total talking

Yesterday I got paid to talk all day…

Sounds like a skive but actually I got so tired I fell asleep face-forward on my keyboard last night earlier than I normally go to bed. So yes, it *was* work!

I was a rep at one of those fairs for graduate students who are looking around at which companies are offering jobs. We had a rather trickyish ‘brief’ as to the message we were trying to put across. Wouldn’t really want to discuss the details right here, but suffice to say we had sorta a couple mutually exclusive “images” to put across. A challenge to add to the excitement, I suppose.

At first I was a little nervous of speaking to people. Then I realised they were even more nervous to speak to me… so the only way I was going to learn this business was by picking on unsuspecting victims. Friendly smiles weren’t enough… I had to force an audible hello onto them to encourage them to feel welcomed.

It was a whole different kettle of fish when I tried having a surreptitious wander round the other stalls. Everyone wanted to know what degree I was doing, and if I wanted some junkmail… despite me sporting a company t-shirt of my own. All I wanted was just to nosy into what kind of company attends these events, how many I’d heard of, how easy it was to work out what they did from the stall branding, and all that kind of worky stuff…

An’ I only chored one freebie… 😛 I thought I was kinda entitled to that, after being prepared to listen to the guys sales pitch for a good half hour (at least!) It was a handy wee sim card reader… (Twice recently I’ve almost-lost my phone, and gone and got panic-attacks at the thought of losing all my numbers…) So, all in all, I was quite pleased with myself at managing to be an opportunist for once

The most interesting part was pretending to be a corporate spy, and trying to get as much info out of the other exibitors as possible. I paid particular attention to another company that our company used to be part of, before we launched forth on our own.

Since joining, I’ve been reading up on quite a bit of our (joint) company history… so it was rather enlightening to see just how much two companies can diverge in half a decade. Enough that they have developed almost completely opposite recruitement strategies…

Curious!

But hey

On the blogging front, its been quiet lately (as you may have noticed!), but having recently discovered my dearest Stephie has a blog… as does Ev , I may decide to motivate myself again, and start tackling the 30-or-so drafts I have on the go. :S That sounds awful! ‘cos it is, really! But I guess I just needed a holiday for a bit… and its not like I’m “pandering to the masses” anyway. I’m really writing it for me of course!