Lose your head hat, perhaps hurry

I got a call today... from HR.
Will you take the job?
Will you come to work tomorrow? Full-time.
No you can't bring your kids.

A painful foil to.... I got the card yesterday.


Love from my three year old. [Insert intense mother blubbering.]

Facts are:
- We could use a bit of dough.
- I always thought I would be going back; so it seems best to either a.) return or b.) return and wrap things up. Fading away seems not best.
- We really have no childcare and the options in Vancouver are crazzie last minute hire nanny or crap a horseshoe or two on some waitlist somewhere. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
- I will never get another job again. I mean I can't even remember the HTML for bulleted list!

I will call back tomorrow and tell them 'I'll take it'. It will be a test and a passage. So be it. We will find a way, or not, as need be. But tonight all I can think is I waited for MY job for 5 months and now it is all hurry up, you! Anybody ever asked for a six week window on starting a position? I want to give them that much of the finger.

I'll leave it at that tonight. That and more mother blubbering.

to be continued

Earnings

I have been looking for work for a couple months in earnest. So far a few bites but nothing to write home about

Do I care?

You know I don't know. I sit down to write applications and I am less than enthused. Now if someone offered me a job on a silver platter tomorrow I know I would polish up and shave all over and present myself bright-eyed and bushy tailed. Hell if my old job came calling -- and they do call about every two weeks to say how much they miss me which is nice. If my old job came calling I would leap into action and leave the Mother-Woman behind. But I like being Mother-Woman full time. At this point I struggle to get excited about telling someone how effective and dynamic and effing visionary I am as an employee. Let's face it I have babies to hold so their parents can eat with two hands. I have an imp addiction to feed with snotty nosed kisses. In front of me stretches at least one to two years of frenetic juggling of lives among horrid childcare choices if I work.

There are lots of reasons to stay away from the workplace.

At the same time I am -- as the cliche goes -- a passionate worker. I have loved each and every great library where I have worked. Surely there could be another love out there for me?

I don't know.

It will likely be harder to find work than I think. Over and above the apparent downsizing of a lot of professional staff complements my expertise seems to have gone quite stale. I am not an entirely conventional librarian. I am system-administrator/cataloguer at heart with a generous dose of hyper-vibrant training-oriented manager. The populations I run in somewhat mimic those of the spotted owl. Of late I have fully realized that as a technical specialist it is do or die time. Due to a couple little things like the collapse of conventional library software systems and the rise of thoughtful little movements like open source, oh yes and this thing called the internet if I don't work now I might as well scrub my resume clean and start all over. Librarians have to work hard to market themselves as relevant in the face of technological change these days, unemployed librarian/system administrator/cataloguers even more so.

Funny but for everything we might tell ourselves about our rights for in/out to our careers in practical terms (I don't think this is just me) "Polly put the kettle on!" I must be an idiot but I have only recently fully realized/come to terms with the fact that working only one of the past four years has had an affect on my career. Likely it was only this week that I have achieved any measure of self-acceptance that I just am not as serious about work as I used to be. Call it Mo-Wo the worker 2.0.

I am kicking myself a bit this is something I could have planned for if I had thought it through at all. Hindsight is for assholes I know, but still. Of course I could have avoided much of this by just keeping my old job but from where I am I now have quite a profound understanding that I wouldn't have avoided all of it. Work is work, it is a world. There isn't a tap I can just turn off and on. There was no pause button.

ps... thanks again to my husband for going to work everyday and busting his butt that I might even have this navel gazing exercise. I am one lucky duck.

Finally.. like the new tag line?