Have a Ball...FINISH IT!

Amazon cold-called me on Thursday. I'm not entirely sure how they stumbled across my resume since I was holding off on job searching. My motive (anybody? motive...just me?) for staying my hand is a desire to "warm up" after a nice long period of academic inactivity. I was aiming to start the job hunt in earnest this summer.

The best laid plans and all that. I don't think I had a proper way of telling Katie, Amazon's recruiter, to get back to to me in a few months when I felt prepared to speak with her company. And of course she had that disarming charm that seems to be required of recruiters so I was pigeon-holed to doing anything she demanded. After some humerous and useless patter about Seattle's weather we settled on today at 5:00pm Texas time for some Amazonion to phone interview me.

So I found myself nervous. Amazon is very high up on the list of companies I want to work for and is also rumored to have difficult interviews. I asked Blake, who works there now, for any advice and he came up with some very useful gems while also stoking the flame of my excitment.

I wasn't going to tell anyone else for fear of public failure, but then I told my parents. One of my largest motivations is making my dad proud, ever since I sat the bench and he still came to our games, so if he knows I've failed, everyone else knowing is a drop in the bucket. That did add to my nervous state quite a bit.

Now that there are 5 short hours before my interview I have settled into that strange calm shielded by arrogance that I am convinced got me my previous jobs. It also happens when I approach a girl, or get on stage, or really anytime I plan to misrepresent myself. A bullshitter's high, if you will.

Some interesting points about the job:

1. I would spend 1 week in 12 "On-Call" in case the site goes down
2. I would work with the UK and Japanese teams
3. I would work in Linux....^_^
4. I would live in Seattle proper

All of those sound exciting to me. Well, the on call thing seems like it would get annoying.