Maybe He Should Organize a "Chippendales Night" at the Local Pub

Finbar isn’t going to take the North Carolina job, even if they offer it to him. I feel guiltily relieved by that, because it was never my dream to live in rural North Carolina and I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the employment prospects for myself there. After visiting the company and getting a taste of their operation, philosophy and the working environment, he’s thinking that the company is too unstable financially (they have all their eggs in one basket that could—and probably will be—upset by events in the Middle East) to justify a move to an unfamiliar area with no support. He also thought that there was little “team spirit” for lack of a better term, making him uneasy with the prospect of entering a new industry and a new living area with co-workers unwilling to help each other out.

It’s difficult to watch someone who you love go through an extended period of unemployment. The frustrations and insults to your ego are nearly incessant when you find yourself rejected again and again over a period of weeks or months. How can you not start to take it personally when you essentially hear over and over again: you’re not good enough to work for us?

It’s scary, too. If someone who has not one, but two degrees, both with honors, and has worked at more than one Fortune 500 company over the course of his career, can’t get a job despite months of intensive searching, what’s to say that it can’t happen to me or to someone else I love? He follows all the advice you usually see in the employment columns. He treats the job search as his job, getting up early every morning and sitting at his desk by 8:00 a.m. He keeps meticulous records, follows up on any leads that he gets, and sends thank-you notes to the interviewers. He has cast his net fairly wide, too, not limiting himself to just this city or to jobs in his specific field of interest. Despite a fairly wide geographic area (he’s willing to consider just about anything in the East, Texas, Arizona and large parts of the Midwest, so long as it’s within shouting distance of an urban area—that part is so that I’ll have a chance of finding a job there when I finish law school). Just about the only thing he’s ruled out is the West Coast, which is more of a quality of life issue than anything else. We’d like to be able to pay down my student loans and get a foothold on house ownership—at 30-something, it’s time to start putting down roots. Jobwise, he’s looking at not only research, but also technical sales and techwriting jobs, so it’s not like he’s limiting his options there.

He’s currently back in The City of Light for a four week “job interview”. Which is very odd, if you ask me. The company did not want to interview him. Instead, after reviewing his resume, they asked him to come work for them for four weeks. If they like him, they will make him some kind of unspecified offer for more permanent employment. Personally (and maybe I’m just a horrible cynic), I think it’s more a case of they have a job that they think will take about four weeks and they don’t want to pay a temp agency. We’re both looking at this as a four week temp job. If something better comes of it, great. If not, no big deal—four weeks of work is better than no weeks of work. Plus it places his unemployment on hold, which is a bonus.

I keep telling him that he should get his own blog to write down the things that happen in job interviews. Truth is definitely stranger than fiction in this area. From the company that invited him to an interview more than 1,000 miles away and refused to fly him in, to the company that expected him to stay in the company trailer on the owner’s ranch more than 100 miles from Houston (when he arrived, he found an armadillo on the doorstep and dusty bare light bulbs in the ceiling among other... rusticness), to the company that asked him for an interview in one department, then sent him to three different departments until he ended up interviewing for a completely different position that he wasn’t qualified for and didn’t want (and the final guy interviewing him yelled at him for “applying” for that job when he didn’t have the right experience—Finbar was so shell-shocked by that point that he didn’t even know what to say)—the stories are as endless as they are depressing. Sometimes I wonder how these people keep their jobs.

And so here we are, exactly where we’ve been for months now: no job, no real prospects for a job, no money coming in, no idea where he’ll be in six months. The problem with all of this is that it’s not just about him and his job. I need to know where I’ll be taking the bar pretty soon. And I’m here to tell you that I have no intention of taking the bar more than once. Do I go ahead and take it here? Or in the state I came from? Or in some other, third party state where neither of us has ties currently but where we think both of us might possibly find employment? It makes me slightly ill thinking about this. How do other people manage this? Are there other couples with professional careers in different fields that can make something like this work without one of the couple essentially giving up their career? We don’t have or want children, so that should theoretically make it easier, but so far, I don’t see any real advantage to it. Neither of us minds moving to an area away from our families (and in fact, neither of us currently lives in an area where we have family), but at the same time, it gets harder and harder to uproot yourself, move your whole life, get to know a new city with new neighborhoods and new culture, make new friends, etc. But then again, maybe it’s getting harder because I’ve done it so many times. And maybe it’s just because everything else in my life seems so unsettled, so I’m looking to sort of “hang my hat” on some small hook of stability. I’ve always been a big proponent of the idea that you have to live somewhere where you have no ties at least once in your life to learn how to build those ties, to find out who you are when you don’t have the ready-made background you find with your family or with lifelong friends. That’s how you grow as a person. And it’s good to leave your comfort zone every so often.

At any rate, I’ll be here in Our Fair City for at least another year and a half. Who knows what happens then?

“The ship in a harbor is safe, but ships are made for sailing.” (no idea who actually said this, but I’ve seen it attributed to Mark Twain.)