choco_frosh | Realm: Announcements - Subrealm: Job/Fish with price tags

Various people have been asking various variations on the question of whether this is a temp. to perm. job, and what my general prospects here are. (Well, some of you have. Assorted other people have been asking "So, how is the Census going?" without realizing that that project ended on Halloween, and that I'd quit by then anyway.)

The short answer is that No, it wasn't temp. to perm. What the hell WAS going on has gotten increasingly LESS clear, rather than more so, over the last couple weeks. As some of you may recall, I was initially sent in to do filing and, as I later discovered, assorted covering of various other projects while various people were on vacation.
And then it was "Oh, can you help with this thing that we were really supposed to happen back in like September?"
And then they started teaching me all the - insanely complicated - stuff that this department actually deals with most of the time, which mostly involves managing subcontracting to and from nonprofits.*
And then the junior member of the department came back from vacation...
...and was here for about four days before they fired him.

So THAT was awkward, since it looked uncomfortably like I was getting a job via dead men's shoes. And I wasn't even counting on the "getting a job" half of the equation, since (terrible) past experience has a. made me a pessimist on such matters, and b. taught me that such measures may ALSO be a prelude to firing the whole damned department.

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Then today, A2, one of our senior people, was in the middle of walking me through yet another sub-something process, when he got a phone call. "You should go deal with that," I told him. "I'm going to have to be data-entering all of this for the next five minutes anyway."
A couple minutes later, he was back. "OK...oh, yes, that looks fine. Can you step into my office for a few minutes?"
I wondered if I was being called on the carpet for something. Playing Rachmaninov without headphones?

Nope. "So I just got off the phone with Michael, and we agreed that you're learning quickly and taking a lot initiative, and generally doing a great job.** So we'd like to offer you a job..."

What with the whole dead man's shoes thing, I wasn't completely shocked; but...well, again I've had some ... experiences in the past. So I figured that they might well be hiring me - probably even for the amount of money they just offered me - but that they'd probably take the opportunity to ~~be cheapskates~~ save a few bucks and wait until after all the paid vacation days around Christmas.
Nope. Official hire date is gonna be December 4. (And A2 apologized even for that, explaining that they had to give the temp. agency*** two weeks' notice!)

So: celebratory Chinese food on December 1!

* My employer, btw, is itself a rather large nonprofit - although, as the president reminded us this morning, not NEARLY as large as some - that does various and sundry educational, mental health, and related work worldwide. What my department does is, stripped of the fancy titles, basically grant administration: managing federal grants, managing grants to other people, managing subgrants FROM the fed. to third parties, managing cases where people subcontract to us. It's much more interesting than I'm making it sound, but the process is wildly complicated, and the software we're using is really designed to manage patents, so...

** *I* feel like I'm learning everything at a snail's pace and screwing up a lot; but I guess that they understand the concept of a learning process. A refreshing change!

*** Again, they are Monument Staffing, and my contact there has been a total mensch through multiple applications for jobs that didn't suck, so: recommended.