Say Goodnight Gracie....

There are many unforgettable closings and goodbyes that are etched in our memories from decades ago. George Burns' "Say Goodnight Gracie", Carol Burnett's ear tug at the end of each show, and who could forget the series finale of the Newhart show, when Bob wakes up next to Emily, (lusty low-voiced Suzanne Pleshette from "The Bob Newhart Show") and tells her he had the strangest dream...he was an inkeeper in Vermont, with a cast of crazy characters, including Larry, his brother Darrell, and his other brother Darrell.

Since the day I started this blog, November 3, 2008, I have dreamed of this, my final blog entry, and I don't need to tell you what that means:

The nightmare is over!!!!


I've been trying to figure out how I could summarize this moment for you that would be hilarious and unlike anything I have written before.

I came up short.

You see, I've spent almost 3 months documenting this "journey" as a way to release some stress and to keep you AND me laughing.

And it worked.

And here I am, at the end of this journey. You would think that this would be the entry I had prepared WAY in advance. It should have been the FIRST one I wrote. Of course, that would've been bad karma probably, or as I like to call it, bad "ju ju".

While I have not run out of material, I feel like cutting to the chase. (If you need me to make you laugh in the future, just call, we'll have coffee!)

Here it is, "by the numbers"...
(and for those of you who got our '08 Christmas letter, yes, "by the numbers" is stolen from there, and if you didn't get our Christmas letter, I'm sorry, I'm just not that into you...) ;-)

~Days since my notification of downsizing - 142

~# of weeks in job search - 12

~Hours spent in job search activities - 263

~Number of networking contacts I made - 68

~Number of contacts with three eyes and claws - 1

~Number of jobs I applied to - 53

~Number of companies I actually got an interview with - 4

(actually, make that three, Apex Printing doesn't count...)

~Ounces of coffee consumed and home and out and about - 7,128

~Conversations with God - I lost count

~Number of interviews with the ONE company that finally had the brains to snag me, (oooh, sorry, my ego flexing has been on hold....not anymore!) and the ONE company that would be at the very TOP of my list to work for:

3.5 - (That last one was a "technicality", hence the .5...)

The company that believes in me as much as I believed in myself (most days!):

LifeTime Fitness

My title:

Manager of Member Relations

My life:

Changed forever

My worries:

Over

My gratitude:

Immeasurable

My desire for coffee:

Still off the charts

My dream job?

Yes (until my 24 employees start crabbing at me, but then I'll just describe the last 142 days to them and then they'll shut the hell up...)

Do I think getting laid off is the best thing that could've happened to me?

Last Thursday...no. Friday...where is the "Hell Yes!" button?

My commute:

14 miles to the LifeTime Corporate Headquarters in Chanhassen MN

My passion for health, fitness and wellness:

As enormous as my passion for finding a job

Was it a rollercoaster ride?

OMG YES!!!

LifeTime and me?

The perfect "fit".

My days of grinding the beans:

Over

Do I care?

Hell no

Did I ever get those windows washed?

Dang...

Feel good inside?

Yes. I do.

:-)

"Sometimes through the winds of change we find our true direction..."

"Things don't go wrong and break your heart so you can become bitter and give up. They happen to break you down and build you up so you can be all that you were intended to be"

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Bank...

There is a fine line between persistence and being a pain in the ass. I was walking that line the last few months on a job I had been feverishly following. It was for a bank branch manager job RIGHT HERE in Shakopee USA! (And it's a little known fact that Shakopee MN truly IS its only namesake in America).

How much better could it get? Working right down the street? The ability to come home for lunch or a quick snooze? Heaven.

So when I saw this job posted back in October, I knew I had to go for it. I applied, and of course, heard nothing. This is not surprising to me, because in job search, it is just assumed that whenever you apply to a job on-line, expect to hear nothing. Sound frustrating?

Oh, it is.

The job kept showing up on various job boards on the Internet. One of them listed some poor guy's NAME, and I to this day don't know if that was a mistake or really meant to be. A name? Jackpot.

Time to go into stalker mode.

So I stalked the guy down, coming across his e-mail address by doing a little sleuthing, and quickly sent my resume and cover letter directly to him. "That'll do the trick!" I thought.

I thought wrong.

His name could have easily been "Black Hole". Frustrating? Yes. (That is now MY middle name).

AGAIN the job appears at the end of December. What the???!!!! So I go to the company website where I applied the first time, and it said "You have already applied for this job, would you like to apply again??"

If there had been a "Hell Yes" button, I would have pushed it.

So on Friday, January 1, I applied for the second time. On Monday, January 5th, Mr. "Black Hole" called me up.

Uh oh. He's going to tell me to leave him the hell alone already. I was ready for his shots at me. After all, I likely had crossed that fine line.

With hesitance in his voice he proceeded to ask me some basics, and by the end of our 10 minutes, he had me coming in for a face to face interview later that week.

Persistence is not futile.

So the interview goes great and he said he would get back to me within 5 days. 5 days came and went so I gave old Nick a call.

A woman's voice: "You've reached the voicemail of Nick ____________. Nick is no longer with the company. Please press 0 for another member of the bank human resources department".

Again, had there been a HELL ZERO button I would've pushed it.

It was the episode of Cheers where Rebecca finally makes it to the head cheeses office, tells her all the reasons he should hire her, he's about to give her a job, and WHAM, the Feds rush in and arrest him for tax evasion.

And thus, in a flash, Nick is gone, and I later learned my dream job so close to home has been put on hold.

Not knowing the sequence of events that led to the demise of Nick, but knowing his quick departure was likely not on his own terms, what I do want to know now is:

Is Nick's job available????

;-)

Grab a Cup of Coffee and Read On...

If you don’t like coffee and are unemployed, you are, well... screwed.

And likely tired I surmise.

I love getting jacked up on coffee. The coffeemaker in my house is far and wide my most used appliance. Way more than the hair dryer, and more than the vacuum? Please. Last time I vacuumed thoroughly I was still employed. Sometimes when I get up on a Saturday to go have coffee with my posse, I have “coffee on the way to coffee”. I have not yet succumbed to eating the grounds straight from the bag, but don’t think I haven’t pondered if they’d taste good sprinkled in some vanilla yogurt. I have.

That I am unemployed and like coffee is a good thing. You see, for a job seeker, coffee is not just a drink; it’s a “concept”. It’s an “event”. If you ever find yourself in the unfortunate situation I am in, you will be asked out for coffee. A LOT. We don’t have jobs. Going out for a beer "after work” is not an option. If we smoked I suppose we could huddle outside some random office building somewhere while our _____'s get frostbitten (you fill in the blank), all the name of a good nicotine fix.

I’ll stick to my caffeine addiction thanks.

It will start something like this: A fellow job seeker will approach you and say, “Wanna grab a quick cup of coffee?” It’s like code for “I need to dump on you I’m having a bad day.” But before I get into that, let’s break down that initial question. First, “grabbing” a cup of coffee. Who grabs a blistering hot cup of anything? Wouldn’t the act of grabbing lead one to believe that it was done quickly and with force? Please. I never GRAB coffee. I do move toward it quickly and with tremendous anticipation, yet I can seemingly still never reach Mr. Coffee fast enough. When I do get a job, I’m getting a moving walkway ala MSP International installed in my kitchen to get me there faster.

So “grabbing” with my luck would likely involve 3rd degree burns, skin and tissue graphs, (hey, can they take that from my a**?) and THEN how would I drink my coffee??? Not worth it. The only coffee physically able of being grabbed in my eyes is the cup I left in the car that is now frozen because it hasn’t been above 15 degrees in months.

The next part of the whole deal that is whacked is the “quick” part the equation. Again, the act of DRINKING 200 degree liquid is anything but quick. And in the concept of time, a “quick” cup of coffee with a fellow job seeker is quite the opposite. It is NEVER quick. Isn't the usual "coffee break" say, 15 minutes? Not so here. A “quick” cup of coffee for me these days is a freaking 3 hour event.

And what if you don’t like coffee? Get a hot chocolate. But from what I hear, coffee house hot chocolate is like sipping Hershey's syrup straight from the bottle. In theory that sounds pretty lip smacking, but that’s because if you ask me which I love more, chocolate or my kids, I’d have to ponder that for awhile… In reality though, sipping on chocolate syrup might be a little vulgar, so order a coffee and fake it is my advice.

So let’s move on to the “whys” of this event we call Coffee. As I mentioned, asking or being asked to “grab” a cup of joe with your fellow job seeker falls into one of three reasons: a) I haven’t been out of the house in 3 days so would you PLEASE be so kind as to entertain me before they haul me off to an institution b) I’m at the bottom of my roller coaster ride today and could you kindly bring some amusement to my life, or c) a combo of both a and b, which is usually the case. Oh, and with any luck, we’ll talk about our latest successes in the world of job search.

You might ask a prospective employer for a “quick cup of coffee” if you have arranged a networking meeting with them, but if you’re like me, you’re going to make it as painless for them as possible. (And as I've stated, coffee can be chock full of physical pain...) You’re going to MapQuest their office, get in, get your message across, and GET OUT. While they were nice enough to agree to a meeting, you still don't want to waste their time, (and in the case of a networking meeting I had last week, she DID have 3 eyes and claws.) Get out indeed! Yikes!

Next we get to the “where’s” of the event. Since we are unemployed, of COURSE we are budget conscious. This however does NOT mean we hang out at the SA next to the hot dog roller sippin’ our joe. “Hey cashier lady, need another pot of Shockwave over here!!!”

While McDonalds does brew a good cup of java, it is a not gathering spot we unemployed liken to either. Somehow sitting in the plastic booths next to the big, freaky, creepy plastic Ronald McDonald is just too traumatic in these tough economic times.

So, despite our frugality, we pilgrimage to the “elite” of the coffee slinging houses, “grabbing" our "quick" cup at (if I’m doing the inviting) Caribou, or sometimes, the S word…

We feel so special sitting on real furniture, surrounded by moose, the waft of the beans filling our noses. We order our poison, in its logoed cup and cardboard sleeve. The stir sticks made of wood, not plastic. Not a hot dog or polish sausage in sight. The whole set up feeling so special I want to take my cup home and hold on to the memory.

And why is it those cups have some sort of paralyzing effect on people?? My former boss buys hot tea from the S word every morning JUST because the cup “looks cool”. Like the paparazzi are going to come and hound him because he is being seen with a paper cup wrapped in cardboard? $2.50 a day for that? And he runs a million+ budget? No wonder I don’t have a job.

Anyway, so there we sit. My fellow job seeker and I. We’re all set.

Holy Crap! Now what???

We gossip, we vent, we talk of our victories. There is no grabbing. Nothing is quick.

I’ve had more coffee in the last two months than I would care to admit. Funny, I still manage to sleep 9 hrs a night. Yeah me!

I’ve drank coffee in Roseville, Woodbury, South St Paul (and I do miss that just killed cattle smell…), Minneapolis, Golden Valley, Bloomington, and Shakopee, and a few more places in between. The coffee all tasted the same, and I’m happy to report, it all tasted good.

However, I surmise that the best coffee I’m ever going to taste is the coffee I pick up soon, on my way to work.

;-)

A New Year, New Hope

My high school classmate who died of breast cancer in August 08 always remarked on her Caringbridge site that if she didn't post for awhile, it was because she never had good news, it was always bad bad bad news about her health and she didn't feel like talking about it.

Thus is the case here for the past few weeks. I haven't had much to say, and I really didn't want to talk about it. I went on hiatus for the holidays, and I loved it. I loved not worrying about looking for a job, attending networking meetings, applying on-line, blah blah blah.

I loved not talking about "it". (I didn't love that Leah has turned into a whiny monster right before my eyes, but that's a different story...)

I'm bored with the whole unemployed thing. I'm sick of it. I want to go back to work. I wanted a job for Christmas but alas, it was not meant to be. I want some company to believe in me again, but until then, I will have to continue to believe in myself.

A new year, and with that comes new hope for me and all my fellow job seekers.

Time again to get down to business. And as the wind fell out of my sails, two e-mails this morning from people I talked with weeks ago, with offers for informational meetings with them.

Then, the phone rang. An interview. (and this time, for a job I actually applied for....)

Thank you God. 2009 is here with a vengeance.

;-)

PS - Humor returns next post