Stoopid Corporate America

Those of you who believe in "everything happens for a reason", would you please line up for your richly-deserved beating?

After weeks of anticipation and constant reassurances that yes, they still wanted to interview me, Best Job Ever just evaporated. Apparently there was another position, a more important one, that just opened up in New York, and they've decided to direct their energies toward filling that position. (Which sounds TOTALLY fishy to me--what, they can only fill one position at a time???) As the recruiter said (between apologies)--"When something's on the front burner, they'll put all their time into it, but once it's put on the back burner...." Also, "Would you maybe be interested in the New York position?" he asked. Which...okay, yeah, I thought about it for a second, but...no. New York is not one of those places I ever wanted to live. The flatlands of Wisconsin, in a farmhouse miles away from the nearest neighbors? Sure. But not New York.

I simply could not be more disappointed. And granted, I still do have one local possibility, for which I interview on Thursday morning--the one that I thought might be a wee bit over my head--but I really, REALLY had my heart set on this job. It's not 100% for sure that the job isn't being filled--I'm supposed to call the recruiter back a week from today for the final verdict--but it's not looking good.

I'm starting to wonder if all these near-misses and almost-had-its are meant to send me some kind of message. I've known for a while that I don't want to do tech support for the rest of my life. I want to do a bunch of small things--write, run my bakery, eventually open up a little coffee shop somewhere--but none of those will pay the bills immediately, and most of them require money to start up. And right now, I need MORE money, not less. It's not that I'm living a wildly profligate lifestyle--about the only thing we could cut out of the budget would be the extravagant number of cable channels--but the house costs a lot to keep running. And this house, expensive and crappy though it is, is maybe the only thing I can point to in my life right now and say "This was not a mistake." I know I made the right decision, but I can't get it to where I want it to be, where I can show it to other people and have them agree that it wasn't a mistake. And I've been counting on getting a better job to put me in a position where I CAN fix up the house...but now I'm wondering if maybe there's not something else I'm supposed to be doing.

Then I think, what a lot of superstitious hoo-hah. I need a job, I need money, I need to put my nose to the grindstone and suck it up and just do what needs to be done, and all these pipe-dreams aren't going to pay for a new roof. (Although--the HUD inspector called today, and he's coming out Saturday to take a look at just how badly I got rooked on this place, so maybe the roof will get paid for somehow...)

I'm just really, really disappointed about this job. I really thought I had it.