About 2 and a half weeks ago, I had the opportunity to go down to St. Louis for a second interview with Edward Jones Investments. It went alright, but there were a lot of really qualified people interviewing there. So for the past 2 weeks I have been driving my girlfriend (and probably everyone else) crazy because I have been spazzing out about my interview and whether I got a job or not. They told me they would get back to me by last Friday, and when Friday came about, there was no call. So I waiting until Monday, and where there was still no word from them, I called them and asked what the deal was. I was told that they had "not yet made final hiring decisions" and that I should wait around for another week or so.

So I got hold of a friend of mine who had also done an interview with them and asked if she had heard anything yet. She told me they had offered her a position last Thursday. Needless to say, that didn't make me very happy. At that point, I knew that they had already called their first choices and offered them positions and were just waiting to hear back from those people before calling the other people.

So when I got a call from them yesterday on my way out of work, I didn't have high hopes. The lady who called me started right away into the standard, "It was a tough pool of candidates this year..." and "We had to hire people based on specific needs..." talk. It didn't help that my cell phone gets a really crappy signal in the basement and I could only hear her half of the time. I basically wanted to say, "Okay, just say it already, I didn't get the job," when she did what seemed like a complete 180 and said, "So I would like to extend you an offer as a Programming Analyst," I was pretty confused.

Actually, I was really confused at that point. It took me a while to realize it, but the reason she was talking about hiring on specific needs and everything was that they had given me the position I had told them I really wanted to avoid. I mean, it is no big deal, I wouldn't mind fetching coffee for them at this point. I have a lot of development experience and they felt they needed to put me where my strengths were, even though I wanted some variety.

Anyway, I now have another decision to make. I can start in either May of 2006, or January of 2006 (yeah, next month). I hadn't realized that would be an option and I didn't really think about it. But now that I have been thinking about it, January actually sounds a lot better than May. There are many reasons, such as the fact I will need to take a lot of hours to get done with school in 3.5 years and I don't really want to be taking 17 hours of classes and work at ResComp 20 hours a week. Also, I wanted to do some stuff with teaching next year to see if that is what I want to do with my life, so it would be best to have a whole year dedicated to that. On top of all that, I would be better off coming back form Edward Jones and having 2 semesters to finish my classes than just one. Of course, there are problems with this too. If I left in January, then I would be leaving ResComp 6 months earlier than expected. Not just that, but I would be effectively giving notice next week because I would be leaving ResComp before Christmas.

Anyway, I am going to have to make that decision by Monday, so I need to get hold of people really soon.