Iron Mountain

There are so many things I could be blogging about today, but that I am not going to. Anthony Weiner's Twitter "scandal," the wildfires burning in my home state of Arizona and devastating the wilderness between Hannigan Meadow and Greer, the recent incredibleness of the Diamondbacks (and their current 3-game losing streak), or my school summer financial aid runaround stupidity would all be poignant topics for this blog. I shall resist those temptations today.

Instead, I want to post an update of my recent job searching experiences. The backstory: my brother's lease on his apartment at his college is up in July, so he needs to find a new place. I want to move into an apartment as his roommate so we can split rent. Win-win situation. All I need is the job so I can pay for an apartment, so on Tuesday I went out to the area around where we want to live to pound the pavement and collect applications.

However, after the first few locations I stopped at all told me that I needed to fill out applications from their websites online, I came up with a new plan. I started from the apartments we'd looked at and went up to a couple miles north, south, east, and west of there and wrote down the name of every business that I would care to work at in order to be able to come home and just fill out a plethora of applications all at once. I found that, among other things, there are six banks, five hotels, a CVS, a Walgreens, a Target, a Fry's, a Costco, a military complex, a public relations firm, a Harkins, a Wal-Mart, an IHOP, an Applebee's, at least 15 lawyer's offices, four CPAs, and a slew of other places I don't remember off the top of my head. Oh yeah, and a little place called "Iron Mountain, Inc."

If you've never heard of Iron Mountain, Inc. before, I wouldn't be surprised. My readers on this blog tend not to be the type of people who would use their services yet. From their website: "Iron Mountain is a world leader in information management services, assisting more than 140,000 organizations in 39 countries on five continents with storing, protecting and managing their information." The company is a Fortune 500 corporation traded on the New York Stock Exchange (and doing pretty well from the start of the company's shares on the NYSE). Here's a short list of services that Iron Mountain offers: document managing solutions, digital archiving, online backup, records management and storage, secure shredding, data backup and recovery, records management compliance, and film/sound archiving.

Sound familiar? My information science master's program is all about preparing us for work "concerned with the analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information" (from the Wikipedia definition of Information Science). Add in the classes I plan to take in archivism (document storage, care, and preservation and digital information storage and preservation), and this company is something of a match made in Heaven! And within walking distance of these apartments!

So Tuesday night I searched their job listings, and found three positions I feel qualified for in their warehouse (two openings for "Records Center Specialists" and one for a part-time "Operations Service Specialist/Warehouse") which I promptly applied for. I wrote a tailored cover letter and everything! Suffice it to say that I would really love to get a job there... it would be ideal for my degree, for the experience I would get from it, and it would be close to "home" if we got that apartment. Now begins the waiting game while I fill out other applications. I hope they call!