Courses and Jobs

At the start of last week, I decided that I was going to do one of the Christmas courses at the Central Martins College up in London. There were a number of courses I was interested in, mainly ones involving Flash and Photoshop. I decided to do the Photoshop course, as it seemed that it would be one that I would find more useful. It's a rather expensive course, but with five days tuition in a very small class, of just five people, I think that the money will be well worth it. While I could probably learn the stuff I'll be taught just from web courses, I doubt that I would actually get around to it.

The course itself is quite fun, and in two days I have already started cutting and pasting images around, sticking them back together and doing complicated things involving layers. The class itself is, as I said, small and most of the other pupils are quite young, probably in their 20s, though there is one other person of my age I would say. I am the only male in the class, though so far it does not appear to have made any difference.

Yesterday, I received a message from one of the job agents, the one dealing with Bloomberg, asking me to get in touch with him. I managed to phone him at about three o'clock today, only to hear that so far he had not heard from them and that he had phoned me to see if I had. As I hadn't, he decided to chase them up further.

He then phoned me back. As I was busy at the time, he had to leave a message on my voicemail, but it appears that the Bloomberg wants to see me again, or rather see me for the first time in a follow-up to my phone interview.

As I am busy on my course, I won't be able to see them this week, but I hope to arrange for a proper interview on Monday of next week.

Today

Today has been quite fun and probably profitable.

First of all, I phoned the job agent this morning, and he confirmed that the company wants to give me a second interview as soon as possible. As I have the course this week, I couldn't manage it immediately, but I suggested that he book any time next week. Within a couple of hours, he came back to me and I am booked for an interview Monday afternoon. If all goes well with the interview, I will have a second and final phone interview, this time with someone from New York, and if I pass that as well, I should get a job offer. It appears that I might start the New Year with a new job.

We appear to have had the first snow of the year. Only minor falls, and it melted reasonably quickly, but there were a lot of people posting about it. I am half expecting the trains to start having problems with the snow start running late any second now

I think my tutor at the course set me up a bit. At the end of the day, when we went home, instead of going down in the lift with me, for some reason she decided to walk down the nine sets of stairs. When the lift got halfway down, it stopped for some reason. It did not open the doors or give any other indication that it was working. When I pressed the lift buttons, they lit up but nothing happened. When nothing further happened for a few minutes, I was about to hit the alarm button, but fortunately noticed that the lift button lights had gone out. Pressing the ground floor button again got the lift moving, and settled my panic. I doubt that the tutor actually had anything to do with this, however, I am going to give her all sorts of grief tomorrow morning when I see her, and claim that she deliberately set me up.