I am OFFICIALLY unemployed now. I am working diligently to find a new job, either here in the Denver area or back in Oklahoma...at this point, I'm not too particular which. My only concern is making sure that I make enough to cover our stuff. I could take a small pay cut to accomplish this, about 10%, but beyond that we would be hurting and I would be faced with the prospect of yet another second job. I would obviously prefer to not go back to working two jobs, as that really started affecting my health at the end (my regular readers might recall this from earlier this year).
The problem is that the market here in Denver for jobs that I do is a bit soft right now. I'm a senior information security administrator/analyst/engineer, but I can also do senior network administrator/engineer jobs. Unfortunately, there are three kinds of jobs available:
1. Senior-level duties at mid-level pay -- this is always common in IT, as companies do their best to underpay good talent. They eventually realize they will not get lucky and have someone with 10 years' experience drop in their lap and be happy at $50,000 a year. Sometimes they will increase the pay rate, but usually they just leave the pay the same and lower the duties to something appropriate for what they want to pay. I imagine this happens in every field, with every company.
2. Consulting jobs with 75-90% travel -- Let it first be said that these jobs usually pay very well. However, I'm not a young, single man any more, and I just can't justify something like this with a family and a pregnant wife.
3. Dead-end work -- these are the bottom-of-the-barrel jobs where you know you will be doing one task, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, and there will be no opportunity to grow your skills or move into other positions. For a security guy, an example would be firewall management, where you basically manage firewalls for many, many external clients. You spend your days changing rules, troubleshooting problems, and looking at logs. And that's all. I could only do this job if I were ready to admit that I no longer care about my career and were ready to effectively sink it.
So there are opportunities available, just not very many. In any case, I'm still hunting diligently, and I hope to find something soon.
I heard Don't Give Up, the duet of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, the other day in the car on the way to work, and it really got to me. It perfectly describes the way life has been for me over the past several months...in fact, as I listen, it's difficult to believe it wasn't written about me. Nearly every part of Peter's lines describes how life has been or how I've felt about it. I just hadn't listened really closely, and so when I did, it hit me right between the eyes.
Really, though, this has been such a tremendous lesson in faith and patience, and that's a difficult lesson for me to absorb and take to heart. I've always been pretty self-reliant, and I've always been able to get by, or even thrive, on my own skills and abilities and talent. This time, though, everything is different. I don't know what I'd do without Heidi to support me and love me. But the most important part of the lesson has been focusing on God and what His plan is for me. That is the part of the lesson I'm still learning. I just hope He doesn't take too much longer teaching it to me, because we're kind of getting close to the ragged edge. We'll live, but it's going to be horrible if we can't get this worked out, and soon.
The weather has been terrible the past few days. It's been great for the grass, because we've had almost non-stop rain until this morning. It was almost like living in Seattle; constantly overcast, rain wavering between a constant, light drizzle and a constant, heavy downpour. Everything was wet, all the time. Go out to the car, you're wet. Get in the car, shoes are wet, and seats get wet from rain blowing in and dripping off your clothes. Walk inside, you're trailing wet footprints everywhere (even with wiping your feet on the mat). And it was COLD. We didn't get up above about 55 degrees until today. It was a lot more like late October than mid-August, that's all I'll say. Nothing like a look into the future. You all know how much I prefer warm or hot weather, so I didn't like it much.
I'm looking forward to a good week coming up. I am working hard to keep my faith that God will open that next door for us soon. Please pray for us as much as you can; we've needed it a lot lately, but we need it now more than ever. Thanks for reading along.
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