The more time I spend around people, the more I like my dogs. There are plenty of people I like well enough, but after a day at the office, there’s nothing better than coming home to these two. They’re not going to want to talk or ask questions. They’re not going to need a PowerPoint on short notice. And they’re not going to call an impromptu meeting. They’re mostly going to be happy with the same dinner they’ve had every day for two years, hanging out on the patio, and an occasional scratch behind the ears. Dogs are decidedly uncomplicated like that. When the world where you spend eight hours a day is doing its level best to go sailing off the rails, they’re an amazing bit of dependable normalcy… and possibly the last bulwark between me and bludgeoning people into a coma with a three hole punch.
Category Archives: Life
Absolutely average…
The weekend has been absolutely average in every way. Nothing too good, nothing too bad… just humming along to the rhythm set by every weekend in recent memory. Maybe I should actually make an effort to go do things here in town, but I’m not sure I want to invest that kind of time and energy into anything that I’m making alot of effort to leave behind in something approximating the near future. Of course since we’re talking about the government here, the “near” future can safely be considered 6 months to 2 years. After that, I’ll keep myself entertained by figuring out what the new “average” looks like. Until then, though, it seems I need to find something to keep myself occupied. Maybe it’s time to reconsider that Xbox… lots of distraction without the pesky need for unnecessary interaction.
All resonable offers…
I want to write about anything other than the same old topics. I’m feeling more an more like a broken record and that doesn’t make good blogging. Cathartic for me, yes. Good blogging, no. Now and then I seem to hit these obsessive points (big surprise, right?) when everything I do and think about is focused like a laser on one thing, one goal. Focus is a good thing. Pouring endlessly over job announcements, making daily happy to glad changes to the ol’ resume, and preemptive house hunting only get you so far and seem to be a leading cause of sleep deprivation and stomach churn. That kind of focus feels, at least at the moment, less than good. The real problem of putting maximum effort into chasing one thing is that it doesn’t leave much time, inclination or energy for doing anything else. That seems to be the tradeoff. At some point the law of large numbers has to kick one in for the score, right? I’m ready to get to whatever’s next and all reasonable offers will be considered.
Fire two…
Cumberland job announcement #2 closes in about an hour and then it’s a restart on the waiting game. It’s been a week and a half since the first job announcement closed and I’m increasingly anxious to see if I’ll manage to make the cut for the interview round. If I miss the cut for the first one, making it for the second is extremely unlikely given that the latter is the higher graded of the two. If yes, I want to get started on the pre-interview prep. I’ve been out of that world for a couple of years and I’ll need to get current on the fly. That shouldn’t be a problem.
There are always other possibilities, of course, but I want to rule these in or out before getting too committed anywhere else. So for tonight the resume is spruced up and fired off into the interwebs in the hopes that a nice selecting official will find it irresistible. Let’s see if we can get this done, shall we?
Closing time…
I think it’s safe to say that I’m serious about being ready to move on to the next job, but in the same breath, I’m probably more concerned about geography than I am by pay at this point. That’s been a bit of an interesting point of self discovery I made over the last year or two. If the desire for more money was the driving factor that brought me to Memphis, it’s the desire for the right geography that has sent me out on the search for the next great thing and, surprisingly for me at least, pay has taken a back seat this time around. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t consider something out beyond MD-VA-DC, but it would call for a pretty exceptional set of circumstances.
The job announcement for the first of two jobs I’m applying for in Cumberland closes in a few hours. In the parlance of the federal job seeker, that basically means that at some point in the next few weeks someone in an HR department is going to put together a “best qualified” list and send it along to whoever is doing the hiring. Then the person doing the hiring will take a week or two to rack and stack the list and make a decision about who gets an interview and who doesn’t. And then someone will take another week to schedule interviews. After the interviews, hopefully, there will be a decision made about which of the applicants to select and then the name of the selectee will be sent back to HR to make a formal offer. At any point up until the offer is made by HR, the entire process can be cancelled for almost any reason. That’s a roundabout way of saying that closing time is really just the beginning and as an applicant, it’s the only time in the process when you know there’s a hard and fast date when something is going to happen. After closing time, it’s all about waiting, and wondering, and playing what if, especially if your resume is deemed “good enough” to make the first cut and be sent to the person doing the hiring.
Waiting for things to happen, as we all know, isn’t my strong point. But it’s what I’m going to do. While I doing my level best to keep my head down. And avoid any unnecessary contact between me those who seem bent on driving me round the bend at every possibly opportunity… But I digress. Or more precisely, I wait – and you wait with me. Part of me wonders if I should be blogging this at all. Will you still respect me in the morning if I can’t figure out a way to make this happen? In a blog that focuses largely on what has annoyed me on any given day, this whole discussion feels a little extra personal, I guess. The only promise I’ve ever made here is to always write about whatever happens to be in my head… and as you can see, this is occupying alot of time on the old brainpan these days.
As much as I want to be hopeful that this will come together, I’m trying to mentally prepare and protect myself from how much I’ll hate it if this gets jacked up at the last minute… or if it doesn’t even make it to the last minute. As much as I’m trying not to let myself go down the road of “what if” it’s proving to be more of a challenge than I anticipated. Even after ten years on the road and half a dozen cities, I guess it’s easy to see yourself home when the opportunity is tantalizingly close.
And the plot thickens…
If pondering a voluntary reduction in grade in order to make an escape plan work might be described as an academic exercise, finding a position that would allow you to laterally transfer to the desired geographic location without loss of grade or pay could be described as mana from heaven. Of course the gulf between finding and actually being hired for said job is something akin to believing there’s a Loch Ness Monster and actually catching it with a fly rod. Sure, it’s theoretically possible, but pretty damned unlikely.
I know I’m beyond qualified, but I also know that doesn’t necessarily mean much in the selection process. And as much as I like to think I should be able to walk into this as a gimmie, I feel like I’m in the fight of my life… for a job I didn’t even know I wanted until I saw it announced. The kicker now is to try not getting too invested in the process; to treat it like any other resume I’ve got floating around out there. It’s easy to walk away from most notices that “you were not referred because you were not among the most qualified applicants.” Like it or not, I’m invested in this one and missing out on it would be a heartbreaker.
So now we wait…
How you know it’s that bad…
One of the worst kept secrets around is that I’m ready to move on. Other than to a few close friends and family I’ve never said it outright, but I suspect it’s more than obvious to anyone paying any attention at all. Memphis was never a place I planned on staying for a great length of time, but having the happy luck to fall in with a good team and a collapsing housing market made my three-and-out plan all but unworkable. I’d mostly made my peace with that. Or at least I thought I had.
The last year has proven to be more challenging professionally than I ever expected. And I’m not using “challenging” here in any of its quasi-positive connotation. The truth is, the last year has mostly sucked, but I didn’t know exactly how much it sucked until this morning when I found a federal job announcement in my career field for a position near my home town. I seriously considered it for way, way longer than I should have if my head were in the right place. I say that because although geographically desirable (to me at least), the job would have been a two-grade demotion, loss of $15,000 a year in pay, and I’d have to pay to get myself and all my stuff from here to there.
But I still though long and hard about it. And not in that wistful Norman Rockwell way. I’m talking about in that running financials and contemplating living in your parent’s basement for a year or two kind of way. You know it’s bad when voluntarily living in the basement to get away from what you’re doing now and for less money doesn’t seem all that bad by comparison. Yeah, I know I should be thankful to have a job and intellectually, I am. Emotionally, though, I’m spent… and it’s showing.
If anyone in Western Maryland sees me working weekends to make extra scratch in a couple of weeks, at least they’ll know why.
Getting by…
Yeah, I’ve been quiet lately. Fact is, I haven’t really had all that much to say. Like I’ve said before, the best blogging comes from being annoyed. That there isn’t more content being added is probably a good thing.
Work has been slightly less obnoxious lately and making the decision to mostly quit watching the major news networks has probably greatly added to my new found sanity. Since I only control one of those two inputs, I’m expecting that to change at any moment. I’m learning to accept that you can old keep stupid at bay for so long. After that, all bets are off and the best you can hope for is mitigation.
For the moment, I’ll just accept that things aren’t so bad… Ask me how that’s working out tomorrow morning, though.
Being Sherman…
During the Civil War, one of the greatest partnerships in American military history was forged here along the muddy waters of the Mississippi. The senior partner would become commander of the Army of the Potomac and bring Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to its knees in a grinding war of attrition, while the junior partner marched his battle hardened western armies south to Atlanta and on to the sea, making the Old South howl.
From camp near Memphis on March 10, 1864 and just after Grant was called to Washington and promoted to command all Federal forces, his old friend Sherman sent a memo of congratulations that read, in part, “…You go into battle without hesitation… no doubts, no reserve; and I tell you that it was this that made us act with confidence. I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come – if alive.”
If you’re very lucky, you’ll find such a colleague and friend once in a career. If you’re even luckier, you get your chance at being Sherman.
Off the road…
There are any number of great and good aspects of traveling, not the least of witch is ending up back at the place where all your stuff stays (and where you have sole dominion over the air conditioning and your schedule). Going home is always bittersweet and leaving tends to bring out more melancholy in me that usual. I’ve lived somewhere other than “home” for the better part of the last decade and despite that, I still think of it as exactly that; home. In a different time and place, maybe I’d go back, but every trip reminds me just how much I have changed (no matter all my protestations to the contrary) and how much the mountains haven’t. I may be from them, but I’m not of them any more. At the first opportunity, I went downstate and stayed… and then logged a couple of hundred thousand miles after that. When I left I swore I’d never be nostalgic for the deep quiet of the woods or the long whistle of a coal train rolling through a mining town. On a purely objective level, there’s no reason to think of home as a place I’ll ever live again. On an emotional level, though, well, that’s another thing altogether.
I’m not quite foolish enough to believe that I can go home again. I’ve priced myself out of that market and since a guy’s got to work it’s nothing more than a happy thought. Even if it were possible, I can think of dozens of reasons it wouldn’t be a good idea. Maybe someday when I invent the equivalent of sliced bread or get around to writing my great misanthropic diatribe. When that happens, of course, home would be fighting a strong desire to go somewhere with palm trees and a rum economy. Until then, I suppose it’s enough that I have promises to keep… and miles to go before I sleep.
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