A couple weeks ago, I heard my phone chirp.  Looking down, I saw a text message from a friend (Scripps ’07) asking me if I wanted her job when she left it this summer.  Considering the last calendar year—I just passed my one year jobsearchiversary—I responded immediately with “Yes, yes I DO want your job.”

Which is how, after a five-month dry spell, I was up an hour and a half early at 5:30 to make sure I had enough time to get ready before catching the first of three buses to my interview at the company where my friend works.

The combination of buses being on time (oh the shock!) and me walking fairly quickly lead to me appearing at the company a half-hour earlier than I was supposed to arrive; luckily I just tromped up to my friend’s office after being provided with a handful of hard candy and a cup of coffee, and got to rest for a few minutes.

The interview, such as it was, was to confirm that I am, essentially, what my friend sold me as: competent, good with computers, and a lot of data entry/management experience.  She also did an excellent job of asking leading questions so I would remember to sell what experience I did have.  Selling myself is not one of my many and varied talents, and she was a huge help in that department.  After the interview, I shadowed her for a few hours, which lead to the pretty excellent opportunity to help one of the staff members negotiate with the quirks of excel.

All which is to say: I have a verbal agreement with the owners to start when my friend leaves in June.  After the last year of disappointing returns, I’m not going to feel comfortable telling people I finally have a job lined up until my name is on their payroll; I feel a lot like I’ll jinx it.  What I have been telling people is that I’ll probably have a job in June, because I feel like it’s so…contingent?  I’m not sure how to put it; the “having a job” is so qualified by maybes I know that I won’t believe it until I wake up at 4:30 on that first Monday.

This update, beyond sharing the fact that I will finally have a real job and be paid in more than hard candies, is to emphasize exactly how important networking is.  I am awful at it, and don’t know how to make use of my friends and feel wildly uncomfortable doing so.

The fact that I have a fancy BA, a fair amount of data management experience, excellent references and have honed the ability to write really excellent cover letters (thanks to Valinda and my many editors, especially Alexis) are all contextually irrelevant if no one actually sees my application.  That is what networking is for.

A huge proportion of “open” positions are never posted (that’s what I’m told; Valinda can probably confirm this) and are filled in much the same way that this job was: social networks.  In fact, my friend inherited this job from her sister when she went back to school.  Having a network of people who are willing to listen for and report that kind of job opening (or, in my case, serve it to me on a stainless steel platter) is vital, and I know that if I had been better able to build that kind of network, it would be unlikely my jobless state would have lasted as long as it has.

My current sortofmaybehaveajobinafewmonths status is entirely dependent on the fact that my friend advocated for me and funneled this job towards me.  While it’s not what I had wanted to be doing a year after graduating from Scripps, it is a good place to be and will let me start building a framework for getting to where I do want to be in terms of my long-term life goals.

Until June, I’m going to try to be content with baking ridiculous numbers of cupcakes and try very hard not to spend my first paycheck on brightly-colored sneakers and exotic kitchen wares three months before it arrives in my hands.