Health Stuff and Job Stuff

I haven't been online for a couple days, so I have a handful of events to talk about in this entry. We'll start out with the fun news from Dr. Lee. He had someone in his office call my house yesterday. He's instructed me to discontinue my glyburide over the weekend on an experimental basis. I am supposed to take my blood glucose readings as normal and then send them to him Monday mornng. He'll check them and determine from that whether to make it permanent. Last night, my blood glucose was roughly 110 and this morning, it was 89. So by the looks of it, I may officially be done with one of my medications! How awesome.

I'm also down another pound or so, too. According to the scale at work, I'm somewhere between 275 and 276 pounds. Considering I started this trek at 311 last November, I think that's fantastic. My coworker, Mike W., saw me at the job fair (I'll have to write about that too). I was wearing a pair of black pants, a red dress shirt, and a burgandy sweater over top it. He said that with the wait loss, I looked absolutely incredible. I thought I looked darn good in it too, but it was nice to hear someone else say it. I was going to post a picture of it, but Mom didn't get home until an hour after I did on Thursday, and by then, I was ready to change into something different. The sweater was just a tad bit too warm in the house.

Yeah, I went to a "job fair" (and I use the term loosely) for Lockheed Martin. They were mainly holding it for their Owego facility (though they did have their Syracuse facility represented too), since they're looking to fill over 700 new positions. I'm not sure I want to work for Lockheed Martin (and after yesterday, I'm even less sure), but I figured I'd check it out. I learned exactly one thing while I was there. I was way underprepared. I might have gotten more out of it if I had spent a few days scouring their website and printing out and reading specific job listings they have posted. That way, I could have asked questions about specific jobs I was looking at. As it was, I had about four or five general questions to ask. They didn't even have project descriptions or anything there. I was expecting it to be much more informational on their part, and it was quite obvious that they were expecting to collect hundreds of resume and spend between thirty seconds and two minutes chit-chatting with each person. I tend to agree with Mom when she heard about it and commented it didn't sound like much of a "job fair" to her.

Of course, the thing that really got me was the one manager from the software engineering department I spoke to. He asked me what my GPA was. Now, I will be the first to admit that I haven't done a lot of inteviews in the last seven years. But the few interviews I did five years ago when looking for my current job, I didn't have one single person ask about my GPA. By that time, most of them were interested in the three years of in-field experience I've had since school. I would've expected that eight years later, any potential employers would be even more interested in my experience. So to even be asked about my GPA seemed weird.

And then when I told him that I got a 3.06 GPA, he commented that "made the cut, but just barely." And then he told me that I'd have a lot of competition. If I would've been thinking more clearly at the time (I was a bit shocked by this time), I probably would've told him to fuck off at that point. That probably would've been a bad idea, so it's just as well I was too shocked at the time. But it sure makes me want to go with my first instinct to find a job that isn't with Lockheed Martin.