The new pillows I bought yesterday work great! So much so that I slept in way later than usual… maybe due to residual fatigue from Thanksgiving? I also stayed up late watching Lady Snowblood (available on HBO Max), a Japanese film from 1973 that was apparently the inspiration for the Kill Bill movies. It came to my attention after reading some analysis about the influences for the recent episode of The Mandalorian, which in my opinion, is some of the best 40 minutes of Star Wars content in a long time.
The theatrical release poster for Lady Snowblood:
At any rate, I eventually get up, have a late breakfast, take a shower, and start some laundry. My top goal for the day is to submit an application for a job at the Dublin & Dún Laoghaire Education & Training Board. DDLETB is one of 16 Education and Training Boards (ETBs) established in 2013 to serve as local education administrative bodies replacing the previous system of committees dating back to the 1930s. ETBs are statutorily responsible for the provision of all further education and training in the Republic of Ireland, including managing a large number of secondary schools, further education colleges and training centres, multi-faith primary schools, and adult education centres throughout the country. In other words, ETBs run pretty much all the public schools and post-secondary educational institutions in Ireland but stop short of the higher education institutions and universities.
The job is a mid-level supervisor/manager role in DDLETB’s finance team. It’s a civil service job that doesn’t pay a lot, but it would offer good benefits and relative stability. I’m probably overqualified, but they didn’t require applicants to be qualified accountants, which disqualifies me from many other job postings. My friend D works in the Irish civil service, and so I showed him the job description when we were hanging on the other day. He explained a little bit about how the application for civil service jobs works here. In lieu of submitting a resume, you have to respond to a series of questions to demonstrate your “competencies” in different areas that are defined on the job description. It’s supposed to be more objective, but honestly I find it incredibly annoying… why can’t they just accept and screen resumes like everyone else, then ask questions during the interview process?! But I imagine it’s not unlike the process for civil service jobs in the U.S. The only comparable experience I’ve had was with an application for a job under the San Francisco bureaucracy — I had to provide written responses to a series of interview-like questions in advance as part of the application. It seems like a very inefficient process… perhaps it weeds out a lot of applicants who would otherwise apply just by submitting their generic resumes? We’ll see if I hear anything back.
Until next time…
