Nine Months, Without Labor

I'd pretty much emotionally recovered from the Super Bowl by the time I woke up today. As emotionally invested as I was in the game, it didn't take me long to recover. Perhaps it's because football isn't my number one sport. I've been bummed out longer because of regular season Suns losses, especially ones against the Spurs. Not lately though; this year's Suns team is a mess. The victory tonight was good, but I wish we could have just won by two, and then retroactively applied those other 46 points to other losses. Why didn't they have this closed door meeting before the Spurs game the other night?

Tuesday marks a special anniversary, my 9th month of unemployment. I certainly never expected it to last this long. I've had my moments over the past couple months where I regretted turning down the offer to stay with my former company, but I'm absolutely positive now it was the right thing to do. They just announced today they're laying off another 7000 employees, including most if not all of the San Francisco office. I feel awful for my former boss, who sold her house and moved down there for her new job around Thanksgiving time. She was happy to move to California, but now, at this expense, I wonder if she still thinks it's worth it. Talked with a former co-worker about it today, no word yet if the rest of the Seattle employees who stuck around are affected, but my former boss's boss seems to think that they will. Talk about a clusterfuck of emotions in the past 12 months!

Anyways, given all that, I definitely made the right move. I've now had 9 months of experience of being on the market. As each day passes, there's potentially more and more competition for the declining number of jobs I'm seeing, many of those possibly more experienced than I am. But unlike them, I've honed in my interviewing and networking skills, and I'll have a chance to put those to the test Tuesday with my first in person interview in almost 3 months.

Talking about how good this opportunity is seems irrelevant; any job at this point is a good opportunity. With that said, this job has everything I had in mind when I was being more selective about my job search over the summer. It's funny to think that when I was first laid off, I limited my job search to jobs downtown so I didn't have to drive again. I've definitely broadened my search since then, and all I can do is hope that being that selective is some miraculous way of being available for a better opening now. Positive thinking, you know?

I actually had more to write about tonight, thought about the economy and this whole sense of the sky falling and what not, but I caught that last sentence I wrote and realized that's where I need to end this. I've got about 45 more minutes in me before I head to bed, and it's time to put that energy toward preparing for my interview. Chances like this are few and far between these days. Hopefully all of you are finding ways to stay positive as well.