(no subject)
Friday's interview went quite well (I think). I was once more interviewed by an asian man and a white woman, but this time the man was Sri-Lankan and the woman went to uni at St Andrews so conversation was a bit easier to come by. After the Q&A the man told me I was to take 'a quick Excel test' - since I haven't used this programme with any regularity since Uni I was a bit taken aback. Fortunately it was quite straightforward: there was a spreadsheet with columns for each month and sales revenue, cost of sales, fixed overhead and profit for the rows. The previous year's figures were in and I was to predict this years figures given stuff like "Jan, March and August's sales will be up 7% over last year's: Feb and Oct will be down 6% and the rest of the year will see 1.5% increase". Basic entering of formulae ("=B7*1.07" type stuff) and copy-and-pasting, I was done in minutes. I asked afterwards if that was seriously the entire test. He replied that some of the applicants had claimed prior accounting work and intimate knowledge of excel, but then seen the test and just sat. Maybe hoping the Excel Fairy would come by and do it for them o_0 Anyways, they have to interview a few more people so I'll not get my hopes up but it was nice to have a relaxed interview anyways.
Work trial today was interesting, part of a programme to help unemployed people find work (taste the irony!). Mondays and Wednesdays inducts new groups to the programme, the other 3 days are keeping tabs on the existing programme's remaining members (obviously numbers decrease as they find work). In a nutshell, the job is to identify what kinda jobs they're going for, if they're being realistic with their aims, and to assist them in their search using various resources. Already I have learned that sometimes people have wildly unrealistic expectations and refuse to listen to any arguments. I shall maybe take to keeping a rubber bat in and writing 'Idiot-beater' on it.
Today I also learned that going to an evening course after having been at work all day means your brain is a lot less happy to learn. Which means that from now on, my willingness to learn will now be a negative value. That's right, going to classes will induce my brain to kick old stuff out. Like knowledge of... umm... I can't remember o_0
And finally, my mum's computer's tetchy habit of sometimes not recognising the DVD drive is getting really irritating. Especially since in those instances it refuses to open at all :-/ I wonder if the Idiot-beater would help it function?