The Plight of an Awkward Person

I'm an incredibly awkward person.  Whenever I go into fight-or-flight mode, my brain inevitably chooses flight or, worse yet, curls up into a tiny tight little ball and refuses to function beyond a five-year-old level.  That's not to say that I'm always that way.  Outside of being nervous, I'm a generally well-educated, comprehensible, pleasant human being to be around.  It's just that damn fight-or-flight thing.

This is all to say that I've never gotten a job from an interview.  As much as I hate to say it, I'm the poster child of "networking gets you jobs, not resumes" even though I hate that fact.  Though that's not entirely true either.  I've gotten a couple of jobs on my own without knowing anyone who knew my employer, but they were unconventional (and to me, preferable) interviews.  They asked me to come in, work for a half day and then determine if I was capable of doing the job at hand.  In every case, I got the job because I am a really awesome worker.  I pick up tasks quickly, know random things that assist in day-to-day tasks, can type faster than just about anyone I know, and usually know the right questions to ask.

But it's the traditional "sit here and answer some questions" interviews that kill me.  There are so many factors in a standard interview that set me into fight-or-flight mode that comprehensibility flies out the window at the speed of sound.  I'm in a unfamiliar location - mildly anxious.  I'm talking to a stranger - mildly anxious.  I most likely got lost on the way to the interview - slightly more anxious.  I'm having to answer questions that I don't know will be asked before hand - even more nervous.  Knowing this stranger will be judging me based on my answers - heart rate increasing anxiety.  It all could potentially lead up to something that I really, really want - cue fight-or-flight mush brain mode.

Phone interviews are better, but only marginally.  In that case I don't have to remind myself that decency requires me to look someone in the face when I talk to them (something I have a difficult time doing with even my family), but I still have questions that come at me that I don't know will be asked beforehand and someone judging me upon my answers.  Then you get to add in the garbled quality of voices over cell phones and possible lost of signal.  Or in some cases, the person in question not calling you on time so you second guess yourself and think maybe you were supposed to call them.  It's the phone-based equivalent of getting lost or stuck in traffic on the way to a real interview.

This all comes back to the forefront of my brain as something I know I need to work on, but fearing that no matter how much work I put into it, I won't get any better.  This is just me - completely competent and intelligent yet uber awkward.

I had a phone interview yesterday afternoon.  It went... well, it went.  She talked too fast, so I talked too fast and meanwhile my brain goes to mush.  Words literally disappeared from my vocabulary.  I'm pretty sure entire parts of my brain disappeared for those short fifteen minutes.

Hopefully I'll do better today.  It's something I need to work on.

Mashable's Misleading Headline

Sometimes scientific research makes me shake my head derisively, not understanding what the point was of the entire ordeal.  More often times the headlines associated with these studies make me laugh.  Mashable posted a summary of a study trying to tie together the regularity of binge drinking based on whether the survey took place over a landline telephone or a cell phone.  Having not read the entire study, I can't determine if the endeavor is as ridiculous as it sounds in Mashable's article, but I can say that Mashable's headline - Cellphone Users Like to Be Drunk - and their summary statement ("A study released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control shows that cellphone users are more likely to binge drink than other groups surveyed.") made me laugh.

They might as well have said "Human Beings Who Breathe Appreciate Oxygen".  Narrowing the study down to such a simplistic phrase depreciates whatever value the actual study had in the first place.  Considering the wide range of people who own and use cell phones, of course a portion of those people would be more likely to binge drink than other groups.  People who do not use cell phones tend to be of an older generation or very young.  What the study then goes on to show is that people who only use cell phones - meaning they have no landlines at their homes, I'm assuming - are more inclined to be binge drinkers. 

Considering that in 2010, nearly a quarter of all householdshad no landline (Reuters 5/12/10) and nearly half of people ages 25-29 lived in cell phone-only homes, it makes sense that the "cell phone only" demographic tends to have a higher rate of binge drinking.  The CDC just recently released a study  (LA Times 1/10/12) that concluded most binge drinkers fall into the age range of 18-34, so the results of the cell phone study seem to be even more like proving the obvious than on first glance.

So what is the point of all of this?  Why must bloggers attempt to sensationalize even the most non-sensational of news items?  The title of the Mashable post doesn't seem very SEO friendly nor does it state the actual conclusions to which the study came.  Instead it substitutes accurate reporting for a really obvious yet totally misleading account of a study that seems to have very little use in the first place.