ODDREE.COM

Opening The Door

I was sitting in my living room earlier this week. It was a non-karate night. I was still lounging around in my work garb (tan pants, polo) trying to forget the day I had and rest my brain. Then there was the doorbell. I don't get visitors. My kids don't really have friends in the neighborhood any more. They all moved away. Any friends we have would tell us that they were stopping by. The only people that ever ring my doorbell are salesmen, or charity workers. I wouldn't have any of it.

Five minutes or so went by, and then there was banging on my door. I had one of my kids look out the window. "It's just some guy ... with a clipboard". I decided that this must be pretty important. Here it is just below zero outside, and this guy is still on my porch wanting to talk to me. I open the door. He says, "I have a package for you". Seeing that nobody sends me flowers, I knew exactly what kind of package this guy had for me. Court papers.

Sure enough, I had two nice packets of paper from the local court system. Nothing unusual. Just the mortgage company doing what it has to do, which is to put a final date on my house. My choices are to sell it, or give it back and let them sell it. The "get out of our house date" is well into the summer, which is nice. Maybe this wasn't bad news. I have some time to get this place into better shape and sell it.

Move forward to Thursday morning. It was tougher going to work than usual because we have all worked a long week. Aside from taking shit from a lot of our customers, we had the boss breathing down our necks about intrusion prevention alerts that he feels have been ignored. I was just as tired getting out of bed as I was getting into it. I went into the office, dropped into the call queue, and away we went. Sometime into the afternoon, my cell phone rang. It was one of those rare opportunities where I was writing up some service ticket notes, and I wasn't on the office phone. I set myself into DND, and I looked down to my phone. I wasn't sure what to expect. For a while, my mortgage company was calling me twice a day to play a recording that says "we need to talk to you". Now that I had talked to them and told them that I couldn't afford the house payments, they stopped calling.

But this was a 740 area code. I only know two people who would call me from that area code, and one of them is a guy working 10 feet away from me. This had to be the hospital calling. But it could just as easily be the news that they had hired someone else, and I was out of the race. Just before I opened my phone, I let all the air out of my lungs expecting the worst.

"Hello, it's Mike from the hospital ... would you still be interested in a position with us?"
"Oh yes, absolutely!"
"Great, we would like to meet with you as soon as possible ... when can you come back out?"
"How about Monday?"
"Okay, Monday it is ... 10:00AM good?"
"10:00AM it is!"
"Good. You will be meeting with the IT director. You can go right to her office, or if you don't remember where it is you can come see me first"
"Great! Thank you so much. Have a good weekend"

Now I went from not having the job at all ... to almost certainly having it ... again. These up's and down's are killing me. I have to keep my hopes under control. But I was all ready interviewed by the whole family there. And the person I am meeting with next, is the IT director. This is looking like it will probably be a job offer. Me, her, and a table with slips of paper being passed back and forth. I may just be moving out to the country (to eat a lot of peaches).

Options

On the other hand, I may have a shot at a job that pays a boatload more than the hospital gig. I would be a "manager", and would get my own department to run. I don't know what my chances are at this job - but my friend Bonnie says "they're good".

I guess it's nice to have options. I can start the job at the hospital, and if I hate it I can hope that the other job pans out. If I like my job, and I still get offered the other one, I will get to decide if I want to try something new for considerably more money - or take the job that I like out in the sticks.

To be continued I guess.