Been At Mizzou for 5 years

In the campus mail today I got a booklet from Mizzou. It is a way to pick a nice gift to thank me for being at Mizzou for 5 years. I started here on April 13, 2005. I remember it well.

2005 was a year that was slowly starting as my marriage was sliding down hill; gaining speed as time went on. At that time I lived in Boonville and had found part time work, besides being tolerated at the B & B, as a delivery driver for Dominoes in Boonville. I was applying at the University as I really wanted to get into the Mizzou system for a couple of reasons: I was pretty sure they wouldn't be going out business anytime soon, I loved Columbia and I attended Mizzou. After 52 applications for different positions there; some that I was vastly over qualified for, I had 3 interviews. My last was at the Missourian. At that time, John Nelson was in charge of the advertising department. He called me in, and we had an interesting interview. I guess I was used to standard, typical interviews. This one had questions like what was my favorite sport, and if there were only 3 minutes left in a game and my team was down by 6 points what would I do? At the time I didn't understand, but now I do. In any case, it was a nice interview (I thought) and left.

Like you are suppose to do, I called back after a week; and got voice mail. I called a week later, voice mail again. By the third week, I had a voice mail from him saying that I was good, but probably not quite right for the position, but would be good in outside sales and wished me good luck. Ok. Didn't think anything about it, as I had a stack of rejection letters from departments I had applied to, and kept applying. Anyway, 2 days later I get another voice mail message from him saying that the girl they had hired had taken a better paying job, and that if I wanted the job, it was mine. And hey, I was his second choice.

So I came in on that Wednesday, and started learning Classifieds. Within seven days, my Classified boss was fired, and I was told that "I would be handling Classifieds now." That was 5 years ago.