I've been working at the same job for the past 7 years, and I do love my job, the company I work for, the work environment, everything, but in the past 6 months or so I noticed things started to change. We're talking about moving to a smaller office space in the building, or moving into just half the floor we're in now. There's talk about shipping some furniture from an office we had in Portland back here so we can sell it (Ikea office furniture??? It costs more to ship than its worth for resale), people have been leaving and their positions not being filled. Pretty much the company is slowly dying. While is that a little bit stressful to me, my boss assured me that everything was fine (mostly because he was afraid I'd see the writing on the wall and start looking for a new job). In the midst of all this I start getting cold calls from recruiters, looking to snipe me away from my job. I mostly blew them off, because the whole interview process and all that is a pain in the ass.
Then I get a call from a recruiter practically begging me to take a look at this job position, saying that the company was already interested in me and that he would really like me to just go check it out. So finally, after the third call, I decided to set up an interview. The location of this company is in an inconvenient place for me (I'm used to a 10 minute commute from South Minneapolis to downtown, this place will likely be 45 minutes each way, though I haven't done a test run to see how long it'll take int he morning), but when I walk up to the building and I have to have the guy interviewing me vouche for me at the security checkpoint at the door my interest level starts going up. The guy I'm talking to is the IT director worldwide for this company. He's Danish, so it takes me just a minute to get used to his accent because sometimes we sarcastically speak in german or danish accents around here. We talk for about an hour, about the job a little, mostly about life and what we like to do, what sort of beers we're interested in, things like that.
I'm impressed. After about an hour he tells me that its been great talking to me and I'll be hearing from him in a couple of days. Three days later I hear back, and they want me to speak with their CIO in Denmark. I talk for about an hour on the phone with him too, and basically tell him I don't know anything about Denmark other than that they have a queen and they're supposed to be the happiest people in the world (to which he laughed and laughed and said, in his heavy danish accent "Oh yeah, we are VERY happy people").
I hear back from my recruiter that they'd like to hire me and we discuss salaries and benefits and things like that, then the next day I get an offer letter and a big long boilerplate Nondisclosure, noncompete, etc etc agreement to sign. This is at 3pm on a friday, the day before I'm leaving for mexico for 12 days. For some reason I'm nervous as hell about telling my boss about it, but I did need to tell him ASAP so he'd have as much time as possible to deal with it. He looks at the offer (which is for like 20k more than I'm making now, holy shit!) and says that he definitely can't beat it, and that I should take the job, congratulates me, and asks me when my last day is going to be. This wasn't the reaction I was expecting, but then again I didn't know what to expect.
After 2 lovely weeks in mexico, I come back, fill out the lengthy background check, and this morning I'm going to go pee in a cup for this job. That's the only part that makes me a little nervous. In the past week though I've passed both a dollar store weed test, and one from the pharmacy, so I think I'm good.
Its interesting how life can change so quickly, whether for the better or worse, and I'm not sure what I did to deserve this happening to me completely by random chance, but I'm thanking my lucky stars, knocking on wood, and trying to make sure that I keep my karma up. I don't want to preach or anything, but I feel like I've been doing as much for other people in the name of karma as I can, and it feels like I've been rewarded for it. So my advice to anyone who's read this far in this post: Do something nice for someone, help someone out, be kind for the sake of being kind. I feel like the universe has rewarded me for doing that, so I'm going to keep it up, and so should you.
