It has been a crazy couple of weeks. Unfortunately this was one of those periods at the low end of the roller coaster - the kind of cycle that makes you want to say, "Stop the ride, please. This isn't fun anymore." After several long phone conversations with various people from the company that contacted me through the newspaper article, I finally landed a face to face with one of the regional vice presidents. I had really psyched myself up for the interview, and could picture myself doing small business business development. The commercial VP took one look at my resumé and proclaimed, "I see you in a retail role." My heart sank. I left retail because I knew it required much more interaction with internal customers, which is not my strong suit. I'm GREAT with external customers, but learned from previous experience that managing younger people who are not necessarily career-minded is a challenge I don't face well. I even called a former supervisor to discuss it, because I didn't want to throw away a perfectly good opportunity. Her advice? "With your personality... RUN!" I had made myself sick, agonizing over whether it was the right thing to do. Once I had the follow up conversation with HR where I politely bowed out, I instantly felt better (physically). The catch was, now I no longer had a promising opportunity headed in 'the right direction.' This was really disappointing because the whole thing was sort of "their idea" to begin with, and then they said, "No thank you." I've got a few anemic leads in the pipeline right now, but that was a pretty big one that has now vaporized.
That was the first event in a series of them that led me to ask, "If things are supposed to happen in threes, did I just get super-sized for free?," because I'm nearly double that number. I got notice of a sizeable rent increase; my laptop's LED screen died (don't even get me started on Dell, you remember the hell I've gone through with a succession of hard drives); my washer and dryer both malfunctioned on the same day, leaving my apartment simultaneously flooded, and smelling like smoke; and if all that weren't bad enough, a good friend from college passed away unexpectedly while recovering successfully from a transplant. He was only 46 and has a wife and two young children.
I never got to tell him how much he had touched my life and that made me very sad. We shared a common love of music and had performed together many times. Music was a very big part of his life and when one of his friends eulogized him (there were FOUR eulogies at his funeral!),his whole speech was about this man's love for music. Since that is where he and I connected, I just lost it. I've been in a fog, and numb for several days. Grief is one emotion, that no matter how old you get, or how hard you try, that is still very difficult to deal with. His untimely death hit home for me because my father died at 44 in a very similar situation, and the anniversary of his passing is next week. The similarities were a bit too much for me to handle.
Someone once said I could sell a blow dryer to a fish. I'm definitely a chip off the old block...this is where I got it from!
Conventional wisdom says things get worse before they get better, but I feel like my limits are really getting tested lately.
No comments:
Post a Comment