I’m becoming mildly obsessive about job searching. I’ve been reading a career advice book that I picked up for about $1.50 at B&N’s post-holiday clearance.

Most of what the book says (and I suspect all career guides) is to be brutally honest with yourself in self-evaluation. Here’s the thing, though, I’m my own worst critic. Thanks to a fucked up ratio of self-awareness, self-esteem and ego, I spend a lot of time thinking worse of my performance than my peers or superiors ever would.

As a purely hypothetical example, say I were to get into an issue about work and felt it necessary to retain counsel and a vignette were to be written. One could conceive of a universe in which the advice-giver would remark, after reading through my personnel file, “Hmm. I’ve been doing this a long time and met a lot of different people on both sides of the negotiation table. I can tell you in all that time, I have never seen as an exemplary a work history as this one. It’s confusing that you are even here.” End scene.

One thing that I’ve been obsessing on is how at my last gig, if memory serves, it felt like a lot of people saw me as angry. Maybe I was. But, it was an anger-inducing environment for me, I think in retrospect, because there was always an undercurrent of my not being respected.

That sounds so juvenile written out, but I mean it more in a reality check kind of way not a whiney, teenage, mall rat screaming on her cell phone, “don’t you disrespect me” way.

A scenario comes to mind that might serve to illustrate the playing out respect thing. First, I’m a right tool for the right job kind of person and, especially when it’s office dough not my own, I don’t balk at spending on the right software. But, I ain’t no chump, and if I’m supposed to watch the budget, I don’t want no white elephants on my watch.

So, if you are trying to figure out how to pay all your staff ‘cuz the budget’s tight, and I mention an open-source solution for saving documents as PDF on your desktop, because for some reason you don’t want to ask your secretary using a licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat to hit save, please, oh fucking please, don’t reply “Open source? Oh, right, that’s because your new boyfriend works in open source. So now we have to choose software based on who you’re sleeping with?” and then accuse me of being controlling.

Something about rolling my private life and knowledge of software into a negative, while trying to keep up with conflicting desires on your part, makes me a tad edgy. How odd of me.

I’m thinking of other situations in which my information, like on opening every jpg from your husband could be a source of a virus, ColdFusion not being the next wave of web serving over Apache or even what Catholics believe as church doctrine, was ridiculed or somehow attributed to belief, stubborness or some other emotional state. In that time and place, it was as though it were impossible that I may know or understand more than was assumed.

Since in all other aspects of my life, I have friends, I’m pretty much liked and I’m rarely startled into a provocative dispute unwittingly (I mean, I do get into the ocassional scrape, but apart from my old job, I’m well-aware of what got me there), I have to believe it ain’t all me.

I think maybe it’s like shoes. Some shoes are going to give me a blister or otherwise hurt, no matter how long I try to break them in. But, on someone else, they may be magic slippers.

I wore the wrong pair of shoes for a long fucking time, and my dogs are begging for some comfortable dancing shoes.