Mike Needs a Life Blog Reposts – Part 17
June 5, 2009
Christina lands the Big One!
Well, OK.. maybe not the BIG ONE, but big enough.
After coming back from St Thomas life pretty much went on as usual.. work, come home, eat, go to bed, rinse and repeat. Christina took up a weekend job at Macey’s at the fashion square to get a little bit more money coming in. I don’t know how she does it, I’d have been killing people and drinking more than I already do if I’d been working 7 days a week, at two jobs that out of the both of them I liked neither. I guess she and I are wired differently, either that or I’m just plain lazy, which is a distinct possibility. Anyways, she worked all the time, and I stayed at home on the weekends and worked on the yard, or on sculpture stuff, or just hung out with friends and drank, nothing too exciting. The work at the gallery was steady enough to get me an average of 40 hours a week, so I casually perused the want ads and such looking for a glimmer of sunshine. No such glimmer appeared for me, but Christina found one!
She had been practicing the power of positive visualization at her day job. She had a little bulletin board next to her desk with photos pinned up of the things she wanted out of life; a sailboat, the beach at water island, an Electra ‘Betty’ bicycle, that kind of stuff. She religiously dug around on the internet looking for jobs, but hadn’t found anything decent in orlando, so she thought.. hey, why not look in the places I’d rather be living? Well wouldn’t you know, there was a job right up her alley working for South Florida Workforce in KEY WEST. Well, not one to be discouraged by a little obstacle like geography, she applied for the job by sending her resume online. She got an email the very next day, could she come in for an interview… it was at this point she began to realize that maybe her visualization might be paying off.
That evening at home, she asked me if it was OK that she was applying for jobs in Key West, I laughed and said, why not! Thinking to myself that it would be a cold day in hell before anything like that ever happened.. so then she said that it was good I thought it was OK, because she had an interview for one next week..
She drove down to Key Largo for the interview and met with the director of the Largo branch of work force, then turned around and drove back.. all in one day. He told her that the position was for the director of the Key West offices, and the job involved (among other things) trying to interface the Miami head office people with the Key West people, since they were so different they couldn’t see eye to eye on much.. apparently he liked her experience with corporate sales offices and such.
Well we spent the next few days kind of in shock, what if this actually happens?? What do we do with the house? What about my job at the gallery?? So many things to think about. We decided to not even think about the consequences until we had to, if ever. She got a call probably a week later. He wanted to see her for a second interview! Now the freak-out really started happening. I was pretty sure the way things were slowing down at the gallery that I’d be out on the streets looking for a job soon anyways, so it might be perfect timing for me. There would still be the house to deal with, but once again we decided not to sweat the small stuff unless we had to.
Once again, she got up at 4 am to drive to Largo. I went to work as usual. I got the call around 11 AM.. ‘WE’RE MOVING TO KEY WEST!” was all I heard.. holy shit, the five year plan was coming faster than I’d ever expected it to! I got off the phone, and I guess the big-ass smile on my face gave it away, because Jeff knew what was up.. I was OUTTA THERE! 