Jeff Billimek’s Journal

I had some trouble sleeping last night. I was pretty nervous about the interview tomorrow. I haven’t really had to interview before so I had no real interviewing experience. My ‘interview’ for the job at Delta consisted of Dennis (my then manager) asking me if I wanted to be a developer and if I knew how to program in C. That was it. After that I got an offer letter.

Jen tossed and turned a bit last night too. I woke up, showered, dressed, had some breakfast, and was out of the house by 8:20am.

I got to the Turner Inforum building at 9am and met with a lady from HR in the atrium. She took me to the applications manager. I met with him for about thirty minutes. He mainly asked me about my past experience, it was pretty straight forward.

Next I met with his tech lead who was to give me a technical interview. He came prepared with a bunch of .NET questions to ask but said that would be a bit unfair since I didn’t have much professional experience with .NET, so he tried to ask some other types of questions. It wasn’t anything too test-like and wasn’t that bad. I’m not sure what kind of impression that I made with them. Everything seemed a bit low-energy so I didn’t think that was a good sign.

After the interview process was over I headed back home. I had a hell of a time finding the highway due to construction near the on-ramp in the downtown area. I’m definitely not used to the downtown area.

I went home and talked with Jen who was at work. We agreed to meet for lunch at Swapna. I met Jen for lunch and we talked about my interview and also about her stopping by the accountant’s office to take care of our taxes.

There was some trouble with that so Jen came home shortly after I did. I played on the computer most of the afternoon - it was fun. After having been working so hard the past couple of weeks it was nice to unwind from work and the stress of going to an interview.

While I did this Jen read a book. We decided to go out of town this weekend to St. Maarten. I called up Casey to get the name of a hotel that I wanted to try in St. Maarten. It was the ‘Caravanserai‘ hotel near Maho Beach.

I called up the 800-number listed on the website but they were not able to give me any info on airliner rates. It was just an angency that handles reservations. The girl I spoke with refused to give out the hotel direct-phone number.

After some googling around I was able to find a direct number to the hotel. I fired up Skype and called them up. I asked about airliner rates and was quoted $136. This was much better than the Maho hotel - about half as much. It’s also considered ‘high season’. We went on nearly the same weekend last year.

I went ahead and booked the room. This was a bit worrisome since I didn’t know if we would make the flight or not but I decided to take a chance in case it books-up (since it is high season).