I called.

I love it when your contact at the company you interviewed with gets kind of snippy with you when you call to find out about a job. It's not like she said that they'll try and let me know by early this week. Yeah, she did kind of put it in grey terms, but she did say early this week. So when I didn't hear back, I called. I just to find out what was up and nothing more. Humour me.

While she was doing her best to be polite, I could hear the little tone of irritation in her voice. I could tell she was thinking "God damnit, why is this guy calling me? Doesn't he know how busy I am? I told him I'll tell him when I know." Well, sorry. The lack of sleep and the constant checking of my messages every half an hour over the past four days made me a little cranky. It's only my life we're talking about.

She told me what I thought, that the decision was held up because HR hadn't signed off on the position yet. I'll back off from bitching about why interview people when the position hasn't been signed off yet because she thought it would be signed off on when she started interviewing people. But it wasn't. Quelle surprise. Every HR department I've ever dealt with, that I've heard of, is like this.

Can someone tell me what the fuck HR actually does? Aren't they supposed to get people into a position when the position needs to be filled? Why can't HR just sign off on the thing? Isn't that what HR is supposed to do?

Everyplace I worked, the HR department never had a good reputation. They were usually known for being impossible to reach, always unable to help anyone when they needed the help, and prone to coming up with stupid silly "team building" things when there were about a hundred more important things to be done. And considering how many badly run interviews I've been on, or mistreatment by one company or another, I wonder just what HR is doing at those places. Coming up with Silly Hat days?

Why can't the HR people at this place sign off on this job? The people in the department are all working 60 hours a week because they're short handed and five people (including me) or all sitting around waiting for an answer. It should be an easy thing to do. Have a meeting and sign the paper. Just sign the paper. That's pretty much it. Why can't they do it? Gossiping doesn't take up an entire day, after all. Is there something to HR that they do that I just don't know? Something that's terribly important and not only explains why they can't sign off on this thing but why every place I've ever worked at they've been pretty lame? It could explain why months ago I was let go from the Temp assignment at PG&E's HR department, because I didn't know all the secret things that HR does.

Are they too busy working on the companies Halloween party? Are they waiting for a full moon so they can do some Satanic ritual to check the signs on a hiring? Are they waiting for the new letterhead to arrive so they can sign the paper using the new "official" company paper? When I worked for a publishing company years ago, I always used to joke that the decision making process in HR department was like out of Twin Peaks that before the head of the Department would make decisions only after having dreams involving dancing dwarves. Maybe that's it.

And all of this means that I could find out tomorrow. Or I could find out early next week. Or late next week. Or sometime around Halloween. Or when I'm busy buying a car for a possible job in Sunnyvale. Or when I've moved back home and spend all my time watching soap operas because there's nothing to fucking do in Harrisburg PA.

Looks like I picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue.