Describe to me a situation when...

So, the interview last night - well, it was a long one. I was on the phone for about an hour. Katie and I, the employment agent interviewing me, seemed to click ok though, so that made it a lot easier and more relaxed. I was certainly glad I did the time preparing for the competency-based stuff though. It came up in a big way. "Tell me about a situation when you had to co-ordinate a team to achieve a goal and what you did to ensure the team worked well together and that the goal was achieved." "Describe to me a situation when new information meant a change in mind and/or priorities and how you handled that situation". Etc etc. Without running through quite a few typical questions I found on a website to get a few useful scenarios in my head and get in tune with the way the questions and answers work I would have been stumped. Well worth investing the time. I'm glad I did.

The job actually sounds quite interesting. The company are investment advisors and currently most of their reports are done by collating external research into reports for clients. But now they've decided they want ownership of the research and want to keep it all in-house. So they want an analyst to come in and develop that. They want someone with an investigative nature who loves numbers and stuff. Sounds good so far. But here comes the bad news - the role will involve reading and interpreting annual accounts and P&L sheets and stuff. Financial and accounting stuff. Which I have never done. I asked about training and Katie said that they'd be willing to finance study for the Chartered Financial Analyst qualification. But that will involve an awful lot of home study. It suggests upwards of 250 hours over a four month period and it is all done by home study. And that's for each set of exams. Of which there are three. It's true some of the course content will be a breeze, but other bits of it won't be at all. I'm just not sure the plan for the move to NZ involved months of time at home at evenings and weekends studying.

But anyhow, I might be worrying about nothing. It's not like I've been offered the job or anything. Katie is meeting with the company today (or tomorrow, I guess, although it will be later today as far as I am concerned) to discuss the people she interviewed. And then she'll be in touch. We'll see.

We've finally had some news on the flat sale today. The local search results are back. So now we just have to wait on the buyer's solicitor to see if the search raises any further questions. Hopefully not. These local search was all that was holding us back from exchanging, so there's a distinct possibility that we could complete in a couple of weeks or so and definitely before the end of June. That will give us perhaps four weeks of 'living elsewhere time' to fill.

We found out last night that the storage place closes at 7pm during the week, not 8pm, so the lugging of boxes and collating of a list of contents will have to wait until Saturday morning before we head off on the next leg of the Holt farewell tour of Europe. This time it's to deepest Gloucestershire to meet the Uni gang for the weekend. It's not the end of the world that we can't get into the storage place on Friday as it means I don't have to wait for my curry now. The plan for the weekend is all of us meeting up at some country pub somewhere for lunch on Saturday, going for a walk and then heading back to Ian and Naomi's in Tetbury for a fondue. Perhaps we'll bump into Prince Charles in the Snooty Fox Saturday evening. It's his local, supposedly. Sunday's plan is church with Ian and Naomi while the rest sleep off a hangover, before all rendez-vousing (I'm sure it's not grammatically correct to do that to a French word) at the Tunnel House Inn for a superb Sunday lunch. I like that place. We went there last time we went to Tetbury.