manic pixie dream bitch

I'm the only person in my family that worked in a classic corporate job, so they never really knew what I was doing - they just knew I went to an office and that I was successful. When I was made redundant last year (with a long-ass transition phase to unemployment), they were all convinced that I was going to find a new job really quickly and that I shouldn't worry. I worried. And when my unemployment officially started, all of my worries came true:

I just had a job interview at A Very Big Bank for A Very Big Title. I luckily did google how titles work in banking (it is ridiculous), otherwise I would’ve looked silly in the interview. I also did that exact job description and more at a big company, so at no point in the interview did I wonder if I could actually do the job.

I’ve been unemployed for four months now, but the data science bootcamp kept me busy until mid March, so I’ve only been properly unemployed for five weeks. This is already way too long for my taste.

I'm doing job applications again, very seriously. I'm going over some German startups and scale-ups right now, since there's a lot of momentum there at the moment.

I just had a job interview that was about the usual, my experiences, my stakeholder management, my lack of knowledge about performance marketing, my SQL skills… but it was also, very obviously, about whether I am cool enough to work for this brand.

For the first time in 20 years, I have to do the kind of maths that involves letters (including Greek) and requires me to know formulas.

Every afternoon, we start class with an icebreaker: You say your opinion on the topic of the day and pick the next person to go. In week 1, we started with “What’s your favourite colour?”, in week 4 we’re at “What’s your perspective on determinism vs free will?”

I'm doing a full-time data science bootcamp while I am unemployed. I have worked in analytics long enough and I'm definitely capable and learning a lot, but I do have a lot of catching up to do with the people in the group that are engineers or have a degree in applied mathematics, or already know a few programming languages.

I just got contacted by a former colleague, who’s now doing some mindfulness/reflection/girlboss shit. We haven’t worked together in more than five years. I’ve loathed her since our last interaction, where she asked me if I could set up a meeting with her new direct report the next week (“to grow her network”), I said “Uh, I have surgery next week, so time is tight.” and she responded with “So this week, then?”

There's a massive power outage in the Southwest of Berlin. It started Saturday and it's been going on for days. I live in the South, so my area is luckily not impacted, but I'm relatively close to the powerless areas. The truly unnerving things are:

It is ridiculous how many jobs in Vienna, that are usually advertised via some kind of recruiting company, end up being sports betting or tobacco. At least the crypto companies are straightforward about being crypto.

I met a few (also unemployed) former colleagues for lunch and we talked about the different experiences we’ve had with the unemployment agency. I’m not even officially unemployed yet (I’m on garden leave until the end of the year) and my case worker insisted that I make job search my no. 1 priority and find a new job while I am still at my old company - but they won’t support me in any way or finance furthering my tech skills. Somebody else was told to just chill with her family since nobody’s hiring in Q4 anyway (she was let go in June). My former direct report with 10 years of experience is sent to a mandatory 2 month “how to apply for jobs” seminar. My French teammate got the recommendation “move to France”. Somebody else was told that they would get financing for all classes except for those with AI in the name.