While I was waiting

That’s the story of this week.

I’ll summarize:

I’ve passed three interviews with a company—let’s call them Company A—I would love to work for. I had two interviews last week and then an interview on Tuesday. My contact there knew I had a contract I needed to sign and return for the KC job.

And the KC job is through a dear friend of mine. I’d told her a couple of weeks ago that I was still looking for permanent work, and that I was still in the running for the job with Company A. She didn’t seem to care. Well when things heated up more this week, I dropped her an email because I didn’t want to screw up her project by coming on board and then maybe ditching her in a month or so.

We talked briefly right before lunch today and I gave her some names of people in the KC area who might be interested in the job. I just heard back from her about 20 minutes ago that she was able to find someone local.

So on the one hand, I just cost myself a job opportunity. But on the other hand, I am staying home where I belong.

Gotta say my head hurts and I think a glass or two of wine may be in order.

Oh and the waiting bit? Between noon and 4:30 today, I’ve sewn up a fleece jacket. That’s what I did while I was waiting.

Mixed bag

Last week I had a phone interview with a company in Detroit. As described, the job would have meant stepping back a few years in terms of my career, plus I'd have taken a $12k pay cut. But as described, it would have returned me to technical training development and delivery so I was interested.

You did notice the phrase “as described,” right? Yeah, the job I actually interviewed for was pretty different from the job description on the company’s career board. This would have been pure instructional design, with essentially no delivery or at least none for the six to nine months. On top of that, this group is tiny—two instructional designers—and tasked with crazy deadlines. I was so very glad to get the call almost immediately from the recruiter saying I didn’t have the kind of technical experience they were looking for. I did feel for the guy, though. He’s got the impossible job of filling a req that doesn’t accurately describe the position. He told me that he doesn’t think the qualified candidate exists. I assured him they do but they almost certainly won’t move to Detroit for that pay.

The second job I interviewed for was in Milwaukee. I’ve never received the kind of update I got today. I think they’re saying they’re still looking but will include my resume in the next round of candidate evaluations if I'm still interested. So if that’s the case, I might be good enough at some point in the future . . . I think? I’ve sent that email on to Kent to get his take on it. Usually I just get no answer, a rejection or a job offer. This is certainly new.

So onward I go with the job hunt. In the meantime, if you know of any jobs I might be suitable for, just holler. I would not mind in the least leaving Boston.

Loose ends

For being newly laid off, I’ve been really busy tying up loose ends.

I got the unofficial not-supposed-to-tell-you-yet-but-that’s-BS word on Wednesday that I was in fact part of the 1/3 headcount reduction at DMT. I never did get the official word from HR but that’s pretty typical of that company. So I worked with my manager, Nick, who is a great guy.

What I found very odd and more than a little naïve on DMT’s part is that they didn’t consider the potential liability issues of laying me off effective close of business Thursday while I still had to finish traveling home on their behalf Friday. That could have been a huge mess. When I pointed that out to the HR woman, she said that if I’d gotten sick or injured, they’d have covered COBRA 100%. Um that’s nice but that’s not the point. COBRA coverage isn’t the same as the health insurance coverage offered to employees. Plus I would have also been filing for workman’s comp and things would not have been so pleasant. Yeah I think they dodged a bullet.

While traveling to HI, I’d left my car in Portsmouth for some car repair (see also Ferals and the damage to my front left fender), and needed to pick it up on Saturday. I told Nick that I’d make just one more trip up there to turn in company property and it had to be Saturday because of my car. At first, the HR woman was not willing to meet me then, so Nick was going to do it. I’m not sure why she changed her mind but she did and I got everything signed and turned in Saturday afternoon. Now I’m a free agent.

I’m still relieved to be done there. I wouldn’t have outright quit without another job lined up, but I’m glad I don’t have to mess with that company any more. It could have been a super environment, and it should have been. Alas for what could have been.

We leave for England tomorrow night to attend the wedding of one of our closest friends in Boston. We will also be able to see my sister and her family on Saturday at the older daughter’s end of term activities. We get home Sunday evening and have a week together before Kent travels again.

For the next job, I won’t look at companies that far away from Boston—well, not unless things get really desperate. I don’t mind the travel; I did mind the commute. It reeked.

And that's a wrap

I’m getting laid off on Friday, it looks like. Not sure of all the details, the paperwork is getting emailed to me. Things are complicated by me traveling back tomorrow and getting to Boston on Friday—the others who are getting laid off won’t be at work that day. So I’ll be in a sort of no-man’s land.

I feel mostly relieved. I won’t get into details and I won’t engage in snit-fittery but mostly yeah, I’m relieved.

Kent pointed out that my new sewing cabinet (that replaces the one that was ruined in the Great Water Episode of 2009) gets here Friday. Once we get back from our planned and mostly paid for vacation to England, I will have time to sew again. And that’s convenient because my niece just had her first child, a girl, yesterday. And I’ve hardly sewn anything for Eliot at all.

We already know how to budget, we are champs at that so I’m not freaked out about money. Plus I won’t be spending $100-$130 a week in gas plus $6.50 a day in tolls to get to Portsmouth PLUS holy cow I will not spend three hours of my day sitting on my butt in a car.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll be bummed. Right now I’m just kind of glad.

In other news

I just got an email from Kent. He wrote:


Dear Elizabeth,

With this email I resign my position as house husband effective on 9/29/2010

Love,

Kent


Those words mean we are returning to a two-income family and I'm not ashamed to say I teared up reading them.

This picture isn’t actually from today but it’s pretty typical of how the cats react to news that doesn’t net them tuna water or a new toy:

If only they knew, they have a huge change coming up in their kitty lives. The boys have pretty much had a hairless one keeping them company since we got them three years ago. Well that's changing now.

Scary, scary hope

Kent is in the middle of a round of job interviews that appear positive. I hesitate to write even those words because if this doesn’t pan out, we’re back to the status quo which isn’t a lot of fun.

One of the things I disliked the most about my own search was telling people that I had an interview. Invariably they would ask about it later, with the best of intentions. I hated saying that once again I hadn’t gotten the job. I also hated feeling hopeful only to be let down.

If there’s good news, I’ll post it when we get it. You can assume that if I don’t post any sort of follow-up that we are back to the status quo.

Addendum

The pressures I feel regarding what I’d do should Kent land a job elsewhere are not from him, they are primarily self-imposed. It’s all wrapped up in how I think a supportive wife would act etc, and also includes societal pressure. I do believe that women are socialized to make those sacrifices, and it’s sort of considered run of the mill when we do just that.

However, while we are socialized to build consensus, make compromises and so on, men face their own socialization issues. Kent’s a regular reader of my blog, and yesterday after saying the obvious, that he is not angling for us to move, he mentioned that he struggles with the pressure of the man being the bread winner.

If I recall correctly, this is the first time in his adult life where he won’t be able to support himself. In the 12 years I’ve known him, he was laid off once, but was called back after three weeks. And in his first marriage, he was the breadwinner by a large margin. On July 1, he won’t be earning money, although he will continue to receive a paltry unemployment check that doesn’t even cover the mortgage. So in addition to wrestling with the same issues I did while unemployed (because it’s a hell of a self-esteem wrecker), he’s also confronting the realization that right now he is not the breadwinner.

I know we aren’t the only couple to face issues like that—some of you are facing doozies of your own. I’ll take any hints you have on strategies that have helped you during these times.

Hear me roar?

Quick back story which you can skip if you know it:

I moved here not quite two years ago (June 28, 2008 to be precise), without a job and with no prospects of finding one although I was optimistic. I shouldn’t have been—while I had some contract work in 2008, I didn’t get full time work again until four months ago. As anyone who read my blog over the last 18 months knows, that wasn’t the best of times for me.

To the main point:

Now I’m working in my field at a job I love. And Kent is unemployed.

This morning he told me he’s expanding his job search to New York City. In my rational mind, I get it. NYC is a huge hub for his field and hey, his severance package runs out at the end of this month. True to gender norms and despite my greater level of education, I still don't earn what he did. I'm at about 80% of what he earned pre-bonus AND my commute costs a lot more ($59 a month vs. $430-ish). That means we have a season of budget squeezing upon us, so we could definitely benefit from both of us being employed. (Note: the good news is that I’m doing better than the national income norm, about which you can read here but be warned it's a PDF. According to this PDF, 10 years post college, we women earn about 69% of what men do, and I attribute my 80% of his previous wage to me having earned that master's of science).

Yet I find myself feeling a little cranky about the situation. When I started interviewing for my current job, we already knew Kent was losing his. I told him then that if I took this job, I wasn’t going to move if he got a job elsewhere—to which he said he wouldn’t look on the West Coast (which he had previously, and which is also a good source of jobs in his field).

I know why I feel cranky—I suspect that he will get a job in NYC and then the pressure will be on me to move again. So I fear I’ll get stuck between two competing desires, neither of which is wrong. My marriage is beyond important to me AND I don’t want to crater my career again. I’m damn lucky I pulled things out last time. I’m also not really interested in being judged by others who would choose differently. And I’m faced with the pressure that generally speaking, it’s the woman who makes those concessions and trundles off into something less fulfilling so she can support her husband.

Kent—this isn’t aimed at you. If anything, it’s aimed at societal pressures. And they weigh on me greatly.

Discouraging

Kent’s job hunt continues. He’s had some promising interviews although nothing’s panned out yet. One position was in New York City and I had mixed feelings when I learned they’d filled it; while I would have ended up hating him being gone all week, every week, the job and the company sounded pretty interesting. Today he’s learned that another company that’s been interviewing him has some real problems with the way they are managing their business—probably bad enough to be a deal breaker for him.

So we are looking at single income status again at the end of next month. I remind myself we’ve done it before and God knows I did it with far, far less when I was newly divorced. But just because I have the skills to live on a lot less doesn’t mean it’s particularly fun or enjoyable.

I’m not prepared to consider a name change to Job—things aren’t nearly as bad as they were last November and December. But I am discouraged and so is he. When that happens, we check out LOLcats. I liked this one:

Compare and contrast

I’ve been working at my job in NH for just over two months now—and I do love it. The job is great, the people are fun and some of them are so smart I know it makes me work harder because I don’t want to be the dummy.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had a long commute. In early 2000, my ex told me he’d accepted a promotion that required him to move to Nashville, TN. Our younger son was finishing up his junior year of high school, and my ex (naively) thought that Ben would just go with him. Well no—you see, one commitment we’d made to the boys was that they would graduate from the same school system and I wasn’t going to break that commitment to Ben, especially not for one year of high school.

I moved from Kansas City, MO back to Lawrence, KS in May 2000. That meant I had about a 120 mile commute round trip—only with rush hour. To be honest, I hated the commute, every single part of it. A lot of the hate was because I drove with the rush hour traffic and anyone who knows me will tell you patience is not one of my strong suits. But I’d have done anything to make sure Ben graduated from the Lawrence school, and the drive was worth the frustration.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m not chafing over this current commute. After all, it’s longer and Boston traffic can sure get stacked up. All I’ve come up with is that (a) I’m driving opposite rush hour and (b) Kent’s unemployed. Much as when Ben needed to live in Lawrence, I will do whatever it takes to keep our little family going—the bonus is that I love this job far more than I did that job in 2000.

PS Our second grandchild was born on Sunday--a boy! You can see pictures here.

Survivor’s guilt

To quote LOLcats, I gots it.

Stupid, sure. Illogical—definitely. And yet I still feel guilty that I landed this fantastic job doing the kind of work I love while so many of my friends remain unemployed. And let’s bring it even closer to home.

Kent’s job ends a week from tomorrow. He loved the work he did and the field he was in, and his reviews and bonuses showed the company thought the same about him. But then the business plan changed and poof—bye bye entire business unit. Watching him go through this has been like watching someone I love go through a divorce he didn’t want. And while he’s getting a job divorce, I just got a job marriage.

Or maybe it’s like announcing a pregnancy to friends who can’t conceive. Whatever the analogy, I’m really trying to shed the guilt because God knows I didn’t just sit around eating bon bons while job searching. I needed and wanted a job in my field.

How do you handle false guilt like this?

Where are my slippers?

After 25 months, I’m back among the fully employed. I was underemployed (love that term) for 12 months and flat out unemployed the rest of the time. The adjustment has been about what I expected—I’m tired, my brain is full, my feet want to know where my slippers are and I’m getting used to driving a lot again.

I thought I’d be able to work out at night when I get home from work but that’s just not the case. Let’s face it, I’m wired as an early bird, I’ve been that way since I was a teen and even when not working, the latest I “slept in” was 6 AM. Since I need a solid eight or nine hours of sleep every night, that puts me to bed around 9. Now that I’m getting up a lot earlier, my bedtime has shifted too. When I get home, Kent and I eat dinner and I’m in bed about an hour later. So I don’t have time or energy to work out at night. I’ve shifted my wake up time to a half hour earlier so I can get a work out in before I go to work. It’s always been far easier for me to get up a half hour earlier than to stay up even five minutes later.

I’m also learning a lot at work, both about the processes, the clients and how we work with them. My start date came at a really good time since we’ve got the adjunct faculty (who work with our clients) in for a two day workshop. I’ve had a chance to meet those who attended and I’ve started getting a better sense of who they are and how they operate.

We were on tap to get a lot of snow yesterday, so I prudently packed an overnight bag just in case I needed to stay in Portsmouth. Mayor Merino (Boston) declared a snow emergency for yesterday a day early and we got pretty much no snow. Because of the snow emergency though, my commute home yesterday was the easiest yet—no traffic at all!

So about that job I mentioned

On February 8, I start working for Dare Mighty Things as their senior consultant. DMT is a management consulting company that specializes in working with non-profits to help them be as efficient and effective as possible in serving their target groups.

I could copy and paste the job description but as a friend of mine says, small words are better and the description was on the long side. But the Reader’s Digest version is this: I’ll:

*Consult in areas like organizational development, capacity building, skills training, change management, program design and development
*Train the people who actually offer the training to the target groups,
*Conduct needs assessments to identify and solve problem areas of organizational and program effectiveness
*Identify and capture research findings, best practices, innovations and so on so that all clients have access to this information.

I’m pretty excited, to be honest. This is exactly the career path I started on way back in 2005 when I was accepted to the MIOP program at KSU. The single drawback is the commute—DMT is located in Portsmouth, NH which is about 60 miles north of where we live. But I’ll also be traveling about 50% of the time, and as I told DMT, Logan International is a lot closer to my house than Portsmouth!

Busy week

This week I:

Applied for a job with the civil service. Their application process is both lengthy and tiring. Coming from an industrial/organizational psychology background, I can say they do a great job isolating the skills, knowledge and abilities needed for the open positions. But the process was still tiring to me as the applicant.

Conquered invisible zippers. This is a big deal to me since I've always been frustrated by zippers and would rather make 15 buttonholes than put in one zipper. The picture shows the invisible zipper in my new skirt (it's on the ironing board). What's more, I made it with my quilting foot on my Bernina because I don't have the correct foot. I'm on the hunt for one now and then zippers will be mine forever.

Along with the zipper, I made a jacket and skirt. Well the jacket is 99% done. I need to sew on a button. I do love Vogue patterns, the attention to detail is remarkable.

Watched Kent turn into a Craig's List seller extraordinaire. In the last week or so, he's sold two rugs, a book case, our red chair and the matching ottoman. He's getting ready to list another book case on there too. We've sold these items as we've found mostly very inexpensive replacements that work better in our space.

Watched and helped Kent install new lights in our kitchen. Previous owners had installed a few can lights throughout the space but they are odd--the bulbs are set deep in the can so the light doesn't really make it out into the space the way you'd think it would. We had two cans in our kitchen, two in each of the halls and two in our living room. So in addition to being inferior can lights, there aren't very many of them. We tackled the kitchen first and found two halogen fixtures for $10 each. We are going to need to put in a dimmer switch now! I think in the winter I'll be really glad to have halogen, although they are a bit warm. We may try lower wattage halogen bulbs too.

Replaced our tall darker book case with new shorter book cases from Ikea. Here's what it looked like before:



And here's the after picture: