One solid offer of work from the States has been received!
An administrative position for Rabbi Yitzchok Hecht of Kingston. I'll be managing the office, organizing things and generally answering the phone when he can't be around.
(His wife was out of town for three days and I called up in the middle of it. He'd become so bogged down that for the last two weeks he'd been just reacting to things he had to deal with Right That Second.)
Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty o' paperwork for me to do. I need to get a letter from Rabbi Hecht first; only then can I make an appointment to put in the forms and stuff for the R-visa I'll need. And [i]then[/i]...it'll take between three and six weeks for them to decide if they'll approve it or not.
Does anyone happen to have friends at the State department? (Or whoever it is who runs the immigration/visa section?)
And now...I need to go fill out my form for intermission for university.
Good grief...I come in in the middle of the day, and there's more than one hundred blogspam messages! Took me a good fifteen minutes just to find all the URLs and clear the spam off.
I thought the system had barriers against barrages like that?
My laptop's XP threw a shoe again.
I spent three days out in Shepparton at SPC watching a more-supervised-than-usual kosher batch of canned fruit for export.
And I'm still not sure where I'm going to go.
Of course, all my recently-acquired contact information for all the old friends and potential new employers in the US were on my laptop.
(Backup, you say? What's that, I reply! Of course I didn't have a backup! People only make backups the day after things fail!)
Fortunately - or by Grace of G-d, says I - I managed to extract all my data from the busted version of Windows using another installed copy of Windows. I'd very nearly shot myself in the foot by having set the busted version to protect my documents - which included Outlook's data. Fortunately (or bGoG, as above), simple, basic Windows Backup completely ignores all of Windows' security settings.
(It still took me a good day to extract all the information, but I heartily recommend the program to anyone who needs to ferret out stuff from under Windows XP security.)
So...computer went down on Friday, computer was fully working again with everything installed and updated by mid-Sunday afternoon. With all of my data and everything.
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I'd been doing some kosher-supervision last week, and Wednesday I was going to be idle. Then a special run was arranged to be put through SPC's runs, an export batch for the States. Star-K, the US-based kosher authority that was sticking their symbol on it wanted a stricter supervision of the product packing than the Australia-based Kosher Australianormally demands.
(A large percentage of SPC's product lines are kosher, especially their canned fruit lines.)
And so, there was me with a day off work and available - for a one-and-a-half day job. No problem, says I - it's good work with good hours and little to actually do. So I was driven two and a half hours from Melbourne, to SPC's factory at Shepparton.
The job was not particularly strenuous, physically or mentally - but with the oldest machine on the lines being the one labelling the product I was looking at, and it breaking down at seemingly every opportunity...the day and a half job quickly mushroomed out into two full days, looking very much like it might end up being a three-full-day task - for which I'd actually have to leave the factory Friday morning and come back in the next week, probably Monday.
Then the demons possessing the machine did a 180-degree turn, and Thursday afternoon's crew and the night-shift tore through most of the rest of the order, leaving a paltry total for the Friday day shift to finish up. Which they did...despite again being beset with problems. They finished up at about 12ish, which gave me ample time to get back to Melbourne for Shabbos (Sabbath).
I was on my way out at 8:15 Wednesday morning...worked until 7:15. Total of 11 hours, straight.
Thursday I started at 6:30 and worked straight through until 7:00. Total of 12.5 hours.
Friday started the same, ended about 3:15. About a week's salary for three days, with one really tired me in the bargain.
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And...yeah. I still haven't got a solid offer in the States. O-week at the university starts tomorrow, so I'll probably begin going to that.