One golden week

I get a week off between jobs. A week is not that much time. Then again, it's an oasis of time. I can't wait. My dear husband will be away for the first weekend, so I and the pets will have the house to ourselves. I'd say it'll be peaceful, except there'll be the police and fire sirens, the drunk street people screaming, and, oh yes, the parrots. Also screaming. Still. If it's sunny, I plan to take a blanket and a book up to Yerba Buena and camp out for one day on the lawn. Then on another day I'll go take a long beach walk. My insides go all jittery just thinking about it. In other news: The writer of a blog I was following for two years, Carla Zilbersmith, died recently from ALS. This sounds like a real downer, and it is. However, if you care to read her blog yourself, starting from the beginning, you'll see why the final post, while sad, is also uplifting.

I eat bitter for breakfast.

I haven't posted here in a while because some coworkers used to read this site, I don't know if they still do, and I've been job hunting like a fiend and needed to keep it under deep wraps. The result of my efforts: I gave notice a week ago and on June 21 will be moving into a new office in a different department at my company. The office of a person who nabbed a job that's two levels up from the one she held before. Oh, YES I did.

Pre-Monday blues.

Today I realized there's been a distinct weekly pattern in my mood: I'm always thrilled on Friday afternoons (it doesn't hurt that now that the days are longer, Bob and I meet every Friday after work at the Embarcadero BART station and stroll along the waterfront before getting dinner somewhere). Saturdays and Sundays until around 3 or 4, I'm feeling just wonderful -- happy to be immersed in my hobbies or social undertakings, thrilled with whatever the weather may bring. Then on Sunday in the late afternoon, the blues creep in. It's now 3:05 on Sunday, and sure enough I'm getting that anxious, stressed-out, sad feeling. It's time to take charge of this. And now that I've noticed the rhythm, I can figure out a counterpoint.

The place between

I am about to stride forth into my new position -- one my clients are expressing relief and happiness I have. And at the same time, I am looking ceaselessly for employment elsewhere within the company, so I can salvage my resume at least a bit. It would be hard to credibly explain to a future employer why my resume shows a step back in my department. Nobody is going to swallow the "my position was eliminated" line, no matter the truth of it. The best route for me is to find something else as quickly as possible, so I won't have to show this position on my resume. The hitch is that I am very attached to my remaining colleague, I'm competitive about making further gains in what has been a very challenging service area (gains nobody thought anyone from my department could pull off, and which I'm starting to get credit for). And there's no guarantee any new position I land will be any less stressful than the one I already have. I wish I had a spare pile of money around so I could just equip a space and start churning out artisan chocolates and just chuck this whole corporate life. If the economy were a bit better, I'd consider it. But it's no time to be depending on a 1-person start-up to pay for itself, pay off a huge business loan, and also keep filling the savings account. I feel stuck in a place between vantage points, a valley full of brush to hack through before I can get to a hilltop, rest a moment, and see whether or not I've made good progress.

Who supervises these people?

Having not received a formal offer of employment in the mail, I finally wrote the recruiter and asked if one was forthcoming. She did not respond. I found out that a colleague had also asked, and had been told, bluntly, "No." When we asked our VP (who's interim director until she hires my department a new fearless leader) about this, she got right on the phone and instructed Recruiting to send us our offer letters. Apparently, Recruiting thought what we were going through was a transfer. No... a transfer is when an employee is moved from one existing job into another existing job. In our case, our jobs were eliminated and we went through a recruiting process and a very few of us managed to snag different (purportedly, at least) jobs. My offer came via telephone, and I had two days to accept or decline via email. Anyway, so today I got an offer letter, by email. Not as an attachment on letterhead, but as an email (and it had the wrong effective date of my new position). So I responded and asked if the email was an electronic copy of the letter being sent to my mailing address. And the recruiter responded "No, just print and sign. :)" Perhaps I'm making too fine a dice of this whole process, but I'd really like some formal, signed evidence of my offer. On company letterhead. With the correct start date, and without the emoticon. I wouldn't be such a stickler, except that HR has been making insensitive and just plain idiotic mistakes ever since this process started (they sent out job description packages that were full of errors; later they called me with an offer but couldn't name the position they were offering me), and I just want them to do something right for a damned change.

Catching up

Yikes! It's been too long since I last posted. Here's what happened: I went to the interview. The skirt fit! I rocked that interview like Mick Jagger rocks "Shattered." Got a second interview. And did not get selected for the job I had targeted. Nobody who applied for that position from my department got it (and we all got the exact same talking points about why, which would be irritating if I wasn't so tired). I did, however, get a job offer for a different consulting position in my current department, which I accepted because I am not too proud to settle. It came with a chunky raise, which does not ease the pain of losing my beloved manager, losing my cherished team, and knowing my workload will increase to the point of career damage. It nearly makes me wish I'd just taken the severance package. But, I'm in it full-tilt for now, knowing that along my path, other opportunities are bound to blossom.

Health care reform in plain English

I regularly follow a blog written by Carla Zilber-Smith, a mother, writer and humorist who has ALS. She's a compelling writer, and has been inspiring me, making me laugh, and breaking my heart, all at the same time, for the last two years. Sometimes she allows guest bloggers. Tonight her son, Maclen, who is an American Politics and Comparative Politics student, wrote a post explaining the historic health care reform bill that passed and got President Obama's signature this week. It's the clearest, most easily understandable explainer on health care reform that I've read so far. If you're curious, here it is.