I’m having a hard time looking for a job and I want to vent about it. If that’s something you’re not interested it, see you on Friday. If it is, I need to give you some context. In 2023, I gradutated college. My majors were linguistics and English studies. I wanted to be a translator, but I had no luck finding a job there. I noticed that a lot of companies were looking for an accountant or an administrator, so I decided to finish an accounting course. Fortunately, the state paid for it.
Speaking of the state, I talked to a consultant at the Croatian unemployment office. She sent me a job advertisement for a company that was one hour away from where I live. I thought it was a little too far away, but I didn’t want to be uncooperative, so I sent them a message. A few months later, I got a phone call from the company’s boss. He told me that he saw my CV and that he needed someone who knows both English and accounting. I thought I finally made it; this was my golden opportunity!
There was just one problem. The location I was supposed to work at was an hour and a half away. Eight hours of work per day is already a lot, do I really want to add three hours of travelling on top of that? I explained my dilemma to my family and they said I should take the job; a lot of people travel a long distance to work. I know long commutes are sometimes unavoidable, but should we really be normalizing something like that? In the end, I decided to go to the job interview, explain the problem and see how it plays out.
The day of the interview came and the commute was just an unpleasant as I expected. I had to take two long bus rides and a long walk uphill to the company. I hated it, but I stuck to the plan. I talked to the guy in charge of the interviews. I answered the standard questions: what’s your experience, what salary do you expect, when can you start working, etc. I told him that the location was very far away from my house and that I wasn’t sure if this is the right job for me. He was sympathetic, but he told me that he couldn’t help me.
I had to pass a test to prove my competence. The company would call me next week and tell me the date. The next week came and went, but I got no calls. In the end, I decided to call the company and ask them about the test. The boss told me that I rejected the job. No, I didn’t. I just said I wasn’t sure if this was the right job for me. I was frustrated, but I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. The interviewer was a different person, so maybe this was a case of broken telephone.
I explained what I actually said, but the boss wasn’t having it. He said I wasn’t competent enough for the job, even though I never actually wrote the test. I never got a chance to prove myself. I tried to explain things the boss, but he just said the conversation was over and hung up. At that point, I lost all sympathy for him. My dilemma was resolved; I didn’t want to work for that jerk, no matter what the length of the commute is.
That was the end of it. I wish I could say something more profound than, “Don’t work for a jackass,” but that’s all I got. A few months ago, I said I worked as a sales representative. I didn’t make any money in three months, so I decided to quit. I’m unemployed again. This has nothing to do with the previous story, but I figured, someone was going to ask me about it, so I might as well explain it here.