…and got it! And now I’m kind of upset.
How can this be? The backstory: I am a Federal employee for an agency - let’s call it “Homing and City Development”. I was working in Ohio until 2 years ago, when they closed that office and offered us our choice of 5 other cities to which we could move, none of which were cities we wanted. Out of our limited choices, we opted for a very large city in Colorado that I’ll call “Peytonville”, because of the apparent requirement that you need to wear a Peyton Manning jersey if you live here.
So we took the job in Peytonville, only to find that the real estate market was an insane seller’s market and our budget of $250k was horribly inadequate here. We moved to a crappy house in a mediocre neighborhood, made especially crappy since my wife has MS, is disabled and the suitability of the house really matters to her health.
I started my job and found that compared to my previous job, it sucked majorly even though it was theoretically the same position, with all the good things about my old job replaced by a Bizarro equivalent. I used to have a few days of field work every month that I enjoyed - that’s gone. I used to get almost no phone calls; now I have to take calls from a call center all day every Friday, which is a huge stressor for an introverted phone hater like me. The one thing I liked was my supervisor, who was a beacon of reasonableness in a sea of red tape. There were 2 supervisors, I knew my guy would always have my back, while the other guy is a total pointy-haired who not only didn’t have his employee’s backs, but thought their backs were only useful for pushing them under the bus at every opportunity. So, of course the good supervisor left in September, since he’s not stupid, and now I am under the bad supervisor.
We had already decided to try and move back to the Ohio part of the Midwest, or at least as close as we could manage, way back in March. When the good supervisor left, I decided to take more decisive action and contacted some people with my agency in a large Western Missouri city that we’ll call “Royals’ Titletown”. It wasn’t the ideal city, but was the closest (to Ohio) viable city that had jobs I might be able to get with my agency. Well, they told me some jobs might be opening up there in January, and directed me to their supervisor. In early November, I spoke to their supervisor and he expressed interest in me transferring there, so we began the (not guaranteed) process of asking for a hardship transfer (based on my wife’s issues; we had already gotten HQ approval for it in March but there were no positions then).
Since then, we’ve been mired in red tape, made worse by trying to do it at this time of year; various people have been hard or impossible to contact. Some are just not calling back. I never gave up on looking on USAJOBS at other agencies; I had had an interview in June but thought I could have done better in the interview, so I decided to apply to a couple of jobs that were listed, even though they were in cities not under consideration (Omaha and Tulsa).
Last week, one of my old supervisors called me to tell me he had been contacted by the Tulsa office (of, let’s say, the not-Navy Corps Of Guys Who Have The Same Job Title As Dilbert And Casey Jones, or the NNCOGWHTSJTADACJ) for a reference. So i was expecting to be called for a job interview. That call came this morning, except it wasn’t for an interview. It was to tell me I’d been selected for the position! Without an interview! I managed to get them to give me until Monday to give them an answer.
But the more I thought about the whole situation, the more I became frustrated, because I consider the NNCOGWHTSJTADACJ to be the single best Federal agency to work for, probably on the opposite end of the spectrum from Homing and City Development, and the job itself is close to my ideal. If it had been in a place we had EVER considered I would already have said yes.
So now we are in limbo in trying to get to where we’d like to be, but could take a great job in a location we don’t want (keeping in mind that neither of us has ever been in Oklahoma). Oy. To add to the general feeling of chaos, the housing in Royals’ Titletown is kind of limited for a disabled person, because they apparently LOVE their walkout basements and basement garages there, while Tulsa’s housing is darn near ideal, with really nice, handicapped-friendly houses plentiful for around $150k; our 250k budget would almost get us an estate there. Crap. I never thought I would get this upset over being OFFERED a job.
(TL;DR version: We’re trying desperately to get out of where we are, but now have the choice of waiting until who-knows-when to get to where we want to be, IF it even happens - or taking a great job in a place we don’t want to be, and haven’t even visited).
