Someone hired me!

Remember this gem that I wrote? Well, apparently it got me a job. Or someone bribed them to get me a job. Or they felt pity for a California girl deciding to stay for an Alaskan winter.

What happened is they called me up, had a nice little phone interview, then asked me to come in for a real person interview, then told me I had to take an editing test.

An editing test?

It's been 2.5 years since I graduated college. I haven't exactly been writing analytical essays on middle century prose. And I'm a frequent visitor of facebook, and we all know how bad grammar on facebook is (or you're a repeat offender and have no idea -- sorry to burst your bubble).

The first page had 50 words on it and I had to circle the misspelled words. People, that is what the automatic red squiggly line is for when you're typing anything. And it didn't have words like "dawg" or "kat" either. We're talking words like "chauffeur" and "nonchalant" and "graffiti" and "ptarmigan." Okay, not ptarmigan (which, by the way is Alaska's state bird and is pronounced without the p).

Next page had 15 sentences and I had to choose which word was the most correct. As in "Jenny's neighbor had a great (affect/effect) on her."

You feeling my pain?

The third page had more sentences, but this time I had to edit them completely -- spelling, grammar, word choice, AP style, and then translate back into Latin. I skipped that page to come back to until the very end.

Fourth page's title was "General Knowledge." I'm going to type up as much as I remember. Let's see how well you do. I'm going to type my answer first, and the real answer I'm going to type in white so you'll have to highlight the text to see the correct answer. It's kind of like monopoly without any of the fake money!

List the capitols of these states:
California -- Sacramento  Sacramento
New York -- Rochester  Albany
Washington -- Seattle  Olympia
Oregon -- Portland  Salem
Florida -- Tallahassee Tallahassee
Alaska -- Juneau Juneau

Name these people and their political party (I'm just going to out right assume you don't know the first three, because I sure as heck didn't, so I'll just type the correct answer)

Alaska's Governor: Sean Parnell
Alaska's Senators: Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich
Alaska's Congressman: Dong Young (yeah, they only have one).

United State's Speaker of the House: John Boehner Repulican
Secretary of State: Hillary Clinton Democrat

Then there was a list of notable/famous people that I had to explain why they were notable/famous. There were only three names that I didn't know, so I don't remember them. Others that I did know (or at least think I did): George Lucas, Steve Jobs, 'DWTS', Lance Mackey, John Boehner, Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez.

The last part of the general knowledge section was my favorite. It was a math section. We're just going to say I wasn't able to fill in all the blanks, but I am pretty proud of the blanks I did fill in.

Final and last part of this whole boondoggle was I was given these "notes" and told to write a news story. Fairly simple. Probably not my best, but at least I didn't put any made up facts in there (which I was for sure tempted to).

I had 1.5 hours to complete all of this. To be a copy editor they want you to get a score above 75%. I'm telling you right now, the odds are very slim that I got close to that.

Later that day, they called me back, offering me a job. I said I'd think about it, because that's what you do with a grown up job. Unfortunately, I think I already gave away the ending of this story, because the next day I did accept.

Major downside of this job: I'll be working 4:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. five days a week. Toodles to the social life. Sigh. At least I am a night owl. And when I leave work there will be no traffic and I'll get the chance to see the northern lights all the time.

I won't start for another 3 weeks, because I'm currently on vacation. More about vacation after I've sipped my pina colada...