Last night I had one of those moments that every mother dreads. It was three hours past the time my teenage daughter was expected home and she wasn’t answering her cell phone which appeared to be off. She’s a pretty responsible girl, so I was concerned to say the least. The fact that I had recently written a post about a sex offender that lives nine blocks from my house probably wasn’t helping me feel more secure about her tardiness.
So I did what any neurotic mother would do. I reached out to everyone I could think of to figure out where she might be. And here’s what I realized. If you really need to find someone, now more than ever, you have the resources to quickly create a web of contacts to get the information you need. I made some phone calls to the parents of her friends, but I simultaneously had my son instant messaging her friends who were online. At the same time, I worked through the one teenage friend both my daughter and I share on Facebook to get the name of a girl who I thought might know her whereabouts and messaged her on Facebook even though we are not friends. Through these efforts, I started to piece together a time line of when she got off the school bus and where her location might be. Within minutes, kids were texting my daughter checking to see if she was ok.
After about 45 minutes of craziness, my daughter walked in the door and told me where she had been (with a student uptown who is tutoring her in math) and that her phone battery was dead. And while she claims she told me about her evening plans this morning, my aging and overloaded brain has no recollection of this conversation. Of course now I’ve completely embarrassed her with my over-the-top sleuthing capabilities, but in retrospect, I wouldn’t have done anything differently if confronted with the situation again.
I think there is a great lesson here for job seekers. If it is truely important to you to find a certain contact that will help move your job search forward or give you key information you need, you will do it. You will think creatively about who knows who and who will be willing to advocate for you and your candidacy. Because it’s that important to you and you won’t stop searching until you have the information you need.