How Gentoo cost me a job

Edaph · n00b Joined: 15 Nov 2004 Posts: 22

Interesting subject, eh? Well, here's how it happened with a bit of a background at first.

I'm student in a polytechnic (equal to a lower university degree, for those not familiar with it) in Finland. Studying in here means generally, that you're totally broke for 9 months a year, unless you're having a financial backup from your parents, for example, which I don't have. So due this, it's really quite essential, that you find a job for the summer so you'd be able to save some money for the autumn and winter. Well, at the moment the run up for summer jobs starts to be over, and those who haven't got one, will not get one.

For the past 4 months I've been discussing with employees, sending out applications etc. just to see them shot down one by one. And as the situation started to look grim, I decided to start looking for a job from other regions than the one I'm currently located in. I called my old employee, which is located in the other side of the country. Suprisingly enough, they seemed to be very interested. The person I talked with wasn't in a position to make the final decision, and he asked me to email my complete application, which he'd then introduce to his boss. The tone of his voice gave the impression, that we have a deal here.

Well, I launched mutt, and typed in my application with my favourite $EDITOR vim, and a good application it was, I might add. Satisfied with the result, I hit 'y' and on the way was the mail! The person from the company said that he'll get back to by the end of the week, so I didn't expect to hear from him until then. I was a bit of suprised to see an email from him in my mailbox next day. With shaking hands I opened it, just to see a heartwarming message "All our positions have been fulfilled". I also did notice something strange then looking my original mail below... all the scandic letters were messed up like Ã etc. At the point I had other things in mind, had I just been rejected, so I pretty much forgot about it the instant.

Now, a few days later, as I was sending out (yet) another application, the appearance of the scandic letters crossed my mind again, and decided to look into it. After sending some test mails to myself, and trying out with locale settings it occured to me that the problem lies somewhere within the process of importing my vim-edited mail to mutt. After some fiddling I found out that in Gentoo, vim edits all files as utf-8, and mutt flys off the handle with such files. So, interesting, I had sent an application whose letters were messed up. At this point pretty much the only thing I had in my head was the word "fuck" bouncing all over the place. Decided to look a bit more closely at the rejectance mail I got, and found out that it had been sent 8:24 am. Hmm, didn't the guy say in the phone that's he's having a meeting with his boss at 10 am. He hadn't even presented my application to his boss, due to the mixed up charactes! Great I thougt. Great. At this point I had to give the whole thing a laugh.

I managed to fix the character set issue for the application I sent this morning by adding the following line in my ~/.vimrc:

leguaan · Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 11:51 am Post subject:

Well, that wasn't cool

But what about using some other application for writing documents?
I use abiword and export to an encoded text (you'll specify the encoding yourself,
I'm from Slovakia & now temporarily living in Sweden, so UTF doesn't work for me either)
or write in OpenOffice and export to Pdf. Applications in Pdf look both nice and proffessional.
I hope you'll get some summer-job & I admire your willingness to study without
financia backups.
Good luck!
_________________
Since he could no longer be of any use to me,I left him there on the stones without much regret and whistled down a few vultures which settled down on him in order to guard him. (Kafka)

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

For a moment, I was disappointed to think Gentoo might literally have cost someone their job. You can imagine my relief when I realized it was a pebkac issue. Good luck with the job.

kimchi_sg · Advocate Joined: 26 Nov 2004 Posts: 2969

There's a thread in OTW on how Gentoo got someone a job. :mrgreen:

hollywoodcole · Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 5:06 pm Post subject:

Yeah sorry to hear you didn't get the job, but when you said you imedialty opened up MUTT and VIM makes me think you have used it great deal. Shouldn't you have seen this b4 in other email sent out or replied from?
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---/usr/games/fortune

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Edaph · n00b Joined: 15 Nov 2004 Posts: 22

zxiiro · Posted: Sat Apr 23, 2005 10:19 pm Post subject:

nice story, sorry about the job. although i wouldn't exactly say gentoo specificly cost you the job

Naib · Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2005 9:54 am Post subject:

Psykk · n00b Joined: 04 Feb 2005 Posts: 49

Would I catch a lot of flak for saying that if it's anything important, do it in windows?

(And yes, I do honestly feel that way.)
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kimchi_sg · Advocate Joined: 26 Nov 2004 Posts: 2969

No way. You system could hang or reboot at any time. No amount of autosave will save you from that.

syouth · Apprentice Joined: 18 Sep 2004 Posts: 275

Isn't there any stories like: "Gentoo got me layd with 5 supermodels", "I got high from emerge sync" ?
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leguaan · Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2005 8:25 am Post subject:

i think that windows-users would flood it here
with threads like 'Windows deprived me of my sleep - had to reboot 6 times until I managed to write that bloody report'
There are quite a lot threads like this I could write

But windows-based problems are probably quite pointless in gentoo forums.
::: syouth ::: If you find out how to make gentoo get lay me with 5 supermodels, let me know... I think I'll get high when I'll finaly make gDeskets and ethernet connection work. (3 month of problems, lots of newbie mistakes...)
_________________
Since he could no longer be of any use to me,I left him there on the stones without much regret and whistled down a few vultures which settled down on him in order to guard him. (Kafka)

Gentist · Apprentice Joined: 20 Mar 2004 Posts: 247

Well, for future reference, perhaps you should test your setup before you use it for critical/important stuff. Just a thought.

/dev/random · Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2005 11:02 pm Post subject:

Better idea if it's important stick to your old setup instead of your new CLI e-penis increasing setup. Also, it worked with thunderbird because they probably set it to force a certain charset on all incoming e-mails.

IvanYosifov · l33t Joined: 15 Oct 2004 Posts: 778 Location: Bulgaria