Six Month Attention Span

So, we are doing alright, considering that we now live in abject poverty. Okay, I'm kidding, it's not that bad. We are safe for the month of May -- between our tax refund, my income as a gardener, the veggie garden, and some gift money from Mumsie and Dadums, we can pay our bills and eat. June, however, is a big unknown.

If all goes well, however, Sweetienookums will have a new job by June and it will be clear sailing from there.

During the past week or two, he has talked on the phone to a lot of head-hunters and has submitted resumes for three or four jobs that look promising. He even has a phone-interview tomorrow.

Okay, this is funny . . . so, for the past, I dunno, ten? years, all of Sweetienookums's jobs have involved using a particular brand of software that is . . um . . . challenging to use. (No, it's not Microsoft) Originally, he had a boss who asked him to please learn how to use BadlyWrittenSoftware, and paid for his training, just for that job. Then, at his next job, someone saw "trained in BadlyWrittenSoftware" on his resume and got very excited, because none of their other employees could get it to work. And then, in a few years, Sweetienookums became a specialist in BadlyWrittenSoftware, and could get no other kind of jobs because everyone desperately needed an employee with That One Skill . . . which is funny, considering that he HATES the stuff. In fact, in every job he has had for the past howevermany years, he has spent at least two hours a week on the phone we WeWriteBadSoftware's technical support department, telling them how they could make this software better. They are nice guys and usually agree with him.

He knows the tech support guys by name, and they know the sound of his voice on the phone. If we were a Christmas-card-sending kind of people, they would be on our list. Sweetienookums would prefer a job using Java, C, C++, Perl or almost any other programming language. But it's been so long since he did that, that he's not "up" on the latest techniques . . . and anyway, once prospective bosses find out that he can beat a useful program out of BadlyWrittenSoftware, that is all they want to talk about! And all I hear, at dinner each night, is how Awful and Evil is BadlyWrittenSoftware.

This is all especially interesting because his phone interview tomorrow is with WeWriteBadSoftware. They need a guy to travel around to various job-sites and teach the people doing Sweetienookum's old job, how to use the BadlyWrittenSoftware. Sooooo funny if he ended up working for them. I imagine him visiting headquarters once per quarter with a foam baseball bat, beating the programmers and Quality Control people around their heads.

I'm rooting for him to get that job, just because of the irony.

The other leads are short-term contracting jobs. One would involve him living in Seattle for six weeks (a long time to live out of a suitcase but it pays well enough to compensate for that). Another is in Roundrock, almost worse than Seattle because the commute from South Austin to Roundrock averages two hours at 5 mph.

Meanwhile, it is kind of fun to have him a home all day. He searches for jobs in the mornings and in the afternoon I make him do chores. He is also making some crossbow bolts and bow strings for Iolo (isn't the website pretty? Sweetienookums is fixing it up for Iolo) and is starting his own business to make crossbow bolts so Iolo doesn't have to be the middleman anymore. I must say, the bolts that Sweetienookums makes fly straight and true . . . he hardly ever pokes holes in my garden shed anymore!