Without going into all the details tonight, our trip to Chapel Hill was less than successful in terms of finding suitable employment for Michele. In terms of learning enough about the prospective employer to know that she really doesn’t want to work for them.
On the trip home we talked about our situation and both of us were relived that I had an ace in the whole. An old friend had put in a good word for me and as a result I had a shot at a new contract.
Or so I thought.
This evening after getting home I received an e-mail saying that another candidate, one with prior experience at the client, had been selected. Coming on top of a exhausting trip that was disappointing this is a bitter pill to swallow.
I’m going to bed.
Yesterday was a day of numbers.
865 - Michele and I drove 865 miles yesterday to Chapel Hill North Carolina so that she might attend an interview here today. Our aging road atlas misled us in to thinking the route we chose was more like 800 miles. The alternate route mapped out to 915 by the old atlas. We’ve got a new atlas now, and I will be recalculating the distance before we set off on the return trip Saturday.
14 - It took us 14 hours in the car to drive the 865 miles here. Needless to say we were quite exhausted when we finally arrived. Surprisingly enough there weren’t too many patches of construction to slow us down. The worst happened just 60 miles from the end, and at night fall. Naturally. Even in a Lexus, 14 hours is a painfully long haul.
5000 - At some point during the day the visible hit counter for this site rolled over 5000. That’s 5000+ visits to the zanshin.net home page since September 2001. I’ve had this domain since early 1996 and no longer have any idea how many total visitors I’ve had over the years. I’d be willing to bet that in the years prior to this counter I had a total of 5000 other visits. That would give me a nice round 10,000.
Since I lost my job in March I have been wishing for a new one. I have been dreaming of new possibilities and opportunities. Michele, too, has been exploring her profession’s landscape looking for a chance to utilize her education and experience.
Nothing is certain yet, but we both have some movement towards new work engagements. Hers is perfect for her at first glance, and we have spent an agonizing week waiting to see if there will be a second glance opportunity. In the eight years we’ve been together she has left behind or given up job opportunities four times as my career, and my choices, have taken us across the country and back again. It feels right to allow her career to dictate our move this time.
After weeks of little or no feedback to my resume campaign I am finally starting to hear from recruiters and hiring managers. I, too, appear at first glance to have an opportunity in the same geographic area as Michele. This is a good thing. Nothing definite mind you, just a skills survey that was well received and an indication of a phone call to come.
A new geographic location means selling our house, and as luck would have it a potential buyer stumbled on to our property over the weekend and fell in love with it. All of the pieces are coming together.
At least all of the physical world pieces. Emotionally I think we are both still torn about all the changes this move will mean for us. I know I am struggling with once again moving away from my family. The thought of another move, one that will take us away from a house we love and our cherished pool, is a painful one for both of us. We balance the thought of leaving here against the thought of moving to a place where Michele can exercise her career to its fullest. If we could stay here we wouldn’t have to give up our home, but it might mean Michele giving up her career once again.
Of course staying means finding employment here. Oddly enough an opportunity has presented itself that would more than match my prior income, right here were we live now. This would mean no move, no loss of family connection, no leaving behind the house and pool. It would also mean that I would have to find a way to live with the idea that she has given something up for me. She would tell you that being with me is the most important thing in her life, that the job doesn’t matter. But I would have to find a way to frame our staying here so I didn’t feel guilty about closing a door on her career just for me.
In the end I think our choice will come down to intangibles, emotions and feelings. Physically we’ve been through cross-country moves before. We understand the trauma and toll it will take on our bodies and emotions. Somehow we will have to weight the unknown benefits and costs of the new location and careers against the known advantages and short comings of staying here.
The choice may eventually be made for us. None of the remote potential employment options is in any way guaranteed. The buyer for our house hasn’t come forth with earnest money or proof of an ability to purchase it. The contract option here may not happen, and if it does is only for 2 months initially, with a chance at new 12-month contract to follow.
Beginning nearly five weeks ago we started wishing for options to get us out of this situation. We did all the gut wrenching emotional work to come to terms with what had happened and what it might mean for the future. We prepared ourselves for any eventuality. We have worked extremely hard to keep doors open as long as possible; now the time when we’ll have to make choices that will close some of those doors is approaching.
Now we face the challenge of balancing our desires and wishes for a life together against the intrusions of careers and obligations. We appear to have before us options that match all of our wishes: the ability to move on and the ability to stay. The promise of new employment opportunities and the continuation of our life as it was before. Be careful what you wish for, for you will surely get it.
Hicks told me to:
Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
From “Chasing the Dime” by Michael Connelly:
“She shouldn’t have been allowed to just waltz out the door at the end of the day.”
Recently I posted a piece about a new definition ( to me any way ) of faith. Since then a lot has happened in my life that has required, oddly enough, faith.
Being out of work, not knowing what the next day holds, feeling adrift in the world, requires a lot of faith. I can not control what happens when I send my resume off to a prospective employer. I can not cause some one to show up and buy my house. I am unable to make any plans for the future because I don’t know what the future is any more. Beyond getting up every day, and eating, there is little I have control over. The rest happens.
I could agonize over all the bits and pieces that are beyond my power to control, but that would drive me slowly insane. I could get angry at the events that led to this situation, but only I would suffer from that anger. I could turn on Michele and take my frustrations out on her simply because she is here with me, but that would only drive away my best friend and stanchest supporter.
I could do all of those things, or I could trust myself. I could trust that I am doing all I can do move forward. I could trust that a new job will come. I could trust that I will be okay. All I need do is trust without reservation. All I need is faith.
As week four of my unemployment draws to a close I find that I am filled with mixed emotions. We have had good days and good news recently. Unfortunately our recent good fortune makes my awareness of our predicament even more acute.
We had a good couple of days towards the end of last week. We allowed ourselves to take an afternoon trip to St. Louis one day, and went to the movie matinee the next. Over the weekend we saw my entire family for Easter and had as good a time as could be expected under the circumstances.
On Monday, Michele, had a phone interview with a company in North Carolina that went extremely well. She is very excited about the idea of working for them, and all indications are that they will conduct a face to face interview soon and make her an offer after that. To have a potential income on the horizon has been hugely uplifting for both of us. I am very proud of Michele, and excited for her.
It does bring up some issues we have so far ignored or tabled. Moving and selling the house are two big ones. There is so much to do in order to get from here to there once an offer is made and accepted. Money will be tight, but not impossibly so; selling the house will help tremendously. But selling the house will be bittersweet at best for me.
Because of bad decisions regarding our finances and taxes that I made, we had to mortgage the house heavily to get caught up. Losing my job right on the heels of getting my back taxes paid puts a lot of pressure on getting a new income quickly so that I don’t fall behind again.
No matter how I slice the numbers we will be lucky to leave here with three quarters of the money we came with in 2000. And it maybe as little as a third. Sure, we’ll have paid everything off except for the car, we’ll be debt free. But we won’t have a house, and we won’t have a decent down payment for one either.
It all seemed so simple 4 years ago. Having a $75 per hour bill rate was going to solve all our problems. I thought I was finally going to make so much money that money would no longer be an issue. Turns out that throwing money at your problems doesn’t work after all. Who knew?
Maybe in the long run leaving here with just enough to start over elsewhere will be good. I have been cured of my need for things. The pursuit of material possessions no longer holds any real interest for me. But I hate that my need to learn this lesson has forced us to the brink of bankruptcy and financial ruin. I hate that my unhappiness with my employment situation may have contributed to its early termination and therefore amplified our situation.
All I know right now is that it is 2:30 in the morning and I am unable to sleep. My fears are wide awake and every time I close my eyes the what if questions start hammering away at me. I am sorry that I didn’t pay closer attention to the realities of being self employed. I am sorry I couldn’t compromise my sense of who I was in order to stay employed. Most of all I am sorry for all the pain and stress this has caused Michele. She has endured so much in her life, usually at the hands of someone else. I hate that my actions in part have once again placed her in a tenuous, stressful situation.
I feel as if we are so close to a better situation and a better life. A life that is styled to take care of our real needs ( read emotional and spiritual ) and not a life of chasing money or things. We just need a couple of breaks to go our way and we’ll be okay. But so many breaks haven’t gone our way and it is easy to see all the thing that can go wrong. I have tremendous faith and belief in Michele, and in her understanding of our circumstances. She is mostly optimistic, and sees a better future for us. In all honesty I am not able to see that future just yet. I need to trust in her. And I need to confide these negative thoughts and feelings to her, and to you the reader, so that they don’t overcome me.
I am my own enemy right now. I have to resist the urge to fight with myself about my past actions. Rehashing what I did or didn’t do isn’t going to get us to a better place. I have met the enemy, and he is me. Now I must find a way to forgive him, and console him, so that I might move on.
Yesterday we got out of the house and “blew the stink off” as my mother-in-law would say. We took a short road trip to St. Louis and had lunch a Red Robin, one of our favorite burger places. They have the best Freckled (strawberry) lemonade. Afterwards we stopped at a Krispy Kreme for a dozen doughnuts.
The ride down and back was delightful. We talked about our fears and worries regarding our current situation. We also talked about friends and family, the right, abortion, the prison system, and life in general. It was a great day. We really needed to get out of the routine here and do something just for us.
And as a bonus this morning’s breakfast was delicious!
For some time now I have noticed that when I downloaded my e-mail I was seeing higher counts in the status bar than I was new messages in my inbox. When I first noticed the problem, one of my mail accounts was claiming to download 61 messages more than I was actually getting.
I am not sure when these phantom message headers appeared, or what may have caused them. I have managed to rid myself of them ( for now ) and I wanted to share the steps in case some one else is having the same issue.
Some background:
My next step was to move the ~/Library/Caches/Mail folder to my desktop. This didn’t work either.
Finally I logged into the control panel for my account at my ISP and deleted the mail account from the server ( after downloading all the mail there first, of course ). Then I re-created the account on the server.
This steps seems to have worked. When I get my mail the status bar numbers match the instances of new mail in my inbox. Personally I think that an aborted or failed mail retrieval attempt left these headers on the ISP server somehow. Deleting the account there, with a seemingly empty inbox, got rid of problem when nothing done on my machine worked.
After almost three weeks of unemployment, uncertainty, and fear about the future, we got some good news yesterday. One of the companies that Michele had applied to responded with a request for a phone interview.
Together we have responded to dozens of openings in three major markets and until yesterday we had heard nothing in return. It was disheartening to say the least. In my case I’ve sent out nearly 75 resumes to companies large and small in Raleigh, Tampa, and Chicago. In many of these cases the position requirements read like my resume, as if the job was tailor made for me. Getting no replies whatsoever was starting to really scare me. How could I not get any responses?
Metaphysically I understand that each lifetime is about gaining knowledge through experience. That we determine the lessons we need before starting the life, and if an anticipated direction or opportunity isn’t happening it just means it isn’t part of the lesson. In other words, the only reason for me not to have heard from all these contacts I’ve made is that none of them is the right next step for me. Easy to understand and accept in the abstract, very difficult to live with in reality.
So Michele’s good news is a ray of sunshine in an otherwise dark and gloomy landscape. We are trying very hard not to put too much pressure on this single event, or anticipate a future beyond it. Instead we are happy to have confirmation that there is a future, and that our patience with ourselves is starting to pay off.
It has been eighteen days since I was last employed. Eighteen days of emotional highs and lows, eighteen days of struggling to make sense of it all. This morning as I realize yet another day has gone by without a job prospect, I find myself wondering about the connection between my self image and my job.
As a child I was always told that I needed to study hard and get good grades so I could go to college and get a good job. If I didn’t I’d end up “pumping gas” at the local gas station. And somewhere along the way I bought the whole career path idea. The one that states you have to have a direction to your career or you aren’t successful. As a member of the information technology industry I always thought I’d be a programmer, and then an analyst, next a project leader, and finally a manager of some sort.
And so, in my career to date, I have been a programmer, and an analyst, and a project leader, and several other titles as well. But no matter what the title, I’ve always associated who I was with what I was called at work.
“I’m a programmer.”
“I’m a team leader for a large OO project.”
This is fine when you have a title. Viewing yourself, or worse, equating yourself, with your job title sucks when you haven’t got a job. You are left with saying, to yourself if nobody else:
“I’m unemployed.”
I think there is a huge fallacy in imprinting our young people with the idea that they are only as good as their job. I know better than to think I’m only as good as my job and I still have a brutally hard time letting myself off the hook when I don’t have a job. When we tie self worth and happiness to some thing as capricious and vague as a job we give up our right to self determination. And we doom ourselves to never feeling happy enough, or content enough.
It has only been as the result of several very painful end-of-job situations that I’ve come to see that it is more important for me to focus on who I am, regardless of my employment. That my relationship with my wife and friends shouldn’t change just because my status as a worker has changed. And yet, thanks to years of conditioning in school and as a young, eager to please employee, I find myself in the depths of depression because a place I hated working for no longer wants me.
Staying focused on who I am and what will take care of me is so very hard when all the imprinted impulses I have are telling me I should panic, and grovel, and sacrifice to get another job so I can have my identity returned. The idea that my identity was somehow owned by the employer is absurd, and yet not being employed has left me feeling lost and apart from myself.
( I suspect, but do not know from personal experience, that this “loss of identity” crises is what destroys so many people who retire only to wither away and die. )
I know in my head that I am not my job. That the sum of who I am is far larger than any title or position. But in my heart it is hard to feel left out of the mainstream, to feel apart from everyone I know who has a job.
From here on out I’m not going to answer the question, “who are you?” by saying I’m a programmer, or I’m a object-oriented application architect. Instead I am going to respond,
“I’m Mark. Human being at large.”