Friends, let me tell you this – few things make a man more happy than landing a good job in a great (but expensive) city, especially after living the itinerant life on savings fumes for many months. As you may have guessed, it’s official – I’m fully employed! Well, 3/4 employed, but we’ll get to that. For the moment, it is enough to know that last week I was made an offer I couldn’t refuse by the Alameda County Waste Management Authority. Yes, folks I’ve hit the big time, but not without some scrambling up the heap.
Although somewhat hard to believe, I have been applying for jobs here in San Francisco for over a year. Shortly after my decision to leave VT, and starting with an office gig with the Kronos Quartet, I’ve been applying to select openings that seem suitable and exciting. Things seemed off to a good start when I orchestrated a real coup of an interview with Kronos while I was still living in Vermont! While that interview went very well – I was visiting SanFran in late Fall of 2003 to make sure I was happy with my decision to move – I didn’t get the job. Over the next few months, that interview and the kindly words of the interviewer kept my head up amidst nary a response from the other resumes I had begun to send out. Soon enough, though, the job search ground to a halt, postponed by the weak response to my intial and, in retrospect, verbosely juvenile cover letters, as well as my decision to take some extra time in transition.
Fast forward six months – after the madness in Central America and a roadtrip for the ages, I am back at the task of the job search. Setup in a converted garage office, armed only with my clunky desktop, keen intellect and hubristic optimism, cover letters start flowing once again. Blantant self-promotion in the most professional of manners sponsors linguistic brevity, loss of creative facial hair and contemplation of sacrificing my ideals. And finally the switchboard starts to light up. What begins as a trickle of responses becomes a veritable deluge (relative to the smallish number of resumes I sent out – stats to follow on that).
My first real windfall in the job market was a contract gig through the leading tech recruiter in San Francisco. It took them 3 weeks to find anything for me, but when they did, it happened fast. A very informal interview late one Wednesday afternoon (following, ironically, a tough, 8:00am first round panel interview for the job I would eventually accept) led to a Thursday morning work call. The work – PHP programming – was good but a little dry and somewhat chaotic. I suppose that was balanced out by the compensation and bragging rights to statements like “Yeah, I was working on U2.com today and…” Yup, it’s all true.
Despite the allure of working at a high-test design firm, my heart was elsewhere and the job interviews proceeded, one by one. By the time I got to my second call from ACWMA, I was convinced the job would be mine and was ready to drop the contract work. The second interview was more relaxed but still a panel and still very professional. I performed brilliantly, if I do say so myself, except for the part when they asked me to deconstruct four different promotional brochures for other departments. I fumbled my way through, though, and felt confident. So confident that I quit the contract job the next day, without even knowing if I had the Alemeda job! Is this the “faith” that everyone is talking about in our morally-charged times? Either that or I was possessed.
That Thursday was witness to an excruciating period of waiting and guessing and doubting. Despite being told that I would know about the job the next day, I did not get the call until Friday morning, at which point I gladly accepted a very gracious offer. At this point, you are probably ready for the details. The position is Program Support Specialist (II) for the Bay-Friendly Landscaping and Gardening programs of the aforementioned ACWMA. These programs were started 10 years ago to educate the residents of Alameda County about backyard sustainability in hopes of reducing the waste stream. Both have been extremely successful and popular, and, in the wake of such demand, I was hired to provide support (!) for the two program leads. The generalist nature of the position suits me well – media promotion, community outreach & volunteer coordination along with administrative tasks (web, print, data, filing, etc.) and possibly some teaching. All in all, the position is an excellent mix of my interests, ideology and skills and, being only 30 hours to start, will allow me to pursue some other opportunities on the side.
And so, with the acquisition of a full-time job, my transition to San Francisco is complete. I cannot be more thankful for what I’ve found here so far. One would think that now I could settle down to quiet, relaxed, ‘normal’ life… that’s what I thought, until the next bid thing came along – www.lunarbid.com. (sigh) No rest for the weary! Don’t worry, you’ll be hearing more about that venture soon enough and things will quiet down for me one of these days. I think.
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Filed under: The Grind
