Ego-boosting "spam"
My handful of regular readers know that I've been running
a little side project to track how much spam I'm getting every month. In a few hours I'll post my August total.
The annoying thing about spam is that once you get a single message, you know that it's never going to be the last one. Whoever got your address and decided to send you offers for cheap Canadian drugs and the
stolen gold of Kuwait will share or sell your address to others, and your once-virginal e-mail account will be polluted by the filthy luchre mongers from the internet's Dark Side of Commerce. When I feel fanciful, I refer to it as the Undernet.
Anyway - I just checked my voicemail at work, and found a much more interesting 'first trickle' of a new form of "spam."
No, thankful it's not
SPIT - because that would be infinitely more 'annoying' than 'interesting'.
It was a voicemail from a recruiter working on behalf of one of the big 4 accounting firms. A few thoughts immediately leapt to mind when I realized what I was listening to; although this list is numbered, they all hit me more or less simultaneously:
- Who are you?
- How did you get my number?
- Do you really think they would want me?
- I'm flattered.
- Are you sure you're calling the right person?
It's a fact of life in my industry - as well in no doubt many others - that once you have some measure of experience, you become a hot commodity. Now let's not kid ourselves, I'm "lukewarm" at best, but it's still nevertheless interesting to see all those stories about other people getting weekly calls from recruiters starting to apply personally.
This is, of course, only the first call, and observations "3" and "5" are at the forefront of my mind - humility is a virtue! - but common sense says that this will probably happen again in the future.
I didn't call the recruiter back because I'm busy studying for my exam and I really do enjoy my current job so much that I have no interest in leaving - the work I do my not be unique, but my co-workers definitely are, and as one of my friends said a party a little while ago, it's the people we work with that keep us from jumping ship and looking for greener pastures.
Pastures? Yes, you can definitely equate yourself with bovine animals when you have a desk job.
Cattle jokes aside, there's a third reason too: my opinion of the
other firm he called me on behalf of isn't very high. I guess it's a respected place and all, but I have friends from university working there and they didn't seem to happy when we talked about our respective experiences. Looking at things solely from the perspective of the UFE, they don't get anywhere near the same level of support we receive.
My bosses have given me all the support I need to study for the UFE and given us great incentives to do well. Need to attend accounting classes? No problem. Want experience with different types of business accounting software? Done. Need time to get your CA, CPA, or just for general exam review? Go for it.
Over there? Not so much.
It probably also doesn't help that I reinforced this attitude by using the other firm as a punchline to jokes I pulled at training events. I never thought of myself as the kind of person who can pull off the role of "class clown", but it worked. And the joke
killed.
Then again, in an accouting-related course, the material is so dry that it doesn't take much to amuse people.
Still, I immediately felt silly doing it because it was so juvenile; everyone got a good laugh out of it, so it couldn't have been all bad, eh? I probably should, however, have been more careful not to pick on a firm that it turned out one of our instructors had previously worked at. Oops.
Still, he seemed to laugh as much as everyone else at that gag. Or was it an embarrassed grimace? Anyway, that's a story for another day.
Returning to the line of thought concerning how this is "spam", it'll be interesting, though, to see if Mr. Headhunter calls again in the future, or if others will be calling in his stead.
It
does feel like a form of spam, in that I'm getting unsolicited communication from people trying to make money off of me - headhunters really
rake in the big bucks! - but it's probably also the most enjoyable type of spam to receive.
And how would that be?
It's a silly thing, but getting added to a recruiter's database boosts all sorts of personal feelings in ways that the miracle drugs that 'regular spam' could never hope to achieve. Plus it's nice to know you have 'fallback' options in case things go poorly for you. It's probably also a fun sort of "bragging right" to have - although my friends haven't traded notes on who's gotten more calls. Maybe we'll do that later on a bored Friday afternoon.