The Job: Not Perfect, but Not Hell

This would have been a different post a few days ago.

A few days ago, I would have been raging about how I'd found yet another idiotic employer, one that didn't have any respect for the contributions of their employees, where I was once again being overworked and underappreciated.

I might have lamented the entire job sector in which I work, and maybe I would have idly wondered about becoming a mail carrier or a construction worker. It would have been seething with bitterness and resentment. And I would probably have gotten a lot of sympathetic comments from my friends and followers.

I can't write that post.

I can't allow myself to become jaded. I was scarred by my last job. I left wanting to burn the entire place to the ground. I don't ever want to work in a place that insane and dysfunctional again.

But I also don't want to have that kind of rage within me again.

Look, I have a good job. It's not a perfect job. There are moments when I don't love it. There are things I'm asked to do that I think are silly. I don't get as much money as I should.

But unlike my last job, I like going into the office every day. My co-workers like me and appreciate me and laugh when I send them silly cat pictures and Bruce Lee videos as responses to work emails.

They respect me. My last job didn't respect me.

They appreciate me. My last office couldn't have cared less about the quality of work I was doing.

They make me feel welcome. In my last job, I'd run into my office, close the door, and keep it closed for as long as I possibly could.

Most importantly, this job did something for my confidence. I was working in a place where I felt like dirt, and they gave me an escape. More than that: they said "we want you." Not just "come here and cower for a while," but they gave me an emphatic "come here; we want you; we're going to fight to get you on our staff." I need to remember how much better I have it now than I did six months ago.

So yes, there are petty annoyances. There are things I wish were better. I'm going to be sending out a few resumes to see if I can find a better offer elsewhere. But I don't hate my current job.  I refuse to hate it. I won't let myself go to that place again.

Because We Care

I was talking to one of my co-workers recently. As I mentioned recently, the department has been gutted, so there's not a lot of us left and we're all dejected.

There was some material that went out and it wasn't up to our usual standards. It was terrible. A typo, poor wording, just not our typical quality. My co-worker is pretty frustrated about how far we've fallen.

But she turned to me and she said, " I don't know why I still care. I should be numb to all this. I shouldn't care anymore."

But yet, she still cares. Even though most of my department has one foot out the door, even though some of us (not me!) have been surfing job postings during our work hours, we still care. She is a dedicated worker, a gifted writer, a perfectionist. But the controls have been taken out of our hands. Other people are making the decisions for us, and the decisions are terrible.

But we still care. We're humans. We care about the work we do. We care about what goes out with our name on it. We - and I'm talking about my co-workers - are passionate about their work and it hurts to see poor quality product going out. So we fight our battles, and we argue with our superiors, and we complain behind the scenes when the decisions don't go our way. But we still care.

We could walk away, but there's something in all of us that is still hopeful that even though the iceberg has struck, even though the hull is taking on water, that the ship will be righted. We are hopeful. We have to be.

Changes Abound

So ... I still have the job.

Yep, still working.

Ahem.

I've been watching the second season of Mad Men, and I'm starting to feel a lot like Harry Crane. At this point in the series (and PLEASE don't let me know what happens from here), Harry has invented a job for himself as the head of the television department, and suddenly realizes it's a lot more work than he expected. He's having a little bit of dread, actually, about how much work it's turned into, and how much harder he has to work than he expected.

I'm also feeling a little bit like ... oh, I don't know. Picture any movie you can imagine where the pilot of an airplane passes out, or dies, or turns into a three-headed dragon. And then the co-pilot/stewardess/stunned passenger in row 14 suddenly has to take over the plane. Yeah. Maybe that's it.

So as I said, I still have my job. My boss, however does not. Several of my co-workers also do not. My department has been gutted. My wing of the office is in tatters, and every day I walk in feels like entering a funeral home.

Oh, and also? We have a major product launch scheduled for the fall.

Wiser people than me might ask - why destroy the marketing department when you need them to do nationwide marketing? There are many reasons for that. Mostly, it comes down to money. We made some major mistakes, lost some money due to missteps, and we needed to bring down our labor costs to stay afloat. I didn't say I was working for a well-funded operation, people. Even though it's a bigger office than I've ever worked in, and a bigger outfit than I've ever worked for, it still just takes one mistake to throw everything off kilter. Some things never change.

So we're doing some innovative things. If you want to interpret "innovative" as "desperate," you can. We've contracted out with a marketing firm that might or might not be capable of doing what we've asked them to do. We're asking some people with very little communications experience to pinch-hit. And I'm suddenly being asked questions that I am absolutely incapable of answering. I get calls at least once a week that would have gone to the communications director before, but now he's not there, and nobody else is stepping in to take their place, and so they call me because ... well, I answer the phone. That's why they call me.

So to sum up - I'm in over my head, my boss is suddenly gone, my work is about to get really really crazy, and people are panicking. Everyone I talk to is either actively looking for a new job or they're getting their resume ready, just in case. The lifeboats are being readied.

Meanwhile, I just come in every day and do my job. I send out the messages I need to send out. I follow orders. I keep busy. I ingratiate myself with my new boss, who apparently thinks the world of me.

But I'm still working. And y'know what? I'm just going to be grateful for that.

The Job that I Have

I've been working. I have a job, ladies and gentlemen.

I've been working for ... um ... weeks, actually. Sorry I haven't mentioned it.

I haven't posted it because I haven't been able to figure out how to talk about it here. I'm working in communications for a very large and well-known employer here in the Pacific Northwest. I can't say more than that, and seriously, I cannot say more than that. If I go a step over that vague comment, you will know where I work, how to find me, and where my business Twitter account can be found.

And I will get in a lot of trouble if that happens.

So I hope you will forgive me if I don't share much detail. But I can say this about the job: I love it.

I feel like this is the job that I've been working my way towards for the past decade. I'm writing. I'm doing a lot of writing, in a lot of formats. I'm working with the media. I'm building online communities. I'm at the vortex of a very large virtual community, and it's an amazing experience. All the organizing, all the fundraising, all of the odd roles I've been taking on all these years. It all had been leading to this.

I'm exactly where I want to be.

I am so deliriously happy that I feel like dancing every day. People, this is a wonderful job. And that's what I can say: that, after the difficult jobs and the weird bosses and the firings and the layoffs, I have found something that is very close to my dream job. It can happen.

Temping It Out

Oh my gawd, dear readers. I hope I land a real job soon, because the temp job I'm doing now is stressing me the hell out.

I'm working for a few weeks for a friend, partly as a favor and partly for the money. She's not the most organized person in the world, so I get a lot of late-night phone calls and emails at 2 in the morning. The last week has been a little weird, what with not knowing what my day is going to be like until I show up in the office. It's fine for a temp job, but the level of expectation my friend has is starting to bug me.

I'm looking for a permanent job, of course. And my friend knows this, and she's been saying the right things about how my search for a permanent job has to take priority. (It really has to. In order to stay eligible for unemployment, I need to be available every day for job interviews or jobs. So legally, a permanent job has to be my priority.) But she's been talking out of both sides of her mouth - simultaneously saying that she wants to give me the time to look for a permanent job, AND that she needs me available at a moment's notice to do anything that pops into her head.

She called me today at 1 pm to see if I could do a shitload of paperwork today. That afternoon. In the next two hours.

I was with my kid, in a toy store.

Yesterday, she told me that she would be dealing with this very stack of paperwork herself. But today it got tossed in my lap, and when I said I couldn't do it, I got the passive-aggressive guilt trip about not being available. The kind of thing that happens with nonprofit work. "What do you mean you don't want to drop everything for the job? Don't you care about the work? Don't you care about THE MOVEMENT?!"

I have a bunch of job interviews next week, and she's sweating me that one of the interviews is on a day when things are going to be frantic at the office. I need a damn job, not some temporary stopgap bullshit! I do not get paid enough to be at this person's beck and call like a genie in a fucking bottle.

Never work for friends. Never, ever take a job because somebody's a friend and you want to do them a favor. Jeezus Christ on a pogo stick.

Yes, but No

(Thanks to Flickr user _FXR for the photo.)

I thought I was going to be able to share the glorious news that I had been hired. I was sure it was going to happen, and then it didn't.

Here's the story. I got a phone interview with a local company. It's a nonprofit. You've never heard of them.

The phone interview was wonderful. I was telling great anecdotes that made me look witty and talented. The director told me his moving personal story of why and how she got involved, how his family felt about the work. We spoke for nearly two hours. I felt great afterward.

The first in-person interview was excellent. It was the director, a board member, a staff member. It was a great interview.

They invited me to a second interview, and this one felt much more intimate. We were sitting around a conference room table, chatting like old friends. We talked about scheduling vacation days and workspaces and upcoming events. I showed them pictures of my son. I asked a couple of hard questions about the organization's finances and got a hard answer instead of cold stares.

At the end of the interview, I was feeling pretty confident. I had a hunch and I wanted to see if I was right.

"At this point, are you interviewing any other candidates?"

I thought I saw a bit of a smirk. "You're our top candidate."

I gave them my references and filled out a generic form authorizing a background check.

I got an email early next week. "The background check looks great. I spoke to one of your references. Just need to speak to the other one and get the board to okay the hire. We're almost done!"

We're almost done. I remember that phrase. He was telling me that he was just checking off the final boxes on the form, dotting the i's, crossing the t's. The process, the waiting, this whole purgatory of job seeking, all of it was nearing it's end. We were almost done.

The next day, another email. "Okay, I spoke to your second reference. Now the final step is getting the board's approval." The board would meet in executive session that Friday, where one of the questions would be my hiring.

Naturally enough, I was feeling optimistic. Who says things like "the final step" and "we're almost done" to someone you're not going to hire? Mrs. B and I made plans to go out to dinner on Friday night. I started compiling a mental list of all the things I wanted to buy once I was working again - albums, electronic devices, household stuff. I was imagining what I'd need at my desk on that first week, the programs I'd have to set up, what pictures to bring with me for the office.

And then Friday came and went. I stared at my phone all day, kept checking to make sure the ringer was turned up. I expected, based on the constant stream of communication, that I'd get an immediate phone call as soon as the official decision was made. I never got that call.

Dinner that night was somber and awkward. I kept my phone with me the whole night, half-expecting it to ring and kick the celebration into full gear. Instead, it stared at me blankly, like an unconvinced witness.

I was tense and cranky all weekend, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. My wife kept reassuring me that the call could still come Monday. Maybe she had been working late and wanted to save the call until next week. Maybe.

I didn't get the phone call on Monday morning. Finally, late that afternoon, I decided to call. I left a voice mail. I tried to keep my voice even, but I'm not sure I succeeded.

Tuesday I got a cryptic email - "we've still got a couple of issues to work out, so sorry, call if you wanted more information." Of course I wanted more information, so I called.

The director sounded nervous. He gave me a song-and-dance about how nervous he was about making the right decision. He was second-guessing whether he had made the right decision. "80% of this organization's budget comes from this position, after all," he told me. (I knew this. I had worked in fundraising before, knew the pressure on the job better than he did.)

And then he dropped the bomb. She was going to schedule interviews with a couple of "late-surfacing" candidates.

"Oh," I said.

"I know, I know," he said too quickly. "I want this to be done, but ... you know? We just need to make sure we made the right call."

He made more apologies which I didn't really hear. I was being turned away. After all the reassuring messages, after all the great impressions and positive vibes. After meeting three board members, two staff members, and two of the office volunteers, I was going to be turned away.

It's now four weeks later. I still haven't heard back. I haven't called back because I don't want to be told that they hired someone else. As long as I don't hear from them, the possibility still exists that I'll get the job.

And honestly, I'm not sure I want this job. I don't know if it was genuinely jitters on his part or if the board wasn't completely sold on hiring me. I don't know the real story. What I know is that I felt misled. I feel like I was led on. I told someone that it felt like we got engaged, and then the organization decided to screw a few more people just to make sure it had made the right choice.

If they have that much trouble believing I'm the right person for the job, I'm not sure I want it anymore. I'd rather work for someone who knows that I'm the right guy, not someone who thinks I might be, but maybe I'm not, and it might work but I don't know, and who really knows anyway, and oh, gosh, this is all so hard and maybe we just ought to think about it for a while more. I know I'm a hell of a catch, and if he couldn't figure it out, someone else will. Someone else will.