lolz, I didn't see a single one of those cars at the office in which I interviewed. I was told I'd need to visit the dealership in the next town over if I wanted to get a good look at one. I did however see a Lotus Exige in the lot. OMG that thing is small and looks SO badass.

I'll be a data analyst (read: Excel geek) who is tasked with accepting reports from what I gather is a network of dealerships. The dealerships are racking up charges on parts and labor via standard operating procedures and this data goes into what I surmise is an incredibly unfriendly database format. I'll slice, dice, parse, graph, and pivot-table the data from individual dealerships and dealerships as a whole (a few assumptions on my part here) and put it into something that lets the corporate sales and marketing team understand it more easily. I don't know much more than that, but this is what was described in the interview.

I took a page from the countless stories which have been in the news about how you have to really sell yourself in ways that weren't necessary during a robust job market. In my case, I asked a lot of questions about the procedures outlined above and then asked one of the interviewers with a laptop to load the CD I had brought, showed them an example of a raw data report from my AMD days (with all client name info scrambled). When they saw the raw report which would come from my vendor, they excitedly said, "yes, that's very similar to what we're getting!" Then I had them open my spreadsheet with an empty pivot table at which point they excitedly interrupted and said, "Yes, we love pivot tables!" I had them click the button I made to execute my macro, explained how data was being pulled in from the raw report and they in turn saw a fully populated pivot table. Needless to say, they were excited to see an application being run that in terms of process, met exactly what they are after.

My hiring notification came the next day.