I want to emphasize this point: I was NOT looking for a job. Heck, I’m scheduled to speak at an IABC meeting this month about the joys of not having a job.

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from someone saying “we have a job opening, here’s the description, are you open to full-time work?” Had it been the typical job I’ve stumbled on around here…you know, $35k/year designer job in a crappy cubicle…I would not have bothered to reply at all. But this was a job description that pretty much described my last “real” job, as a web content manager, back, oh, 8 years ago now, in a far-away land known as California. This is the kind of job I was looking for when I moved here, only it didn’t seem to exist here then. I’d never heard of the company, so I looked up them up online, and found out this:

Fortune magazine top 100 places to work in the U.S.

Beat their third quarter earnings in one of the shittiest third quarters on record.

Global, NASDAQ 100, S&P 500, Fortune 1000.

Health insurance, life insurance, dependent care insurance, tuition reimbursement, generous vacation/sick time—they even give time off to do charity work.

Headquarters in the Bay Area.

OK, so I figured it didn’t hurt to talk to them. This looked like it had the potential of being a substantial increase in income just as the economy is tanking.

So I talked to their HR person, who screened me to see if I was worthy of talking to the hiring manager. The hiring manager called me from California, and deemed me worthy of talking to in person. She flew out from California with two colleagues, and I met with them plus a local HR person down at their RTP campus (gym on-site, running trail nearby). I was supposed to hear by that Friday, but they scheduled me for two more phone interviews with two more people in California. Then I was supposed to hear by Monday, but they scheduled me for another phone interview at 3pm the day before Thanksgiving. I would hear after the holiday.

After nine interviews that seemed to go swimmingly well, I got the email yesterday saying “Oops! Never mind. You’re great, really you are. Everybody loved you. We just decided to hire someone else, that’s all.”

I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed. I was looking forward to an all-expenses-paid trip to Sunnyvale. To not paying almost $600/month of health and long-term disability insurance.

On the other hand, I’m glad I won’t be commuting to RTP, or working in a cubicle listening to my cube-mate’s shitty music through leaky headphones, wearing a cheap visor to keep out the migraine-inducing fluorescent lights. I’m glad I won’t have to beg anyone for the time off to go to Manassas in January and the Gloucester Mardi Gras in February and Honduras in March. I’m glad I won’t have the prospect of a layoff hanging over my head when someone in Sunnyvale decides I’m expendable.

It did put me in touch with something though, which is how much I miss the work I used to do. I’m not sure what I’ll do with that new-found realization, but one of the advantages of being independent is that you can invent your own job rather than contorting yourself to meet someone else’s criteria. Yes, the market is an evil boss in its own right, but at least the playing field is a bit more even this way. There are no golden handcuffs, just a forge and an anvil and a couple of hammers.

The timing of this job, had I gotten it, would have been good in that my studio lease expired at the end of November. In fact, I’ve been having to put the landlord off on signing the new lease until I heard. But in the meantime, I’ve been working at home because the pipes are so noisy that I need earplugs to work there, and it’s difficult to carry on a phone conversation. And all the management can say is “next week” just like they did last summer, when the heat was spiking to over 90 at my workstation because my south-facing windows had no blinds. And then there was the week without heat during a cold spell. And being moved into an office with “upgraded” electric that included a dead outlet and an ungrounded outlet. And putting a fourth power supply in my G5 because the power in the building is so poor, and then having the poor power run down the battery in my new UPS, and having the management shrug and say it’s because designers have too much equipment so we have to expect that the power will fluctuate when somebody uses a microwave oven. Like, don’t my lights dim at home when I run the vacuum cleaner?

Actually, no.

So I’ve decided not to renew the lease anyway. Barry and I will be doing a lot of moving of furniture this month, junking some stuff from the attic to make room for more junk essential items, and I’m moving the business home. This wasn’t feasible when we had one kid living with us and another visiting, but with one living 4 hours away and the other in another country, working from home becomes a possibility. Plus, it means I’ll be here so that I can be freer to arrange workers to come in and do the kitchen work and plaster work and floor work, and then maybe, just maybe, we can move to a house that I actually like living and working in.

Hope springs eternal.

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