Published first on jennyrebholz.com
The week begins with me huddled on the bathroom floor in agony. If I had not been so preoccupied with my illness, I would have started to wonder if fate was out to get me. First the loss of my job, now the loss of my lunch (and dinner and dessert and… well, you get the picture).
At some point during this whole ordeal, my phone rang. I let the voicemail pick up, since I didn’t know the number, didn’t know if I was capable of speaking without up-chucking, and sounded like someone who had just recently died. The resulting message went something like this: “Hi Julie, this is Jessica from such-and-such company I am calling about your application for the proposal writing position. I want to ask you a few questions to learn more about you and your experience. Call me back, my number is…”
I had sent my resume in for this job the week I was let go. So a month later, of course on the day I’m sick as a dog, they decide to call me. What to do…what to do? Call in sounding like death, perhaps having to excuse myself during the conversation to… um, well I don’t need to spell it out. No, that would not work. I didn’t want to ruin my chances for the interview by not calling back immediately, but I also didn’t want to ruin my chances of getting an in-person interview by calling back in that awful state. So, I made a decision. I would wait until the worst had passed to call her back.
The next day I was finally able to speak coherently, so I called and left a message. Was it too late? Did the stomach flu thwart my chances for this phone interview? As it turns out, it did not. She called me Monday and we had a great phone conversation, which then led to an interview scheduled for the following week.
The lesson I learned from this experience is to do what you feel is right based on the options you have at the time. Not calling back that same day was a risk, but calling and not being able to really sell myself seemed like an even bigger risk. My gut told me what to do in this situation (no pun intended) and luckily it worked out.
JEWLIWEB 