Howdy folks, allow me to tell you a tale of personal good fortune. I don’t intend to brag at all, but I’m happy about this, but I also can’t stop feeling like I’m benefitting from more than my fair share of luck in slapping this shit together while so many others are suffering. I can explain!
I started working exactly a year ago for a civil engineering company running their recruiting. I didn’t have a manager title but I did the recruiting and a lot of other management level stuff like workforce planning etc. This was a good job with good health insurance that I was planning to stick around at for several years. It was also killing my soul.
Without getting into it, basically the people I worked for were not my vibe at all. I was in bizarro world. Anything I could say about the ridiculousness of the place, y’all would say was INSANE to put up with. But not going there.
Even with this aggravation I was shooting for sticking around for 3 years because:
- I’ve had too many short-term jobs and wanted/needed to stick around somewhere.
- No deductible health insurance.
- I had the opportunity to kick ass with those extra responsibilities, and I could hopefully work my way to a better title/money. But they were a good feather in my cap to be able to talk about.
- The employee stock ownership plan and company 401k matching contributions take 6 years to fully vest (yikes).
Then in March after a brief period of incompetent flailing in response to the earliest signs of the pandemic, they furloughed me while continuing to pay my kickass health insurance in full. They would supposedly claw back my would-be payroll deductions from my future pay whenever I eventually went back to work.
At least it wasn’t too long before the stimulus passed where I had to ruminate over WTF I would do for money, but we have savings and can get help from fam if needed. Then it was a good several more weeks before the unemployment money started flowing after bureaucratic hurdles, but we had plenty of cushion.
I waited a couple weeks before I started looking for new jobs, and applying in mass quantities, and I do this shit for a living I can bang through an application right quick, I kept my expectations very low. After several weeks of no responses other than canned rejection emails that were far inferior to my canned rejection emails, I noticed a familiar company name.
(oh and there’s also the part where I got a bunch of cheap used pro camera gear and started a youtube cooking channel but that’s it’s whole other thing nvm...)
This place is a federal contracting company that I had done a freelance recruiting thing for last year when I was doing 1099 shit before I took my current job. They offered a job to a guy I found them but he backed out of it for something else. The posting on Indeed said 3 days old but the company’s website said a posting date of Dec 2019. That was a whole other reality.
But I said fuck it, I have the direct contact info of the president who’s a friend of a friend and that’s how I did that freelance thing for them, and the HR director, so I emailed the president, “still looking for a recruiter?” He was, in fact, and then I heard from the HR director, fast forward to a few chats, video interview yesterday, and offer today.
Hoo boy! I got...
- 10 holidays like the feds
- 2x the PTO
- 2 days/week working from home when the world is eventually right side back up because it’s in fucking goddamn Tyson’s Corner, VA down the street from the last fed contracting company I worked for and the traffic is brutal driving home to far superior Rockville, MD. My current job is on the other end of Rockville from my house in a stress-free 17 minutes. Or it would be except my boss is a stickler about arrival times even though other depts aren’t whoopsie I’m not supposed to spill tea
- Director title that we never even discussed in the interview but I guess they liked what I had to say about the stuff beyond plain recruiting enough that their initial offer letter went straight to it.
- Health insurance has a $6k deductible for family but the company puts $4500 on an HSA debit card for you (premium is less than current job)
- A sizable raise
- Way chiller people instead of insanity and I’m already sorta friends with the president
- Current full WFH until at least September and generally no expectation of anyone coming to the office until the feds do that which hopefully no Trumpkin political appointee goes crazy on that one prettyplease
Oh and my wife is starting her new job as a contact tracer soon, which is paying more than she had been making doing massage therapy, but less than she’s currently making on unemployment (SORRY REPUBLICAN CONGRESSPEOPLE SHE IS YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE BROUGHT TO LIFE).
So...my household’s job situation just became DC as fuck, and being in the DC business is generally a good place to economically weather a crisis. We’re coming out fucking aces while the world burns, and our good luck has come essentially directly as a result of the world burning. We’re trying to convince ourselves we’re not terrible people for this. Mostly succeeding.
Phew.