The Progress: In which persistence finally pays off

Friday began with a bit of bad news when I received an email informing me that the SEO Trainee position I was to be interviewing for on Monday had been filled. Sure, I could still interview on Monday if I wanted because there was the real possibility that another position could open within the next few weeks if the company landed the couple big bids it had going on.

I was reading the email on my cell phone at my current job while preparing for an afternoon function in which overly fussy Austin-area businesswomen were going to be getting a rather cheap lunch and talking about more efficient ways to use their Twitter and Facebook accounts (or something like that ... maybe I just heard both mentioned several times because, well, they were women and that's seemingly all they ever talk about anymore). As soon as I ran into my general manager, he informed me that he had received a complaint about me from one of the guests at one of the previous evening's events. Apparently I acted "rude" when she asked to have something wrapped up. I asked for something more specific since I didn't know what I could've done wrong and was only told "not to let it happen again."

I've been looking high and low for anything other than a restaurant job for years now, and while this new place that represents my first job since arriving in Texas has certainly become more profitable in recent weeks, at that moment it was beginning to feel as though even this job was now on shaky ground.

Fast-forward a couple hours to the middle of the event on Friday afternoon and another email has come in. This one is a reply from somebody I interviewed with almost two weeks ago for a writing job. Since I hadn't heard from her earlier in the week, by about Wednesday I was assuming they went with somebody else. Still, I opened the email and thought it began with the obligatory thank you for coming in the previous week. Familiar with how these rejections typically go, I was sure the next line would be some variation of either "we've decided to go with another candidate," or "we can not extend you an offer at this time."

Instead, it mentioned how they liked my work (it marked the first time that I was able to bring my "clips" with me to an interview down here) and they wanted to offer me the editorial assistant/in-house writer position. I began re-reading the email several times to be sure it wasn't a joke. But indeed, it was addressed to me and there appeared to be no catch.

And so for the first time that Friday, I smiled. When some of the ladies asked me to box up their cheesecake dessert for them as they listened to a speaker talk about some Tweet she'd found to be profound, I said how "I'd be happy to do it." (We have to a wear a pin on our vests that actually says something just like that too.)

I think back to that first job I landed after finally graduating college and how naive I was to not recognize I'd been roped into yet another door-to-door sales position. In the now five years since I received that supposedly all-important Bachelor of Arts, the closest I've come to having a gig that really felt as though I was putting that degree to its intended use was the limited contributions I made to a weekly suburban newspaper that eventually could no longer afford to pay me due to, you know, the industry basically dying.

While part of my reasoning for coming to Austin was that I would be entering a better job market, I'm not really sure how much I actually believed that. To me, it was more about being with ™ and being somewhere other than the Illinois suburb that had begun to feel like an area would never end up leaving. And considering the trouble I had gotten myself into with the law (once again) three years ago that still seemed to hang over my head like an eternal dark cloud, I just continued to come across more evidence that justified my skepticism about ever working anywhere other than a restaurant.

So I'm sitting here tonight, set to start this new job tomorrow, and feeling as though it still really hasn't sunk in. It's like I'm waiting for a rug to be pulled out from under me or that I'm going to step on to a trap door tomorrow morning when I arrive. Even though I've exchanged emails and spoken on the phone with the girl who interviewed me, it's like I'm not really going to believe it's actually happening—an honest-to-God Shammgod, real, live 40-hours-a-week writing job—until tomorrow arrives.

To be perfectly clear, I didn't just up and quit the steakhouse either. That shit would've been cruel to an employer that holds a special place in my heart now for being the first to hire me and made an honest effort to help me meet my request for lots of hours and good money. So what really begins tomorrow is not only the start of what I'm hoping to call my "real job," but the return to maintaining two jobs. Again, to the restaurant's credit, my boss has been quite supportive on such short notice with the availability change.

Now, as for what that means to BMC here ... well, you can only imagine that if one job was limiting the posting, a second certainly won't help (oh, look at that: the Braves' 122nd game, and thus the third-quarter mark of the season, is tomorrow). Needless to say, I could make the typical promise about how I'll try to keep up, but I've sincerely got my doubts about my thoughts here on the usual scheduled posts being anywhere near as lengthy as they used to be.

But on the other hand, perhaps the new gig will allow for further thoughts on newer subjects. Life, after all, is changing. And for the better, obviously. Beyond the writing position I finally landed, we also had an addition to our happy little home:

That's ™ with Brady (the Shih Tzu on the right) and our new friend, Max (a "Weinerdor"). Walking two dogs while trying to smoke is tricky, but hey ... maybe that can be the subject for a future post.