A Tale of Two Job Offers

At the end of January my boss told me that my job was being eliminated at the end of June.

"You'll be fine," she told me. "You have 5 months to find something new."

"You don't understand," I replied. "I was unemployed for an entire year just a little over a year ago. 5 months is nothing."

And then, after being told I was taking the news very graciously, I couldn't hold back anymore. For the first time in my life, I cried at work. Hard. I went home early, stopping briefly in my coworker's office to give her my puffy-eyed, sniffly 30-second version of the news and explain why I wouldn't be joining everyone for lunch.

Unemployment sucks, as I have chronicled here and sort of also here. Just when I thought I had settled into a nice cozy spot for awhile, the big U was looming, again (I also got laid off at the end of 2011, for those that are not intimately keeping track of the details of my life).

I gave myself 24 hours to wallow, and then got to work. I updated my resume. I asked friends and friends-of-friends and friends-of-friends-of-friends to let me know if they heard about anything. I contacted headhunters. I bought a new suit. I wrote cover letters.

Oh, did I write cover letters.

When I used to work in banks, cover letters weren't necessary. They aren't necessary at most for-profit companies, as is the quasi-general rule I've learned through my many bouts of job hunting. But I'm in the non-profit land now, and every non-profit wants a "thoughtful cover letter." Some also want writing samples, references up front, test scores and probably a DNA swab, but the cover letter was non-negotiable. So I wrote them.

I wrote cover letters at every free moment. Evenings, weekends, sometimes early mornings. I said no to weekend plans so I could write cover letters. For months, that's all I did, with the occasional interview thrown in, if I was lucky.

And then, a few weeks ago, I had two job offers.

Having not one but TWO organizations that wanted to hire me was the craziest and most unanticipated thing to ever happen to me. I got to actually compare and contrast the jobs and CHOOSE which one I wanted and I GOT TO SAY NO. For the first time, it wasn't the company rejecting me. It was the other way around. It was beautiful. I would like to say that I cried at some point because that makes it sound more emotional, but I'm not typically a crier and so I didn't. But believe me, I was all punching my fist triumphantly in the air like Judd Nelson at the end of The Breakfast Club.

At this point, I feel like I'm supposed to say something like, "I felt so blessed to have two offers." But I don't feel blessed. In order to feel blessed you have to believe in an entity that can bless you which is a discussion for another day, but mostly, to feel blessed you have to feel like something was sort of unworthily bestowed upon you. And I do not feel unworthy, because I worked my ass off. I wrote countless versions of my resume and worked briefly with a career coach and networked in ways that are way outside my comfort zone and feverishly researched companies and took all sorts of crazy notes in my interview notebook and when I wasn't doing all those things, I was writing cover letters.

On July 1st, I start an amazing new job that I'm insanely excited about. Not because I was blessed, but because I worked for it. And even though there was never a competition, I feel like I've won.