Earlier tonight my husband told me he was going to look up a guy’s phone number in the phone book. He told me this at a diner where we were having dinner. His BlackBerry was sitting on the table right next to him.
I told him I can’t be with a man who uses a phone book and not the internet to look up people’s phone numbers.
It’s time for him and his fingers to do the walking . . . out of my life.
Leave a commentI have been thinking about the direction of my blog and where it’s headed. I thought it would move forward organically, but I feel it’s unfair to draw people here to talk about the job search when I now am starting Month 3 in a job.
Would you continue to visit the blog if I change its content or even its title?
I am sure the job search topic will continue to come up. Like the scar on my right ankle, I wear my job search wounds like a badge of honor. The three years spent job searching full time are a part of what and who I am.
Let me know if you would continue to visit if I changed the name of the blog and focused more on all aspects of my life and not just my career. After all, LIFE is a full time job . . .
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Leave a commentI am so sorry for not posting for a few days. I am still leery about posting from work and the nights have been filled with the stuff we can’t get done because we are at work.
This leads me to what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I knew it would happen like this but it happened so quickly and so seamlessly I didn’t even realize it. What I’m talking about is being back in the 7:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. (that “9-5” myth is, like most myths, a bunch of hooey) grind as if I never left it.
I’m not exaggerating when I say those 3 years of being home and having time to accomplish things around the house and spend time with my Mom and cook good meals is barely in my consciousness. I so wanted and needed to find a job I kept telling myself that being unemployed (God how I hate that word) would be a blip on my life’s radar. As a matter of fact, I blogged about this very thing over a year ago. (Click HERE for that entry.)
Now I am part of the daily commute on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I do wash and clean my house on the weekends. I plan our meals for the week based on things that are quick and easy and don’t require much cooking time. I pray for time to read a book. I watch Regis & Kelly at night on TiVo. In many ways, the 3 years spent at home feel like something I dreamt.
But it was real and I have the blog entries to prove it. Maybe someday, after I feel more settled and at home back in the work force, I’ll reread my old entries. For now, I’ll hate the alarm, wish for a quick work day and work week and not look back. Because when you’re looking back, isn’t it all really just a dream? That little ditty about boat rowing really was a life lesson. Who’da thought???
Leave a commentI am learning the ebb and flow of my new company and my new job and much like the job search, I have no control over when and what comes my way.
I am supposed to be traveling next week but that may be cancelled. Other meetings assigned to me are in various stages of flux.
Today I have no work to do. Monday and no work makes for a very long day. Too much time to think is never good for me.
Like the job search, at any time there could be a lot for me to do so I sit and try to seem busy (another horrible thing to have to do) and wait for something to suddenly come up a la Marcia Brady.
I waited for THE job to come along.
I reported for work my first day, then was reading lots of procedures, got really really bored waiting for a meeting to plan, got super busy.
Now I wait for a job within the job.
You’d think I had honed my waiting skills while doing the job search. I’m still waiting for that to happen.
Leave a commentI saw that the Unemployment rate has dropped to 9%. For a long time, I was part of that statistic but when I was, I never really thought about the numbers. I had to keep my head down and everyday dig deep to keep doing what I had to do to get a job.
When I saw that rate all I could think about is all the people who make up that number. Now that I’ve got a job, I not only had the mindset where I could take a moment and think about what that number means but there was no way I couldn’t.
I love a statistic as much as the next geek (and I can use that word because I am one) but the problem with statistics is that when there is a collection of data that data could be people.
I am not going to give the old pep talk about keeping your chin up and all that malarkey. If you are in this nightmare, and it is a nightmare, you know what you have to do.
I do understand what you’re going through and it sucks. If it’s 1% or 100%, if you’re part of that data it sucks. Not much else that I’ve been like in my life has sucked more. And that’s no Malarkey.
Leave a commentI had to stop at the cleaners on the way home tonight. I went there this morning but the parking lot was a sheet of ice so I didn’t get out of my car. Life is very different in the winter and you’ve really got to plan ahead.
I don’t know about you, but after a work day all I want to do is get home. I had another stop to make at the library and then finally I was home.
I mentioned before that I live in a 90-year-old house. The great thing is that we have a garage and for many houses from that era there was no garage. However, if you did have a garage back then it was not attached to your house as is the case with ours. We have to walk across our backyard to the garage where there is an alley running behind our house and that’s where our garage opens into.
My husband works a part-time job every Wednesday night. So that we didn’t lose the parking spot out front of our house, I decided to park there since he won’t be home until 8:30 p.m. tonight.
Fiasco to follow.
I got out of my car on the driver’s side and it was all ice beneath my feet. I had to hold my car all the way around to the back and somehow almost body straddle the spare tire cover on the back of my SUV. At one point I was actually hugging the back tire cover. Oh yeah, I am also now ankle-deep in water from all the rain and any melting that may have occurred today when rumor has it a big giant yellow round thingie was in the sky.
Next I find myself on the very back right rear corner of my car, standing in the cold water. Did I mention in a shear act of nothing short of cockiness, I didn’t put my boots on because I didn’t think I’d need them?
From there it was a little Stretch Armstrong to get my right foot up on the curb without letting hold of the car. I am only 5′ 2″ so my legs are not very long but I think tonight they stretched a foot or more! Once one foot was on the icy curb, I pushed myself with enough momentum to get the other foot up there while still holding on to the car because the curb is all ice.
I now have to inch my way along the passenger side of the car, all while on the icy curb. I get to the passenger side front door and open it. I have to mimic a push up so that my upper body and arms can reach my purse which is on my passenger seat and then grab the handle of my backpack which is on my passenger floor. I grab the handle, forgetting that the handle pulls up so you can pull it wheelie-bag-style. When the handle pulls out, it’s long enough that the bottom of the backpack is in the water along the curb. My new company laptop is in the backpack? Of course it is.
I manage to pull the backpack out of the water pretty quickly and now I have one final long step to get to the stairs leading up to my house which are, thankfully, ice-free. Before I close the passenger door, I realize there is a plastic bag still on my passenger floor. What’s that I wonder?
And then I remember. It’s my boots.
That groundhog had better not be screwing with me . . .
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My new company has its you-know-what together in a lot of ways. On my first day of work my laptop was set up and so was my desk phone. Over the last seven weeks, I’ve been waiting for other things to arrive such as my shirts (we have a company shirt we wear to events), my BlackBerry, my name tag.
Today when I arrived at work, there was a box of business cards on my desk. Not just any business card, but MY business cards. It was a moment for me that you will understand if you have traveled this journey with me or if you are going through it yourself.
I looked in the one pocket of my purse where I keep my business card case and got it out. I opened it and it was empty, just waiting for this day that on many days, quite honestly, seemed like it would never come. I loaded it with my new business cards (I can’t stop saying it) and you might not be able to see it in the picture, but the case is bursting at its seams, kind of like my insides.
I wouldn’t call it pride but it was the feeling you get when you never stop doing what you’ve got to do to make something happen and once it happens . . . bursting.
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More snow and a wintry mix is headed this way and let me be perfectly clear that “wintry mix” is not some form of a salad.
“Smarter than the average bear” is looking pretty damn smart to me.
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