They Have It In For Me

Having received the email about my IBM application and the next steps to take on Tuesday, I was surprised to find that I still didn't have the email they supposedly sent at the same time. I'm not a fan of webmail interfaces on the whole - although I quite like GMail - and so for my Yahoo, Hotmail and university email accounts, I use Microsoft Outlook. I'm not sure quite how I'd manage without it really as not only do I use it to retrieve all of my email but I use the calendar on it as well which nicely syncs with both my online Google Calendar and the calendar on my mobile.

I had a thought during the night that perhaps Yahoo had decided that this extra message was spam and therefore sent it straight to the spam folder rather than letting it be downloaded. On the whole, their spam filter is pretty good and only the occasional message that I actually want ends up there by mistake but even then it is usually a newsletter or something that could quite easily be considered spam. Not only that but the email I received informing me of this other email came though fine.

Alas, as I checked, there it was in the spam folder. I had a time limit of seven days to complete this test and so I wouldn't have been happy if I'd have discovered it at a later date and missed the deadline. What were they playing at? Didn't they wan't me to get the job? Perhaps I need to get my new email address up and running so that I can give that out to my prospective employees. If they are the only ones I give it to for now and I turn off the spam filters then I should be okay.

The test itself seemed to go okay for the first two sections although the time did go by very fast. The instructions did say that most candidates don't finish it however so that made me feel slightly better. The last section was a bit more difficult but I can't say any more than that about it without breaking the terms of the terms I agreed to before the test. Understandably they don't want people to know too much about it before they start so I will say no more other than I hope I did okay!

To take my mind off the results of the test - which I have no idea as to when they will arrive - I decided to do some baking. There were some cherries in the fridge that needed eating up and I seemed to remember we had some almonds in the cupboard - cherry and almonds, perfect combination. So I set about pitting my cherries and grinding my flaked almonds and making some cake mix to put it all together. I had read in my cake book that ground almonds are often used in place of flour for those with gluten intolerances etc and so I followed suit by adding enough flour to make up the weight of the almonds.

I won't put a picture up this time as things didn't exactly go as planned. Having only had one baking success recently, I am becoming slightly dispirited with these new recipes - although this one was slightly made up. They are very soggy I think is the word I'm looking for as the cherries were rather juicy when they went in - something I hadn't considered. I think they might need squeezing next time. The almonds didn't work their magic either as I was expecting a marzipan / bakewell sponge to appear and instead all I can taste is the texture of the slightly un-ground almonds, not what I was hoping for at all. Overall, they aren't too bad. They are more suited to being eaten as a pudding - perhaps with some cream / ice cream rather than as a cake but I will now know for next time.