What I Want to Do When I Grow Up

As mentioned before, I went to the EDD office to take a long, four hour computer test to see what the computer says I should do with my life. And, yep-- four hours. It was actually kind of stressful in a few ways, not least of which was the fact that I was kind of afraid I'd spend four hours working on it and the thing would spit out that my ideal career would be something like "the world needs ditch diggers and you're a ditch digger" or "you'll be sporadically employed for the rest of your life until you die while stocking campbell's soup at Safeway" or even "?"

It started off with this long section where they showed photos of various jobs and I was supposed to say whether I have interest in it, I've done it before and don't mind it, and am completely uninterested. The thing about the program, though, is that it was done about fifteen years ago so when there was a picture of a "computer technician" the picture showed somebody looking over some sort of washing machine size computer. The thing also asked questions like "a clown" or "a farmer" but did not ask anything like "world famous blogger" or "international man of mystery." To add to my aforementioned fears, I pretty much said "not interested" to everything ("except clown). Well, actually, since I've done a lot of admin type stuff before, I said "I've done it and don't mind it" thinking I was at least being honest. This didn't work out so well as I'll get to in a minute.

The rest of the test consisted of simple tasks (alphabetizing, basic vocabulary, numerical) but there was a huge section on math where they asked things I haven't even though of in years, like geometry and math problems. At one point, they busted out an isosceles triangle and asked me to figure out one of the sides and somewhere in my head I remembered the Pythagorean Theorem, something I hadn't even contemplated since High School and somehow figured it out. Got it right too.

There were a couple of weird bits, like they showed a circle of color and then gave you four circles that were of similar color and asked you to find the circle that best corresponds to the given color. Not easy considering how close the colors were. They also did it with geometric figures and even one where they gave you a 2d geometric image and then asked you to point out which form would be it's 3d counterpoint. Can't say I did well on those questions.

The thing finished up with an "ethics" section where they asked you a bunch of questions about what you should and should not do on the job. Things like "you should never show up late for work" or "if coworkers criticize your work, you should shoot buy a gun and shoot them," all with a Mary Worth style cartoon illustrating the particular situation. Now, this test is kind of like a driving test in that there are "rules" and then there are how things really are. Because I'm an idiot, I said things that really are. Like to the question "is your work so valuable that you cannot take a day off," I said I disagreed because sometimes there's nothing going on and sometimes you need to take a "mental health" day. To the question of whether a boss who criticizes an employee is always doing it because that worker is doing something incorrectly" I said I disagreed because we all have known bosses who just don't like somebody and take out all of their life's frustrations out on them. And as for the question of whether or not it's okay to have alcohol at work I said not so brightly that I disagreed but sadly did not have room to add that drinking on the job in your cubicle is wrong but if the bosses bring in a keg, then let's party. And, yes, I've had plenty of jobs where some sort of booze was brought in to celebrate one sort of thing or another.

All of this honesty, I'm pretty sure, will make the unemployment people scratch me off their list of people they should help out.

So what did the test say I should do? Admin work! Because I said I didn't mind admin work in the first part of the test. And also because I kicked butt in the alphabetizing, numerical, and proofing part of the test. So, in other words, all those jobs I've done while looking for work have actually given me enough experience to do the jobs I've done while looking for work instead of the actual jobs for which I've been looking for work.