Yahoo!

Monday, 5:39 p.m.
Right before shutting down the job search for the day, I hit refresh one last time on the Portland Craiglist "All Jobs" page. Curious, I check out the most recent entry on the list: "Bilingual Client Advocate." It's unclear what exactly the job is, but the pay is good and they're looking for someone with 1-5 years of customer service experience (check), with a bachelor's degree (super-check) who is fluent in Portuguese (check). I send off an email with a resume attached.

Wednesday, 9:39 a.m.
Having not received a response, I send another email about the job.

Wednesday, 10:50 a.m.
I get a phone call from Liza, who works for an employment agency. It was she who placed the Craigslist ad. She says the job is with Yahoo! and she is going to send them my resume and a few references. She says that she'll probably know by the end of the week if they want to schedule an interview.

Wednesday, 1:46 p.m.
Liza calls back and says that Yahoo! wants to interview me out at their campus in Hillsboro the next day at 1:00 p.m.

Wednesday, 6:30 p.m.
In preparation for the interview, I get a disastrous haircut at a beauty college.

Thursday, 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
I have an interview on site with Giancarlo (American) and Fabiana (Brazilian). They ask me some standard interview questions in English and Fabiana and I chat in Portuguese about my experience with the language and my experiences in Brazil. They tell me what the job entails: every Yahoo! page that allows chat or comments contains links that say "Report abuse*," which leads to a form where users can explain their objections to another user's comments. All of the reports filed on all of Yahoo!'s Portuguese-language pages go to a team of seven Brazilians located in Hillsboro, but one of them is shortly going on maternity leave, so they need to bring in a replacement ASAP. The interviewers then give me a document to translate into Portuguese. The title is something like, "The Role of Webcasting in Emerging Markets." I can't recall ever having a conversation in Portuguese about webcasting or emerging markets, so my vocabulary on the subject seems a little thin, but I plow through it and at the end am fairly pleased with my work. After nearly two hours, Giancarlo then wraps up the interview, saying that they still have a number of applicants to interview on Friday, and that I will hear back from them sometime next week.

Thursday, 5:00 p.m.
I get a call from one of Liza's co-workers from the employment agency, informing me that Yahoo! would like to offer me the job. I accept.

**********

I've been looking for a job for so long that I was amazed at how one could go from having almost no prospects to having a job so quickly. I had had a number of close calls and after I while I felt like I'd always be a bridesmaid, never a bride (is there a masculine version of that expression?).

This Yahoo! job is remarkable because it pays better than most any other job I for which I had been in contention, it sounds like more interesting work than other positions (hooray, it's not a call center!), it's geographically close to the place where I'm going to be teaching a few guitar lessons (more on that another time), and since I'll be the only non-Brazilian on the team I anticipate that my Portuguese is going to go to the next level. It's only a contract job (filling in for the woman on maternity leave), so it will only last until mid-summer, but hopefully I'll be ready to move on to a voice teaching position somewhere by then. But it's the perfect solution for right now and I feel very blessed that it all came together so quickly (despite the bad haircut).

*Ou seja, "Reportar abuso."