Onwards and upwards ....

Crap Week Part I

Warning - I'm about to be momentarily grumpy ...

So I didn't get that job I interviewed for the other week. After a few days of hearing nothing, I eagerly awaited my rejection letter which, after 10 days, came via the form of email. Ah, the electronic era can't replace a good old fashioned envelope with a stamp when it comes to disappointing news.

I felt somewhat disheartened, I must admit. I had gone for an entry-level admin job - the type I had managed to bypass after leaving college and woefully thought "good grief, if I can't even get that, I'm buggered". Secretly, I think it went to someone already in the organisation and who was probably already earmarked for the job (but it wouldn't have been much of a promotion!) - and the interview process was potentially a paperwork exercise. Alternatively, I was so obviously over-qualified that they did not wish to insult me by offering me the job.

Hey ho - a day or two of feeling despondent (because I really wanted this job for a variety of admittedly selfish reasons - which I did not disclose at the interview in case you are thinking I blew it right there and then!) - and then I sat down to work out a Plan G.

My brain spins several thought processes at once :

a) I have no Canadian office experience - Catch 22 if no-one will give me a job - putting down a stint at Starbucks doesn't help but it is Canadian work experience;

b) I have no recent office experience - having emigrated two years ago, I have enjoyed and totally taken advantage of my new-found freedom. Then I did a stint at Starbucks and worked at a garden centre because it suited me. I wasn't thinking long-term job prospects nor careers at this point. I'd just escaped 16 years in one profession.

c) I am too old and useless and out of touch to be employed in this field;

d) The above sentence is crap and I am young and vibrant and hugely knowledgeable, and will be a huge asset to any company that has the common sense and foresight to employ me;

e) I feel like an immigrant; I can't exactly quantify that last statement - but I am often so aware of my accent - speaking slowly and clearly, changing my language - and of my new-ness to this fair land;

f) I want a local job and do not want to commute 2 hours a day; however, I also wish to earn more than an insulting hourly rate and will probably need the big city lights for this goal.

g) I have young children who I want to look out for and look after - not farm them off to miscellaneous child-care - and who still require me to don my chaffeur hat four nights a week for various clubs. I cannot leave the house at 6.30am for an 8am start in the downtown area.

h) I have young children who drive me nuts on occasion so I need to escape. I'd love to have, be and do something different and stimulating in a non-family-cum-household way.

i) We need the money and I should just shut up and put up with anything at all to pay for the groceries; I never believe other people when they say there aren't any jobs out there.

j) I resent working my butt off for insulting money;

h) I am going round in circles.

So I have applied for other suitable jobs and I have this week signed up with an agency and hope to do some temping over the next few months to give me that all-important local and recent experience.

Onwards and upwards ....

Crap Week Part II

Hubby was off on a training week with work last week and I received a phone call from him on Thursday, saying he had somehow injured himself, he had just spent five hours at the Emergency Room, and could I come and collect him?

Locked up two hungry dogs in the kitchen, and packed up two hungry children into the car and set off in rush hour traffic to a place which should have only taken me about an hour and half to drive. Two and quarter hours later I arrived, somewhat stressed, to pick up a very poorly looking husband - not after getting completely lost and killing a deer en route. Don't ask.

Bundled husband into front seat of car - who was in agony with something odd going on in his back/shoulder - and then rushed to the nearest rubbishy fast-food outlet so my near-starving children could eat something vaguely resembling nutrition.

Pulled car up to a halt, whereby hubby rushed out and promptly threw up all over the car park. Pain, dizziness and drugs are apparently a great combination for a new weight-loss programme. We could market this.

Finally arrived back home at 10:15pm to two crossed-legged but thinner looking hungry dogs, who squeaked with excitement that we had not abandoned them after all, and finally everyone muddled themselves into their respective beds in a state of exhaustion.

4am - wide awake. Husband almost in tears by this point. Very unlike him - so actually quite frightening for me. Excruciating pain and in need of an Emergency room again, some answers and some drugs - not necessarily in that order. More throwing up ensued - and your blog author was feeling distinctly useless by this point.

Morphine in various guises doesn't necessarily assist with all types of pain, we have found out.

Fast-forward one week and bureaucracy rules. Work reports, WCB reports (Worker's Compensation Board), medical requests, weekends, 8-4 office workers who are not currently in pain and doped up on morphine, persons not willing or able to fax a piece of paper to another person - the list goes on to the point of wanting to scream. How my husband has remained so calm and polite I do not know - oh, hang on, morphine .....

We are still none the wiser as the cause of the pain but make our own elementary diagnosis of a trapped nerve or similar which is making fingers and hands numb, and preventing any kind of normal sleeping, sitting or standing position possible. He's off for an MRI tomorrow, and I will safely log this past week as one of the crappiest in a while. It is nothing so serious (to everyone else) as to require acting expeditiously - but pain is pain is pain. It is nothing so serious in the grand scale of really serious events happening all over the world every day. I get that. But in my bubble this week, it was not trivial. Pain that makes you throw up four times is not normal. And he's no wuss, by the way.

Next week will be better - I will be offered the job of my dreams and my husband will be skipping through fields of tulips (in October).

Have a good one everybody. Normal happy blogging will resume shortly.

(Ahhh - I feel better now!)