Unemployed Life.

Last week of employment upcoming.

So glad to be moving on. This job was never comfortable, I never felt like I was in a job that could be a career. It was tolerable up until a few months ago and now I just can't wait to be out the door. This is the pattern I tend to have with jobs. I start out well, usually being something of a superstar in the first months to a year of a job, then I increasingly get disillusioned and little slights and inconveniences pile up. My performance starts to drop over time as I lose interest in doing well in the job and by the end both me and my employer wants me out the door. Happy to oblige this time.

Coming out of a pandemic with sketchy job reports dropping, I probably should have just stuck in for as long as I could, but I have a mighty small capacity to swallow shit and honestly in my career I've never really had much trouble getting a job when I need to, and I don't anticipate much trouble now either. Just in the month or so that I've been semi-seriously looking I've had interviews with 3 or 4 different companies and could have taken one of the jobs a few weeks back but decided it was a bit above my head. I interview well and have a good breadth of experience now to get my foot in various doors.

Worst case scenario (and it would be worst), if I go a few months w/o finding anything I could always take some sort of retail job short term just to get a positive cash flow going. Hell I could even drive Uber or something if I desperately needed something but I really don't want to put the wear and tear on a leased car. Would be the backup plan of all backup plans, but maybe I can get some sort of gig job going during the job hunt. Haven't really even started to explore much yet.

There's still a chance I may get hooked up with the job I've been interviewing with, but  the vid interview with the COO was awkward and I'm not sure I would want to work for him. He seems a bit of a tool. May still take it if it's offered, I know I could do the job and it would pay a little more than what I'm at now.

In any case I'm probably going to be OK for the rest of the year with what I will have saved up. $8K minimum after all bills after getting last check, and probably another $1K on top of that with payed out PTO. Add to that the approx. $8K coming from cashing out the 401k and I should be around $17K in the bank in a few weeks. If I really scale back on expenses as I would have to that's around 10 months I could be no income. 

That would, however, mean no Vegas trips until gainful employment is secured. Assuming I don't get the currently interviewing position, that could impact the July and September trips. Can't blow $5K on Vegas when that might be survival money. Gotta think I'd have something lined up by late in the year so the Xmas trip would be on. I'd also like to not blow through ALL of my savings. I don't really want to go back to the hand to mouth days. I don't think it will come to that though, for the reasons mentioned above. I can get a job.

So we finish up one last week with TFS, hope for an offer from the job I'm interviewing for, and the Vegas train rolls merrily along with no interruption, with hopefully even a bonus trip next week. If not, we hunker down into low-expense mode, build a LinkedIn profile again, bang the job boards and see what pops up.