These days I am in full-time job search mode, which I would not wish upon anyone. This is an emotional roller-coaster. You spend your days developing and maintaining contact lists, spending hours applying to positions, wrestling with applicant tracking systems, making follow-up phone calls, preparing for interviews, (if you are very lucky) interviews, and trying to contain your anger when you learn that the position you thought was right for you was filled internally . Every day.

Having begun my first career in sales, I dutifully make a follow-up phone call on every resume I send. Those calls rarely go well. I am astounded at the number of people who do not take phone calls. If you do catch a live person (and I do believe they are out there), their mood can usually be characterized as surly or dismissive.

When I make these follow-up calls, people on the other side of the conversation often remind me a song from 1975 or so, “Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You.” This song, by the Colorado-based band Sugarloaf, tells the story of the band channeling their frustrations of little interest from record companies into bubblegum sarcasm. The song’s title and chorus was all they ever heard, if they received any response at all. The band got into some trouble because the song mentioned the phone number of a record company executive, who was apparently less than welcoming. That errant use of a phone number in the song made it a fluke hit.

The phrase has even crept its way into software coding. The Hollywood Principle is a software design methodology that takes its name from the cliché response given to auditioning hopefuls in Hollywood: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”. Wikipedia tells us that it is a useful paradigm that assists in the development of code with high cohesion and low coupling that is easier to debug, maintain and test. I much prefer the fluke hit.

Maybe I need a fluke hit, because I hear the chorus every weekday.