Testing, testing
Apr. 15th, 2004 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI confess that aside from the money issues and the general terror of my future being pulled out from under me, causing me to fall flat on my ass, I've been enjoying the unemployment thing more than I should. In the past few jobs, I've gone straight from job to job, with only a day or two in between. The longest vacation I took was two weeks in the times I went across the pond. Otherwise, having long periods of time to myself seemed like an unattainable luxury, and I've enjoyed it. I've done the requisite job hunting that I must do to maintain the unemployment insurance money, but otherwise, I've liked sleeping in (for an insomniac whose sleep times come pretty much only when I normally have to get up for work, this has been... wonderful stuff), pottering in the garden during the most spectacular April I can remember, being able to do what I did today: go sit in Starbucks with a laptop and write. And being home with the cat from hell has been really great, when I can get her to stop begging me for food.
And now it looks like it might all change. I really didn't expect that anything would happen so fast, but I finally contacted a contracting agency and a freelance agency this week, and already I have the possibility of an interview at the Evil Empire -- if I pass this editing test that I have to drive up to hell and gone to take. A two hour editing test.
I'm really, really, really sick of taking editing tests and writing tests. I'm starting to resent the hell out of it, and there's not a lot I can do. I know that if I want to get into book editing, I have to do this to prove I can handle the material after my career has been in serial publications, but the rest of the jobs... it just pisses me off. I've been doing this for 20 freaking years. I've been hired for jobs at some really high-profile companies, and I've been in charge of publications that won awards and had a great reputation in their markets. And yet my resume isn't good enough, the fact that I've been hired over and over for these difficult positions doesn't matter because I have to take another freaking test. And the really insulting thing, beyond the insult of your resume not being worth a shit, is that they're always closed-book, with no references or dictionaries or style guides, so if you can't remember off the top of your head whether AP style calls for periods on acronyms or not (a thing that in the real world, you would just reach over to your book and verify in picoseconds), you're totally screwed.
With book publishers, you kind of know going in that you're going to take these complex tests for the privelege of working on a book that will likely pay you enough to buy cat food with, and not much more. That's okay, because you kind of have to start at the bottom, blah blah. But the fact that I've been doing this for 20 years and I'm still being expected to prove myself with a stupid test for every. single. job. just frosts my flakes in a big way. I hate this.
I know I should be glad that despite my lack of technical expertise (gee, imagine that an actual copyeditor isn't an expert in XML! The noive!), they at least want to look at me, but why can't these employers make decisions without these asinine tests that insult someone's experience? I don't ask landscapers to come to my house and do a little test garden before I hire them, or contractors to come do some drywall in competition with someone else before I'll talk to them. We rely on their experience, references, word of mouth, all of that. But for editors, that's not good enough. Your resume is meaningless when there are tests to be taken! And we'll make you drive 50 miles to come take it!
I don't even want to work at the evil empire, but I know that's the only place I'm likely to get any work at all if I can find someone who's less interested in my techie background than my ability to fix bad writing. And to prove my desire for a paycheck, I have to jump through the testing hoop again, under pressure, without backup, because... gee, how else could we possibly judge a professional editor with 20 years of experience who's worked for some of the other well-known businesses around town? Feh.
And now it looks like it might all change. I really didn't expect that anything would happen so fast, but I finally contacted a contracting agency and a freelance agency this week, and already I have the possibility of an interview at the Evil Empire -- if I pass this editing test that I have to drive up to hell and gone to take. A two hour editing test.
I'm really, really, really sick of taking editing tests and writing tests. I'm starting to resent the hell out of it, and there's not a lot I can do. I know that if I want to get into book editing, I have to do this to prove I can handle the material after my career has been in serial publications, but the rest of the jobs... it just pisses me off. I've been doing this for 20 freaking years. I've been hired for jobs at some really high-profile companies, and I've been in charge of publications that won awards and had a great reputation in their markets. And yet my resume isn't good enough, the fact that I've been hired over and over for these difficult positions doesn't matter because I have to take another freaking test. And the really insulting thing, beyond the insult of your resume not being worth a shit, is that they're always closed-book, with no references or dictionaries or style guides, so if you can't remember off the top of your head whether AP style calls for periods on acronyms or not (a thing that in the real world, you would just reach over to your book and verify in picoseconds), you're totally screwed.
With book publishers, you kind of know going in that you're going to take these complex tests for the privelege of working on a book that will likely pay you enough to buy cat food with, and not much more. That's okay, because you kind of have to start at the bottom, blah blah. But the fact that I've been doing this for 20 years and I'm still being expected to prove myself with a stupid test for every. single. job. just frosts my flakes in a big way. I hate this.
I know I should be glad that despite my lack of technical expertise (gee, imagine that an actual copyeditor isn't an expert in XML! The noive!), they at least want to look at me, but why can't these employers make decisions without these asinine tests that insult someone's experience? I don't ask landscapers to come to my house and do a little test garden before I hire them, or contractors to come do some drywall in competition with someone else before I'll talk to them. We rely on their experience, references, word of mouth, all of that. But for editors, that's not good enough. Your resume is meaningless when there are tests to be taken! And we'll make you drive 50 miles to come take it!
I don't even want to work at the evil empire, but I know that's the only place I'm likely to get any work at all if I can find someone who's less interested in my techie background than my ability to fix bad writing. And to prove my desire for a paycheck, I have to jump through the testing hoop again, under pressure, without backup, because... gee, how else could we possibly judge a professional editor with 20 years of experience who's worked for some of the other well-known businesses around town? Feh.
