Three cheers and a tiger for me!!! I’ve gotten a job offer from Cutco and have accepted. I start work on June 1 and I couldn’t be happier. By all accounts, Cutco is a great place to work – privately held company, good bennies, family oriented, community aware. Plus I’ll be working in IT again. Sure sounds good to me.
It’ll be good to be working again. And yes, I realize how lucky I am to have found a job given the current state of the economy. The thing is, there are jobs out there. Tami and I were discussing a former boss of mine. He was laid off shortly after he laid me off over a year ago. Tami heard recently that he’s still looking for work.
In that same time, I’ve looked for work, taken a contracting job that lasted a year, looked for work again and found a good job with a good company doing what I love. Taking the contracting job was a no brainer for me. It was for considerably less money than I’d been making. It would be considered an ‘Admin’ job when I was an ‘Engineer’ before. None of that mattered to me. It was a paycheck and would allow me to support my family albeit at a reduced level. My sole criteria was did it pay more than my unemployment?
The thing is, I don’t think that my former boss – and a lot of other “Professional” people out there – would have even considered that job. It would have been beneath them or it would have been a blot on their resume or something equally silly. Interestingly enough, that contracting job actually helped me. It allowed me to expand my skills, introduced me to another whole group of people (can you say networking) and, because I actually tried to do a good job, it garnered me another good recommendation.
It also looked good in interviews. Everything I’ve ever read about the interview process says that prospective employers like go-getters and this experience has proved that point. When people asked me about that job I them the absolute truth – that I took it because I have a family to feed and bills to pay – and that answer got a good response. I wasn’t waiting for something to be given to me, I was going out and getting what I needed. In this case, a paycheck.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not trying to blow my own horn. I’m trying to make a case for doing what’s necessary to get through tough times. If I hadn’t been offered that job I would have applied at MacDonalds and the local grocery store and anywhere else I could find – not because I’m some paragon of virtue but because I’m a practical realist. It’s practical and realistic to take the job you can get if it helps you support your family. It’s impractical and unrealistic to pass on jobs that don’t pay what you used to make or that are ‘beneath you’ especially when the economy is tanking.
You do what you need to do whether it’s taking a lesser job or maybe taking two lesser jobs. You do what you need to do so that you can still look at your children and your spouse with pride. You do what you need to do so that you can still look at yourself in the mirror. Anything less is just not good enough.
