Move Me on to any Black Square

(apologies to those of you who recognize the origin of this post's title and are now trying to stamp out the background sound of a lute and recorder playing in the mind)

A few days ago, I was trying to figure out where to go with this job search stuff. I made some progress, but things are still a bit murky.

First of all, option (1) is looking like a last resort.

Option (2) didn't work out because Safe-T-Call didn't reach a decision like they were supposed to. I contacted the recruiter representing them on Thursday, and he didn't have any updates. All he had to offer was perplexity over why they were taking so long to make up their mind. Tomorrow will mark a full month since I did the interview. The contract was supposed to be three months maximum. That leaves me believing that either the project was endangered or they are just so bureaucratically paralyzed that they can't make decisions in a timely manner. I'm not holding out for htem any longer.

I've been playing phone tag with the guy from Amazing Music Floating Price Machine Co., so option (3) could become a short term worst case scenario.

I'm really trying to avoid option (4) because I am finding it harder and harder to tolerate management. This week, with the seat-of-the-pants way that they handled the consulting meetings and their east coast dog-and-pony show, just convinced me that the labor market needs to send them a very big vote of "no confidence".

I acted on option (5), sending an e-mail on Tuesday evening through the appropriate channel. It took a few days for him to get back with me, and ironically enough, his reply was snagged by my e-mail provider's spam filter. His line of work includes filtering out spammish content for his employer's site. I'm going to e-mail him a time or two for us to talk in the next couple of days to see where this is headed. I've heard that they allow for off-site work, so I've been contemplating the prospect of seeing whether I could start off remotely (after an appropriate period of on-site training) and then perhaps move out West once the divorce has been filed and finalized.

I also moved on option (6). Last weekend, as I was scanning the job boards, I found a local posting that sounded very bleeding edge for this area. So I Googled some of the keywords in the job against my town's name, and I found a blog posting that had some very similar content. It was a personal blog maintained by a person who had just hired on at a startup here and in the post he said he was looking for software developers.

So I dropped him a line on Tuesday along with my resume. This started a series of e-mail exchanges that led to us meeting for an hour and a half at their offices on Friday afternoon. It was an informal conversation, a sort of metainterview.

It turns out that he and I have been through some near misses on our personal paths. He was job hunting this spring and summer, and was being very selective about what he wanted. He, too, had been recruited for a job with Online Dating Service but had decided he couldn't tolerate the idea of working for an online dating service. He had moved here from the Emerald City just before Labor Day and lived in an apartment only a short distance from Broadshoulder Broadsides, with whom I had interviewed just after labor day.

The current plan is to bring me in for a more technical interview later this week once I figure out what time would work best for me. It will probably happen later in the week.