In March of 2021, Amway decided that they had 900 too many employees in the Ada, Michigan, office where I worked. They invited employees to volunteer to leave with a generous separation package. For me, the package included 16 months pay and a year’s medical. This was too good to pass up. Most of us left on 9/3/21.

Ordinarily, I would’ve started looking for a job right then, but we’d already scheduled 3-4 trips thru the end of October. I couldn’t see asking a company for a job and saying “By the way, I need a month’s vacation right now.”

I figured that I’d spend the time from September thru October getting my résumé into the latest CV fashions. Amway had provided access to a company called Right Management to help folks get back into the job market. Over the next few months, they helped me hammer my résumé into something that folks would want to read.

They also helped me fiddle with the LinkedIn site to help look for jobs.

When they got to the part where they started telling me to start networking, I got worried. Most folks who know me wouldn’t say”Yeah, Steve’s a networking kind of guy.”

By November, I had a shiny new résumé and a shinier LinkedIn page. Pretty soon, I’d be beating away job offers with 2 sticks.

Spoiler alert: the beating away of job offers thing didn’t happen.

I was finding a couple of job postings a week that resembled something that I was a fit for. It looks like I applied for 20+ postings. I heard back from 7 and of those, 3 led to job interviews. I never heard back from the rest.

Sending out job applications and not hearing anything except the occasional “no” can be pretty disheartening. Was I really any darned good? Was Amway just stupid for paying me as much as they did and I’d have to take a massive pay cut to get a job? Will I ever get a gosh darned job? Am I gonna have to really retire right now?

Then I was asked to a job interview and it went really well. The job was fully remote for a regular company – not a contract house. The first part of the interview was with managers and I seemed to get along well with them and the job that they described was really in my wheelhouse. The second part was with the other app admins (the job is called Application Administrator) it was more of the same. I even got past their trick question (Q. Star Trek or Star Wars? A. Doesn’t matter: Firefly).

After that, a week or so went by and it wasn’t looking good. I went back to wondering if I was ever gonna get a decent job or if I was going to be a fabulously overqualified help desk person.

Then the folks with the great job interview called back and offered me a job! With decent money! And benefits! I’d sorta figured that I’d just get a contracting gig with good pay and lousy benefits and lean on Pam’s job for her benefits. That plan went sideways when she got a job with no benefits.

So anyway, I started today.