Birthday Of The Other Kind

shopping.com, but they decided to pick the other guy. <sigh> Then there was the company that shall remain nameless who was feeding me what I truly believe now to be a total cock-and-bull story about a contract gig with a large financial institution who was looking for a linux admin with apache experience. I’ve got plenty of experience with setting up Apache on my own linux boxes and on various servers, but never in a corporate environment. I was certainly intimidated when they started describing the job duties and what would be going on. When they started trying to coach me on how to behave and what I needed to "study" for the interview with the client I became wary. After the third promised phone call failed to happen, I decided that I’d rather be employed by a company that keeps its’ promises to its’ employees (or prospective employees in my case). The way I see it, the saying, “three strikes and you’re out,” fits very well in this situation. It’s a shame, too, ‘cuz the more I thought about events leading up to the last time I discussed things with them, the more I decided that I most certainly could do the job they were looking for. It would have just taken me another week or two to cover the learning curve. (One of those events was a question asked of me in my shopping.com interview, “Why are you still a Junior admin after two years with Transmeta?” The answer is that I never really had the opportunity to move up there OR the time.) Anyhow, so here I was on Tuesday morning after receiving my letter of rejection from shopping.com and having been stood up by the nameless contracting firm the night prior. This does not do well for one’s confidence. It all added to the fact that I wasn’t looking forward to my UI benefits running out shortly after the New Year… Dammit, as a kid I learned that by the time you reach your 30’s, you’re supposed to have a job, a house, a car, a wife and your two-point-five children. You’re not supposed to be unemployed! Essentially, that above statement an my failure to meet those expectations led to me being rather depressed. I know I’ll get over it. I will pull through, and I’ll learn from it. It will just take time. It will work out in the end. I just need to have faith that my Higher Power has a plan for me. Speaking of Higher Power and all things Recovery related… Today is my eighth anniversary clean and sober. My last relapse was 8 years ago today – January 31st, 1996. It’s taken me almost ten years to get this far, but it’s been worth it. These last several months I have made an effort to get to meetings – even taking a group-level service committment. I haven’t been working on my steps as I should, but I’ll get there. All in all, this is the "birthday" I have been looking forward to. And, I’m feeling much better today than I was on Thursday. So that’s in from me for now. Thanks for visiting and Keep Coming Back!!!]]>