Job Hunting 1.01 - Being Lucky Helps

Life has been so scattered, crazybrain, mental of late that all I want to do on my downtime is Netflix and Chill. And that's not code for any funny business. Except, maybe halfway through an episode of Narcos, Iven's eyebrow may cock upwards knowingly and the twinkle in his eye will say it all.... "There's leftover pizza in the fridge, wanna reheat it?" The last time I posted here I was unemployed and the biggest concern of my life was what to eat for lunch. Now I literally have no time for lunch because I'm doing the jobs of three people. So...here's the story of how I wound up with my first job in NYC.

It was a busy day on the unemployment front - in between watching Charmed and trawling the job section on Linkedin, I took a break and checked out what was happening on Facebook. I'm part of a group on Facebook for Aussies in NYC...it's a pretty rad little online community of Aussies and my go to place whenever I need specialist Aussie advice like "Where are the best meat pies in NYC?". Anywho - I noticed a post from a fellow Aussie advertising a temp reception job for a financial services marketing agency. Bored of being home alone day in day out and suffering severe shopping withdrawals, I got in touch. Without even a phone call, I had landed a couple weeks work to earn some dollars while still hunting for a permanent and just needed to rock up at the office on Monday to start. So I started after the weekend, and first day in I already hated it. The two bosses were crazy, people yelled at each other and a colleague cried (I waited til I got home to cry). I fantasized about quitting for much of my first week. Going out for lunch, and just not coming back. Not coming back after the weekend. But ultimately, I wanted a paycheck...so I came back. Something odd happened on my second week there though. One of the girls (a kiwi) didn't show up for work one day. She had gone home sick the day before, but hadn't called in sick for the day. Nobody heard anything until Monday, when she got in touch to say that she was very ill and needed to go home to New Zealand for treatment. She was allegedly on a plane at 4pm that day and that was the last we ever heard of her. Despite wanting to believe the story - all I could think was that she was acting out one of my quitting fantasies. And without saying 'Liar, Liar', I did see she was tagged in a mutual friends photo on Facebook at Burning Man a few weeks after she allegedly went home to NZ. Power to you. Anywho - so her departure was my opportunity, and I started to take on her account manager role. I hated work a little less by this point, because I got to realizing that yes, I do in fact work with crazy people, but if you treat them like crazy people, and anticipate the crazy, it's a lot easier to deal with. Maybe not even 2 weeks later, the Project Manager up and left the company. Granted, she gave more notice than "My flight leaves at 4pm today" - but still not enough to get a replacement. So again, I absorbed her role once she left. So now I'm project managing and account managing. Hopefully, our COO will leave soon and I can become COO soon as well. So now I am kind of in this weird place at work. I pretty much hate the work...because I'm doing the job of 2-3 people in a severely under resourced company, working stupid long hours and getting paid very little to do so. And also getting reamed out by clients who are suffering because of the lack of resources. And maybe I could deal with being abused by people and treated with no respect if it was even remotely related to what I wanted to be doing career wise. And then because I work these long, exhausting hours, by the time I get home most nights it's all I can do to not fall asleep into my halal food, let alone search for jobs that I actually want. And New York is a tough job market, so I'd be silly to walk away from a paycheck without something lined up first, right? Ugh. Being an adult sucks.