Story, part 3: The value of a traditional job.

My family is opinionated. Let's hear that one again. OPINIONATED. And not afraid to tell you about it. This information will be important later.

So there I am, no job, not quite sure what to do with myself, knocking around and finding bits of piecemeal work, enough to pay the bills, keep the lights on, buy cheap things to put in the $30 crock pot that turns all manner of cheap things into something resembling food. I found that I was pretty happy in this arrangement. I began to fantasize about maintaining this kind of lifestyle, what it might take to market myself as a consultant. Get my own insurance. Go it alone.

As a single woman, living in a house that needed maintenance and repairs, making mortgage payments, it felt risky, but in a "wheee!" kind of way. Like getting on a rollercoaster. I knew I had the skills, that I would be able to find the work. I just needed some help making the connections.

I shared this thought with my family. See above. It wasn't pretty. Apparently, to my complete amazement, the long-term relationship between employer and employee was covered on a day that I was out with strep in my childhood, because I missed that lesson. On the other hand, there was a fairly strong sentiment coming from the general direction of my childhood home that it was absolutely going to be the downfall of society that people were no longer thinking of themselves as employees. That we wanted to choose our work, direct our own careers, think of even our employers as customers, and not tie ourselves to desks for 40-60 hours a week on the vestigial hope that our loyalty would make them loyal to us in return. As I'd so recently so clearly seen, no amount of love and loyalty buys you corporate safety. Being honest about it and making the transactionary nature of employment more visible seemed like the next logical step to me.

I flashed back to my childhood, recalling hearing my stepmom occasionally bark "Oh, Rebecca, you're such an iconoclast" at my retreating back after some teenaged snit. But the time that she made me write the definition of Integrity on posterboard and hang it in my room also came back to me. And to me, integrity strongly smelled of freedom.

I made some contacts, and got some short-term jobs. One recruiter made a contact for me with a company making a very interesting medical device, and it needed documentation. I met with the client, we came to an agreement about my terms, I began work. Truth is, I can't recall how it happened exactly, but one day they requested to convert me to a full-time employee. For the first time since my revelation about having my freedom as a consultant, I took a job, this time with my eyes wide open. I consciously traded 40+ hours a week for the safety of a regular paycheck. I knew it every minute that I was at work, all the moreso because they had so very little for me to do. They didn't really want documentation, and they really didn't want training materials. My guess is that they wanted to be able to say that they had a writer on staff, but the system didn't require documentation. Dozens and dozens of users telling me the contrary didn't make a difference -- it's what they wanted to claim. And I helped, by being there, on staff, 40 hours a week, doing almost nothing. When they finally came to their senses after some months and let me go, it was like stepping out of a huge tub of boiling water. MAN it felt so good when it stopped.

Part 4: Conscious Employment.

Sleeping dragons lie.

I thought this would be a fun blog, and then abruptly I felt like I had nothing useful on the topic to say. I realize now that it's been over a year, and it's time to get back on the dragon, as it were.

I find that my life goes in cycles where I am drawn to self-development material, and other cycles where I can't imagine why I ever would have read such a book, thought such a thought, taken such a class. I'm in a 'drawn in' phase.

For the last two years or more, I've had a long commute, and discovered the joys of audio books to make the time that I resented so much for being wasted in my car more useful to me. In two years, I've listened to thirty to forty audio books, ranging from fiction to history to business, and indeed to self-development. I barely use my ipod for anything but audio books and podcasts, but heaven help me if I get in the car without it.

Yesterday, I downloaded Five Wishes by Gay Hendricks from Audible.com, and I've nearly finished it in a single day. The premise is simple: On your deathbed, what are the five things that you would say caused your life to be a failure, if you continued on your current trajectory? VOILA! You still have time to correct them, and knowing that THE SUCCESS OF YOUR LIFE is on the line, well, hop on it!

Hendricks then goes through the story of the five that he picked, and how he has changed his life in these areas over the subsequent 30 years. I am secretly annoyed that the ones that I instinctively go to match his at an 80% rate. But I digress.

I find myself aware both of the ways that my life falls short of the mark that I'd like to reach, and the ways that I am surprisingly on track. Having reached the age that my mother was when she died sometime last summer, I have a profound sense that I'm living on borrowed time, and that if I actually get to live all the years that she didn't, I'd better live them well for both of us. In a very clear, short, succinct way, this book provides an interesting structure for figuring out how exactly to do that.

Lost my mind and got a website.

It's not up yet, but it's under active construction now. I got a domain name -- it was my first impulse domain name, actually -- to structure the information I'm collecting based on the kind of thinking I've been doing here. My list of links is huge; my stack of books is staggering. It's time to make some sense of all of it.

The book that hit me the hardest recently is this one, and I can't recommend it enough: Crucial Conversations. About how to handle conversations with "high stakes," where emotions run strong and people have a natural inclination to withdraw or overpower, it gives guidance on how to stay present and keep the other person present in a cooperative spirit based on maintaining sight of a mutual goal, not just "winning." It is without a doubt the most important book I've read all year, and possibly ever in this category.

Enthralled by Covey and Maria Montessori

Just tossing up a note to say that I'm in the midst of a Steven Covey read-a-thon. I've listened to 7 Habits in the car while reading 7 Habits/Family, and pre-reading 7 Habits/Teens before giving it to my stepson.

Simultaneously, I've been reading some of Maria Montessori's books about her teaching method. I'm shocked by how similar some of the basic concepts are.

Bitching and Moaning Revisited

On Yom Kippur, we attended our synagogue's family service with my 3-year-old son. Perhaps the most charming part of the event was the way he would sing along, even in Hebrew, but only in his Cookie Monster voice. Cute stuff. But I digress.

As a part of the service, one of our rabbis introduced the idea of the Complaint-Free World. We were each issued purplish rubber wrist bands of the Live Strong ilk, and presented with the plan: Wear the bracelet, and each time you catch yourself complaining, switch it to the other wrist. The goal? To wear the wristband for 21 days, the length of time it takes to change a habbit, on the same wrist without having to change it.

I've had mine on ever since that afternoon, and I'm finding it changes wrists on average once a day. Sometimes I switch it in advance because I sense a whining session coming on and I just acknowledge it and switch as payment before I start. Sometimes it goes for days without moving. Once or twice, I've switched it for massive internal whining when I felt wronged by something, even though I wasn't actually complaining to another person. And once last weekend, I changed it 3 times in about 15 minutes at a party because I was unable to hide the fact that I was pissed at my husband. When my mother-in-law asked me what was wrong, I told her I couldn't tell her because I'd have to change my wristband. And then I realized that threatening to change my wristband in those circumstances was code for the bitching I wanted to do, and so I changed it.

I am notoriously hard on myself about things like this.

The church that sponsors the program will send you a wristband for free, and takes donations to fund the operation. They even have instructions for how to properly remind someone else to change THEIR wristband.

Don't you wish everyone had one?

Story: Part 2 - plotting next steps

Late April was springing and beautiful. I dedicated myself to finding another job, but not TOO fast -- after all, I did have some severance, and some savings, and it felt like a rare chance to enjoy spring.

But without taking any time off, I established a pattern that surprised me -- I got up early each day, far earlier than I had as an employee, and went to my desk with a cup of coffee and an enthusiastic spirit, eager to take on the project of finding work and managing my life until I had found one.

I took the concept very seriously -- right now, my job was to make sure that my bills were paid. I suddenly was much more interested in where my money went than I even was during my divorce at the worst of my "going to live in a box" paranoia. I had spreadsheets of all of my bills, and reconsidered everything. Cable was one of the first things to go. Interestingly enough, one of the things I *did* spend money on was my house -- I arranged to repair and cover the wood trim on the outside of my 1950's bungalo with vinyl, terrified that I wouldn't be able to pay for it, but also certain that it needed to be done and that somehow, I'd find a way to handle it.

For about 2 hours every morning, I searched job boards before the start of the regular business day. Monster, HotJobs, Dice, Washington Post job listings -- I searched them all, and gathered a list of all of the jobs that might be plausible. Then I went out into the day, taking my coffee and a magazine onto my back deck to enjoy the morning air, feeling that I'd accomplished a lot in the hours I would usually have spent dressing and commuting, and now, when my day would have just been starting, I was able to pick how I wanted to spend my time for most of the rest of the day.

After breakfast, I planned what I'd do for the day. I was able (and needed) to cook much more than I usually would have, and eating food made from actual! raw! ingredients! became part of my day. I bought a crockpot, and discovered that it's possible to make an amazingly good stew by just throwing a few raw things and some broth into a bowl and plugging it in. I also enjoyed doing other enhancements to my house, painting some rooms that were still the dingy off-white of my married days, and finally completing the task of cutting up the nasty beige carpet and hauling it, bit by bit, out to the curb.

At lunchtime, I did another round of work, often researching the companies where I'd found promising ads, revising my resume, and taking the opportunity to learn some new skills. I began playing with Web graphics, something I never did get good at.

In the afternoon, I made phonecalls to former colleagues, initially for suggestions on possible jobs, but after awhile, after they suggested consulting opportunities, I began to look around for people who needed a temporary technical writer or editor.

I picked up a short-term project, working for a woman I had myself hired (and been devastated to see laid off in an early round as our company imploded) a couple of years before, and enough money came in to pay the mortgage without biting into savings that month. A fencing buddy came through with a job writing a manual for a piece of software that paid another month, and gave me the flexibility and freedom to enjoy my summer.

Around 3:00, I knocked off, whether job searching or doing consulting work, and the end of the day often saw me hiking the trail around a nearby lake, or riding the bike I bought for myself shortly before all hell broke loose. A backpack held a notebook and pen, and I toyed with the idea for what I thought would be an interesting book. Parts of it still sit on my hard drive, overtaken by other events in my life, or perhaps just marinating.

What I found was that my early morning, noon, and late evening work hours allowed me to really enjoy what felt like expansive freedom, despite the fact that I was working as many hours as ever at my job. Being able to pick my time and plan my approach, though, gave me a whole new way of seeing things.

I did truly come to think of myself as a small business in this time. It was energizing, exciting -- I felt alive in a way that I hadn't experienced before. Completely alone, not tied to any other person in a significant way, I felt absolutely free to make my choices independently, and as long as the bills were paid, I was winning.

My family, however, was very concerned about my situation.

Next: Generational debate over the importance of the traditional job.

Story - Part 1: The Layoff

It was April of 2001 when the company I had worked for for nearly 4 years finally hit the dirt for the last time. Our small startup, fueled by the dot-com expansions of the late 1990s, imploded on itself one last time, this time taking me with it.

I'd seen it before more than once, and been part of preparing for it before more than once, so when I saw the tell-tale signs of a layoff without warning, I knew that this time, I was in it. My usual lunch companions (or at least, those who were left at this point) left sheepishly, after muttering excuses about having to go to lunch early. Those of us left in the office received an email to come to the conference room for a meeting. I walked out into the hallway and found other people who hadn't put 2 and 2 together yet.

"What are we doing?" they asked.

"We're getting fired!" I shouted with enthusiasm -- "C'mon!" I broke into a Wizard of Oz skip on the short walk to the conference room. They stared at me like I'd lost my mind.

We'd seen it coming for ages. Our company had missed our IPO by less than 24 hours with the sudden downturn of the NASDAQ the previous fall, and a series of emergency measures to save us, including being purchased by another company, simply hadn't gained traction. Some of us held onto hope that we could at least package up our product so that eventually it would be saved. And it didn't hurt that the job market in our sector after the NASDAQ "tank" was weak, to say the least.

At the meeting, we were told of our separation packages, the COBRA benefits available to us, and thanked for our dedication in such a troubled environment. Personal information was exchanged. We returned to our desks to find that our network access had been cut off, and we had each been assigned an escort while we packed our desks, got our personal files from our hard drives, and exited the building. I remember a feeling of exhilerated freedom during my walk to my car -- quite the opposite of what I'd expected to feel at such a moment. Others trudged to their cars, voiced concerns about finding another job, walked with stooped shoulders. All I could think was "it's a beautiful day, and I'm finally given permission to go be a part of it."

I took in a deep breath of clean spring air and decided to go for a walk when I got home. I thought about how I could cut some expenses; after all, I was fairly recently divorced and paying the full mortgage on a house I had not expected to own on my own when we bought it several years before. I did have six months of salary saved, somehow -- in the early days of my separation and divorce, when I joked to my divorce lawyer that I feared "turning into a bag lady or living in a cardboard box," I'd also begun to save money compulsively, to be sure I could protect myself in just this kind of situation. In fact, I'd taken to throwing my loose change into a salad bowl on my dining room table, so that I'd always know that I had enough money to call for a pizza if I really, really wanted to. When I finally cashed in that salad bowl of change several years later, there was nearly $400 in it.

Filled with optimism and relief, I went home, hatching plans in my head for how I'd manage my job search and what I would do next.