This is going to be more Admin Trivia. You can indulge me, or you can skip this post. Whatever.
I have needed some time to chill a bit and to make sure things were actually going to proceed as planned — the past couple years have left me with serious trust issues.
I think I am not entirely out of the woods yet, because I still have to get through the next month and I don’t know what that’s going to look like, and I also don’t know how training is going to work out.
BUT.
Okay.
So, I had sort of been half-eyeballing this one job in Dublin (Ohio; named after an Irish city, but probably at least a third of its placenames are Scottish) for at least half a year, but had sort of dismissed it because I wasn’t sure I met the criteria. But here recently, they finally posted something on Indeed about an open interview event. One of my frustrations in job-hunting was that I kept not even getting to the interview process. If it wasn’t human beings deciding not to talk to me, it was AI bots ruling me out and no human involvement at all. It’s been an ordeal, to say the least. So the open interview was very welcome. I figured as long as I got to talk with a human being, maybe I would have a more fair shot.
So I show up last Thursday, and the woman interviewing me is named Rachel, which happens to be my middle name (spelled differently though). I’m a weirdo who notices coincidences so I’m already getting optimistic. And then we have the interview, and we actually kind of vibe a little. She mentions they’ve got three training classes coming up and tells me the dates, I actually have intelligent questions to ask at the end, etc., and then she tells me I’m supposed to hear something by Monday, or that’s how I remembered it later, anyhow.
So I get out of there and I’m driving off and it suddenly hits me that one of the start dates is 24 April. NO AM NOT FUCKING KIDDING. I had a good chuckle.
Anyway, so fast-forward to Monday and I haven’t heard shit all day. And then I got really low. I thought, “Fuck, am I just doomed to spin my wheels forever?” I mean the 4th, yesterday, was supposed to be my exit date from this homeless shelter, though my case worker extended me to Friday because things had “snuck up” on her. And it’s just gotten to feeling like dead end after dead end after dead end. What do you even do with that. I actually contemplated selling my car just to have a few thousand and my own place to sleep for like a month or so. Which would have been phenomenally stupid, but that’s how bad it got.
Okay. So yesterday I was out delivery-driving because I thought, shit, if I can’t extend past Friday and if I can’t find a shelter bed in Franklin County (I shelter in Delaware County), I need to be able to score a room. I cannot do the rest stops and the showering at Planet Fitness again. Just no. I could, but I really don’t want to. So drive it was.
And then the phone rings. I look down. Local number. Caller ID no help. Eh? Let it go to voice mail.
And then I get a Gmail notification. Eh? Stop at a light, look at my notifications…
By the time I got to a stopping place in a parking lot, I was wiping tears off my face.
Okay. Base pay $18 an hour, please sign this thing and do this other thing and send us your résumé and we’ll use that to determine your starting pay. Is May 8 good for you? The April 24 class is full up. Yes, says I, that’s fine. (ARE YOU KIDDING)
Then today I got the official offer letter. $21 an hour. I got my favored 1p to 10p shift (Monday to Friday, they’re closed on weekends) because I’m more an evening person anyway, and that’s good for another $1.50 an hour. Do the math.
I’m still pinching myself. Still absolutely sure something is going to go wrong.
Oh and going along with the coincidences, the start date is the day before my brother Doug’s birthday and we have never gotten along (he used to beat me up) so it was like, “hey, I’m gonna get your attention but NOT make it his day, sound good?” Life is so fucking weird.
I hate that it’s still more than a month away, but that’s also a good thing, especially if I’m allowed to stay here until I get paid, because I can get a wardrobe together.
I’m not out of the woods yet. But I think the trees are starting to thin out.
…..
In other news (unless you skipped this post), the more I think about my restructuring idea for this website, the more I like it. I’m not ready to go all-in yet, and very likely what I’ll do is sandbox it somewhere else and then upload it all here at once. BOOM, site’s changed. So you’ll know when it’s done. No problem.