friends seemed to be spending time with people from Poland, which was an interesting coincidence. I’m sure when his references to his love of Poles actually meant all eastern Europeans and not specifically people from Poland.
True to form he jumped back into his recruitment patter. Again, surprisingly quiet in his delivery, which made much of the role difficult to hear, but I did catch some reference to golf balls and hose pipes. I told him straight out that this sounded more like a role for a Louisiana Prison Guard, and that really that type of job didn’t appeal to me in the slightest.
Quick as you like he jumped to an alternative role, which if I’m being honest confused me even more as it sounded like a gardening role. I took the role to be in the maintenance department – perhaps in Stephen’s Green here in Dublin. With this kind of weather, you can imagine that this would be appealing to some people, but I highlighted a couple of things. Most importantly my knowledge of Angle Grinders or any other type of Grinder was extremely limited, and similarly for Leaf Blowers. I’m really more of an office worker I told him.
Well, I don’t need to tell you how people get when they’re in full recruitment mode – honestly they just won’t give up.
He jumped straight to some sort of role that involved stationery, the volume was certainly an issue at this stage, but he seemed to be offering a role that related to paper in some way. I happily informed him that we were progressing to an almost entirely digital platform here and the ‘Reaming’ that I think he was referring to would no longer be necessary. I think he was a little taken aback by my detailed knowledge of the vernacular around paper quantities. Besides, I told him, I’m a bit of a closet environmentalist looking to eliminate all waste from the environment. The real problem I told him was not paper, which was readily recyclable, but plastic and other materials such as that found in erasers. ‘Rubbers are a problem?’ he asked. Of course it is, but really the problem was the amount of rubber used in engineering – current precision engineering technology allows for the elimination of rubber from all sorts of areas, with the same effect being achieved with the strategic application of sufficient lubricant instead.
Well, how was I to know he was so passionate about precision engineering? He seemed quite keen to discuss this further. Did I mention that I think he’s an asthmatic? During our conversation he seemed to have some form of attack, his breathing becoming more laboured and I believe he was repeatedly hitting his chest to free up his breathing.
Unfortunately at the same time Delilah had got into my son Adam’s stash of tins of Old Peculiar just as she started to watch ‘The Only Way is Essex’. This is always a recipe for disaster as she takes on the many affectations of the people on the show. Her grammar goes completely to hell – I had to point out to her that really ‘May Not or Will Not’ are much more likely phrases rather than ‘Can’t’.
‘I don’t think she’s a ‘will not’ covers it she said’ – I was going to pick her up on this sentence structure, but Jeremy had returned to some form of normality.
Jeremy, having recovered, started to explore what sounded like an opportunity with some form of car sales outfit. Really we weren’t aligned on this, particularly since the areas he was discussing seemed to be more in the vintage car area – Ford stopped producing that model in 1997. That stumped him I have to say, so I pressed him further – ‘indeed’ I said ‘it was considered underpowered – people wanted more torque, more power, more oomph’ – he sounded genuinely interested. ‘So nobody wanted the Probe in the end’ I said.
Jeremy seemed to be starting into another attack, and besides Delilah was about to start into Eastenders, which never ends well for anybody so I was forced to hang up.
I really have to figure out a way to get him to stop offering me jobs though – TechReCorp is all the job I need.
Regards,
Alexander
Dear HR 