A cautionary tale.

Subject: A cautionary tale.
From: Paul Moloney <paulmoloney -at- yahoo -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 16:02:17 +0000 (GMT)

Permit me to rant a few moments. I know
Andrew Plato says you shouldn't rant,
and I appreciate his opinion, but if I don't
do it I'll just have to break my keyboard
instead. So I'll won't reveal any names,
in order to protect the guilty and stupid.

Last year I went through a period of a
few months of gainful unemployment.
During that time I was approached
by one agency who said that a certain
Dublin financial software firm were
looking for someone to come in and
either revamp, or in fact totally do from
scratch, their documentation. (Despite
the fact they were a fairly established
company with the number employees
in 3 figures, there were looking for
someone with only 2 years' experience,
which led me to suspect they didn't really
know what they were looking for, but
as long as the person was cheap they
didn't mind).

Before any interview, the agency contact
said that people at the firm wanted to see
a portfolio. Normally this would happen at
an interview, I would have thought, and I
only had two copies of a portfolio, so I
was loathe to just send one off. I've rarely
worked for companies where the documentation
was printed, and so only had 2 professionally-
bound manuals to show off. Against my better
judgement, I mailed off a copy to them.

Anyway, after a few weeks, I heard
nothing. Eventually I got more interviews,
and then my current job. I decided to follow
up on the agency to find out what happened
to my portfolio. After ringing twice, the agency
guy there admitted he had been unable to get it
back, and gave me a number for the human
resource manager at the company itself. He
also mentioned that the firm had eventually
decided not to fill the position.

After several attempts, I finally got through
to the HR person; she admited that it seems the
portfolio had been thrown out when people had
been moving offices! I was absolutely livid, but
at the end of the day, there wasn't much I
could do about it. I'm still angry that a company
could ask for my portfolio when it seemed
they weren't really serious about filling a position,
and hadn't even the sense to be careful with
that portfolio. Apart from writing a stern letter
to the actual person who lost my portfolio
(not the HR person herself, but I gave her
a piece of my lip anyway), I have no comeback.

Bah.

P.


=====
--
we live. we dance. we die paul moloney
dublin, ireland
=-=-==-=-=-=-www.paulmoloney.org-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
#12794891 @ ICQ paulmoloney @ Yahoo! Pager

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