Is Everyone on Vacation?? No One is Interviewing!

When I decided not to renew my consulting contract, my plan was to pick up a new contract in September. Last year, I had a contract within one week of submitting my resume, and my staffing company assured me that I would have no problem getting a new assignment in the fall.

So I submitted my resume for about 12 jobs, and nothing. No one is interviewing! It is so frustrating! Did the entire metropolitan area go on vacation for the entire month of August?

After a couple of weeks of no responses, I started to think that maybe it was me, despite assurances from several sources that I was very marketable. Then I had a conversation with my best friend and another colleague, both of whom were laid off from their jobs in June. Their experience is the same - no one is around to review, let alone respond to resumes. My husband isn't worried - as a senior manager, he told me that the summer is pretty much dead for interviewing, and he is confident that I will pick up something in the next few weeks.

I probably wouldn't care either, if it weren't for the childcare issue. With 2 school aged children, lining up before and after school care that coordinates with bus schedules isn't easy. I thought I was ahead of the game by making sure everything was in place by the beginning of the summer for the start of school. Now I'm in the childcare catch 22 - if I pull them out now, I risk losing their slots, so I am now paying for childcare that I really don't need on the hopes that I will have an assignment within the next few weeks. Nothing like writing a huge childcare check when I know I could be putting the money towards something else!

So this week, I will be checking my email and voicemail, putting in my resume and trying not to worry so much.

Check back with me in a week ....

Where did the summer go?

Ok, when I first started this blog, I was committed to writing on a regular basis about my day to day experiences with work and home. So here I am, seven weeks later - what was my summer like?

First, we finished a major kitchen renovation, which meant keeping a 7 year old and 4 year old busy and fed for 3 weeks while the crew knocked down walls and rebuilt our kitchen and half bath. Keeping sane meant running the refrigerator from the living room, covering everything in sight to keep the dust out (didn't work), using paper plates and plastic utensils as well as eating lots of fast food. It also meant sending the kids to day camp for a week, and spending the rest of the time saying "don't touch that bare wire!" and "nail guns are for grownups!" Plus, we were down to one bathroom for the four of us, and you can understand what it's like to finally get in the shower only to have your youngest bang on the door and say "I have to go real bad!!!" You get the picture.

Once we recovered from that project, we went on vacation for a week to Disney Vacation Club at Vero Beach, Florida. Things went surprisingly well, considering this was the first time the four of us shared a hotel room and we weren't running off to the Disney parks or had a babysitter to help us out. Our outbound flight was switched from 8:30 am to 6:00 am, which meant getting up at 3:45 to get to the airport on time. The girls were real troopers (getting upgraded to first class definitely helped - thanks, Delta!) and too excited to sleep much anyway. We spent most of our time at the pool, with one day at the Magic Kingdom, and the girls were great the whole time.

Thing is, going on vacation as a mom is never really relaxing. For example, every time my 4 year old had to go to the bathroom, guess who got to accompany her? It seemed like just as I'd settled down on my chaise to read a magazine and relax, or just as I was about to take a bite of my dinner, I'd hear "Mom ...." Not "Dad ...." (except in a pinch - like when Mom's not there).

There was also the state of our hotel room. Disney Vacation Club provides towel and trash service on the fourth day of your stay, which means by the end of the day three, the room is getting pretty messy. Newspapers, food wrappers, plus multiple versions of coloring pictures were everywhere. I tried to keep things semi-orderly, but by day seven, I could feel the four walls closing in on me.

Of course, my husband, who works very hard the other 51 weeks of the year, says to me on our last day, "Isn't this great? I could stay another 5 days." God bless him - I'd be happy to stay if he managed bathroom duty, too.

So we have ten days left until school starts. We've started adjusting bedtimes, planning back to school shopping, and I've begun looking for a new consulting contract for the school year. Our summer was not as laid back as we would have liked, so we're going to enjoy these last few days as much as we can.

Layoffs

I'm a consultant at a major financial services company. Today I had the unfortunate experience of watching an entire division suffer through a layoff that was 3 months in the making. These poor people have been waiting for the other shoe to drop for weeks, and as the end of the month grew closer, the environment just got more tense. Forget productivity - the company was lucky that folks even showed up.

The area I worked in lost 6 people, including a manager with whom I had become good friends. He was a good person, who truly cared about his team and his co-workers, truly a man of integrity. He was one of the first to be let go, and surprisingly, this really hit me hard - I was as upset as those team members who worked with him for years. This was the second time in my career that I had seen a manager with such character let go. Why doesn't corporate America value these qualities? Does a person have to be coldblooded, robotic and without emotion to succeed?

This layoff, along with a dozen other reasons, led me to decide not to renew my contract. I'll be home this summer, doing the stay-at-home mom thing, and looking for a contract in the fall. My daughters are 7 and 4, entering 3rd grade and kindergarten, so I want to spend more time with them - they're only this small once. I'll pick up a new contract this fall when they're back in school.

So I'm looking forward to sunshine and lazy days .... can't wait!

Doing the Stay At Home Thing ... Or Why I Started This Blog

I quit my job (career?) in February, 2004, to stay home with my daughters (who were then 6 and 3), re-evaluate my life and basically figure out whoI wanted to be when I grew up. I was facing the big 4-0, had risen to the higher echelons of middle management at a major financial services company, only to try and cope with a work environment that was so dysfunctional that I actually emailed Dr. Phil for help (he didn't write back), while figuring out snowday coverage so I could keep the backstabbers at bay. So I quit to stay home and rediscover who I was. Am I a mom? A career woman/manager/lawyer (or else why am I making those student loan payments)? Both? Do I need to choose or why should I have to?

As my final working days wound down, I would hear from so many people, especially women: "You are so lucky - I wish I could just stay home." At the same time, major news outlets were reporting a growing trend in America, successful working women who were walking away from their jobs to stay with their families. I've never been accused of being a trendsetter, so I appreciated CBS saying that I was part of a new movement in American society. But why was this such a big deal?

So I'll be writing about my day to day issues and observations about trying to do it all. I love my family, and I love my working life. It's just staying sane that's the challenge ...