Month: February 2008

I’ve reached the point, hurrah, where I get to start applying for jobs. And not just jobs, either. I get to start applying for careers; specifically, to begin my career. This is a magnificent thing, and I’m truly incapable of expressing just how exciting I find it. It’s like getting a baby elephant for your birthday. What, that’s never happened to you? Well, just imagine then. It’s got large, velvety Dumbo ears, a cute, short tri-foliated tail, three little spots that look like toenails on each foot, and a long, mischievous trunk that it uses to steal peanuts; also, it wants you to work from nine-to-five, teach people how to organize and use information effectively, and it has a nice benefits package.

It’s amazing.

I attended the Web 2.you conference today out at McGill, and while I’ll provide a write-up for it in full soon, one of the presentations got me thinking about the job application thing. Alright, so I was thinking about it beforehand, but it strengthened my need to have these thoughts. The presentation was on blogging: how to blog, why to blog, and to whom to blog.

Now, I’ve been blogging for a long time, so if blogging is something that libraries should start doing, I think that puts me in pretty good shape. On the other hand, I’ve been blogging for a long time and I’m applying for jobs and I have the easiest name in the world to google. It’s not that I’m ashamed of my blog. On the contrary, I have very strong feelings about this, my home on the interwebs, and my right to feel comfortable here. And besides, I don’t post anything objectionable, really. Maybe the occasional F-bomb. Plenty of things off-topic (whatever my “on” topic may be). Some personal stuff, some poetry, and lately, some music. I don’t know, I think that all these things, when put together, make me out to be a pretty well-rounded person. My problem is, what if someone I really want to work for googles me, comes here, and sees my post on say, The Mighty Boosh, and decides that because I find Old Gregg hilarious I’m obviously a poor candidate for their nifty if very serious position as Librarian X? Maybe they’re turned off by my usually pretty personal poetry, my aptitude for alliteration, or just the frivolity of this whole affair in general. Bam, nifty job gone. I wouldn’t even get to experience the dubious pleasure of being dooced.

I presented my dilemma at the end of the talk. Most of the people there were professionals, already working, so might have similar if not exactly the same problem. They could get dooced, but mostly I don’t think employers google their employees names on a regular basis all that often. And if they do, well, something has to come up to warrant the justification of firing a person, the pain of going through a rehiring process, and the risk that the new person may blog too. I’m not worried about getting fired for having a personal website that put poems and songs and stuff on; I feel justified in worrying that it could affect my being hired, though.

So what’s the solution? I’m not sure. I guess I could relax under the assumption that all librarians are amazing people and will really get a kick out of Old Gregg. Relaxing and assuming the best seems like a passive approach, though, and I don’t know if I want to put all my trust in it. At the same time, I don’t want to go through and turn select posts into “private” posts because, as I said before, I really do believe in the idea of a home on the web and of being comfortable in that home. Sure, I know anyone can come into my home, take a nap on the couch, raid the fridge, and pet my cat. I can invite them in, true, though I can’t keep them out, but I don’t want to, so I’m okay with that. They can’t move my furniture and there’s nothing worth stealing. The only bad thing they can do is come in and judge me; maybe I’ve hung the wrong art on the wall, or my living room isn’t feng shui, or my couch is too lumpy or my DVD collection sucks. I like my stuff. My home is for me, primarily, though other people can come in anytime and part of me hopes they think my art is cool and my couch is comfortable. The only time it matters if they don’t is if they can hire me, and they choose not to because the fact that I own and enjoy Sin City makes me a horrible person. I don’t feel like they should come into my home and judge me, but I guess that’s the nature of the beast, really.

So what to do? I feel hiding posts is a form of self-censorship, and I hate that idea. At the same time, are my ideologies worth not getting a job that I would really love and be amazing at? I’d like to trust in the better nature of an employer, and think that if they really find my blog that objectionable then maybe I’d rather not work for them anyway, but being a poor, way-in-debt soon-to-be librarian doesn’t really put me in a strong bargaining position in the first place (despite my amazing skills), and to be honest I’m not going to turn down a job on the moral standpoint that they don’t like my blog. That would just be silly of me. They have every right to not like my blog. Really.

So long as they hire me.