The past five or six weeks have served as an experiment in living the life of a contractor. It sounds kind of cool– you set your own hours, work from home sometimes, see a lot of different people– but my experience has been a strain to say the least. Some days I’m driving to three different locations, and in Phoenix that’ s no joke. Coordinating use of the car with Dr. G requires several extra round trips and a lot of patience on his part. The other day he was at school for 13 hrs because our schedules didn’t overlap enough for him to come home before his evening class. The same thing will happen again this week. I used to be an excellent multi-tasker, but my long break put me out of practice and I find myself thinking about science stuff at the teaching place and creative writing stuff at the science place and so on, in a giant circle of misapplied mental energy. Maybe going from 5 hrs a week of work to 55 wasn’t so smart.
I’m looking forward to the end of this phase, when I’ve got just one or maybe two places to think about. I finally, finally got a decent job offer! When I told the places I’m working now that I was in the final phases of interviewing for a permanent job, they scrambled to see if they could put together an offer to keep me, resulting in week or so of existential stress as I weighed my various values (down time, creative time, family and social and church life, challenge, impact, change, discovery) to determine what would be the best fit. I couldn’t decide at all. It was up to God, I told Him. In the end only one place produced an offer worth taking. I’m going to call them Monday and accept, barring any revelations or earth-shaking happenings in the middle of the night. My first day will be March 1st.
This blog is not really a good place to talk about work stuff, but I’ll tell you a bit anyway. I’ll be working on a small team to redesign a bunch of curriculum and certification programs so they fit better with the growing high-tech industry in and around Phoenix. High-tech stuff! That’s what my dad does. Education stuff! That’s what my mom does. (Cue twilight zone music here). My resume will continue to look like it belongs to five or six people rather than just one. Everyone who looks at it says, “Your degree is in what? Creative Writing?” I’m interested in adult education and helping people get straight into good jobs. I haven’t tried that angle before. The cool thing about getting offered this position is that it came out of failing to get a different job, which paid less and was less interesting. “I hope you’ll keep me in mind for other openings,” I said to the people. And they did.
