Showing posts with label Email Screen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Email Screen. Show all posts

Thursday, August 6, 2009

The Email Screen (NBC Page Program Part II)


Enough with waiting. In real life, I actually waited about 3 months between NBC Page Program and NBC Page Program Part II, but you people in the blog world don’t seem to have time to wait that long.
So instead, watch this.

Now I’ll try to be short, as your attention span is the only thing I’m trying to get right now. My email screen was scheduled, then it had to be rescheduled.

Skip ahead another month. (Warning: This is the same clip you just watched.)

Finally it was set. I was home for winter break. I had my dad at his laptop. Me on one home computer. My mother on the other home computer. My good friend had dropped off HoCho and a muffin. I don’t drink coffee. I was prepared.

The email screen is a list of question sent to you in a document attached to an email, that you have exactly one hour to open, complete, and send back to a specified address.

At exactly 9:30am (the appointed time) I started refreshing my email. Nothing. At 9:35am I started to freak out. I had a sudden idea to check my school email, which I had not used once to communicate with NBC, but was also listed on my resume. Sure enough, the email screen was there. Not only was it there, it was sent at 9am, with the appointed send back by time as 10am. By now it was 9:38. That was only 22 minutes to complete the ‘exam’. After 30 more seconds of freak out, I got to work. My parents researching everything I shouted at them, and me- typing furiously. Similar to the way I am typing now, encouraged by the sheer memory of it.
22 minutes later I sent in my barely half completed email screen. By this point I had already resigned myself to a life of burger flipping. (Not that there is anything wrong with that! :) ) No Brooks Brothers NBC Page jacket for me. I then thought to email the woman who I had been corresponding with at NBC about scheduling my Email Screen. I double checked to make sure it was her mistake first, of course.
I wrote her a very polite but discouraged email, explaining the events of the morning. I then gave myself a break, and went to catch up on that weeks episode of The Office and 30 Rock. As the name Lorne Michaels appeared on the screen, the office theme song ringing loudly from my phone caused me to answer to an HR rep from NBC. She apologized profusely about the mis-communication and asked if I were available to take Email Screen at a later point that day. We then arranged for the screen to happen from 1pm-2pm that afternoon. On a hunch, I asked if the screen would be the same questions as earlier that morning. Her response? “Yes, but don’t worry, well send you a new email.”
Needless to say, I raced back to the computer and worked on those questions for the next three hours, and then throughout the 1 hour of the actual screen time.
So even if my answers weren't the best answers, they were certainly the longest, most researched, best edited, and well written.

What can I say though? The next month I got an email. They didn’t pick me. Not for the next step, not for nothing.
I mean obviously damnit. Or why would I be writing this damn blog?
You shoulda figured that out and not even bothered reading this post.
Dumbass.

Too soon to insult my readers?