Caveat Lector

Well, I’m through all of next week’s homework except for a quick library-consult that I’ll handle on Monday, and I’ve written up my talk notes for Ruritania. Written them all the way out, actually. I don’t normally do this because I prefer to speak semi-extempore, but I’ve got so little time this time that I thought I needed to. The blog has given me plenty of practice in writing (more or less) how I speak, so I shouldn’t sound too horribly canned.

The blog, ah yes, the blog. The Ruritanians have been giving CavLec a pretty thorough going-over, judging (again) from my server logs. Though it wasn’t a Ruritanian who searched today for “career development” and nearly gave me a laughter-induced hernia.

Career development? Me? Honey, are you ever in the wrong place for that. I’m doing this all wrong, you see. This isn’t how a job hunt is supposed to go at all.

Because what I’m supposed to do is duck into the nearest phone booth and turn into Perfect Plastic Person. I then appear before the Ruritanians, who search me obsessively for flaws that (as Perfect Plastic Person) I gamely try to pretend I don’t possess. The Ruritanians aren’t supposed to see my warts until they’re stuck with ’em, because who hires a person with warts?

Obviously I’m not playing this that way. I mean, I’ve gone and nicknamed my potential future employers and colleagues as a nonexistent European country notable mostly for swashbuckling and all. And if the Ruritanians hadn’t found CavLec themselves, I’d have told them about it during my visit and invited them to take a look.

Because when you get right down to it, I don’t believe in employment surprises any more. I’d far rather build job relationships based on real knowledge. Here are my warts (I’m human, so I have ’em), say I, and oh, that’s all right, we think we can live with that, say they. (Or in an ideal world I don’t ever expect to find, they say, warts? What warts? We didn’t see any warts.)

Call it an acid test, if you will. Anybody who can look past CavLec and still hire me is likely to be good for me, and I for them. Anybody who likes CavLec—well, how can they not be my kind of people?

Anybody who gets antsy about CavLec, worried I’ll say or do Bad Things with it, or that it will Reflect Badly on them… probably needs to look at hiring somebody else. I’d rather work for someone who trusts me not to be a jerk or an idiot for the most part, not to mention someone willing to forgive me on the (reasonably rare) occasions that I am. In return, I can serve up a mildly self-deprecating, humor-laced straightforwardness that Perfect Plastic Person will never offer.

It’s about fit, really. A good employment relationship is about fit, rather than either employer or employee bending all out of shape to accommodate the other. CavLec is definitely an acid test of fit, because I’m pretty much all here. This is me. This is what you’re getting if you hire me. No surprises.

If I were the employer, I think I’d find that reassuring… but with weblogs so new-and-all, I don’t know how many employers think that way.

I’ll be finding out soon, though.