The Relocation Saga – Part 2

Everything Falls Into Place

Well, hunting for a job isn’t everything that it’s cracked up to be. A cursory look for positions proved to be frustrating and fruitless. Seriously. Once my resume was out on the web, I started getting calls from all sorts of recruiters, but none of the positions materialized. One of them got to the last interview and then they told me that they wanted me to work in Manhattan Beach. Just to clarify, they didn’t want me working at their office in Manhattan Beach, they just wanted me to live close by so I could stop in as a contractor at their whim.

Pass.

Then there was the position doing what I was doing in Connecticut but in San Francisco. During the two week phone-screening process, they had three re-orgs, two major changes in their management and a freeze put on their hiring.

Had an offer been placed to me, I would have passed.

Then there was the startup that sounded great with excellent people that I would have been honored to work with, but the hiring went from burning hot to ice cold in less than 5 days.

So, essentially I gave up. That’s when Carlos, long time friend and co-worker, instant messaged me with the name of a recruiter that was looking for a product manager for an IVR company in the bay area. For the hell of it, I emailed my resume and gave him a call. He said that he wanted to review my resume and would call me back.

Fifteen minutes later, the phone rang. A quick phone screening later, I was scheduling up an interview with the hiring manager.

Two phone interviews later, I was asked to come out to California – on the week that I already had scheduled for vacation (coincidence? I THINK NOT) – for a series of interviews. A week later, Janet and I were bound for the Bay Area once again.

The interviews were a blur. That Wednesday, I had a quick meeting with the hiring manager. The next day, from 8am to 4pm, I was interviewing with everybody from the CEO to fellow individual contributors who would eventually become coworkers. Thursday night Janet and I left the San Jose area and went to stay in San Francisco.

I got the call on Friday that everything looked positive for an offer to be put together.

Ok. It’s Friday afternoon, and we just found out that we’re coming back to the bay. That’s great, but we were flying back on Sunday… that left us one day to find an apartment.

In San Francisco, finding an apartment in a day is borderline impossible.

So we started off by subscribing to Rent Tech on Friday night from my iBook using the most excellent SurfAndSip wireless network from a local coffee shop and calling apartment after apartment after apartment. By 6pm, we had picked out 4 potential places and had scheduled one walkthrough and planned on going to three open houses.

The first place was a dud.

It was nice, but it was small and on the ground floor with bars on the windows. Plus, the landlord was a first time landlord and he had just bought the property. Not the best combination, right?

Second time’s a charm

The second place, less than 5 blocks from our old studio in the Lower Haight, was amazing. Parking, washer/dryer hookup, two floors, two bedrooms, skylights and a private yard. Within minutes, we were filling out the paperwork – and the manager said that if we wanted it, it was ours.

We looked at one more place…

It was nice, but nothing spectacular. At that point, we cancelled the last apointment we had scheduled and told the manager that we were coming over with a deposit check. Apartment hunt complete! Total time – less than a day.

The next few days were a blur. Getting the offer letter, getting the lease, signing both the letter and the lease, resigning, scheduling the flight out to California (because they needed me to start in less than 2 weeks) and getting an unexpected offer on our condo from one of Janet’s co-workers. By the time I could stop to catch my breath, I was packing up my suitcase and getting ready to head to San Francisco as a solo act for the next two weeks.

Life as a bachelor…

It sucked. Luckilly, between the friends from the Toronado, Jocelyn and Slappy, Brett (a co-worker of Jocelyn and Slappy), Paul Jack and Jeremy (both kinfolk of Jocelyn), they kept my mind off of the fact that I was celebrating my 12th wedding anniversary 3000 miles away from Janet. But July 1 came faster than expected and I was on my way back to Hartford to gather up Janet and the cats, supervise the movers and prep for our drive back to San Francisco.

Tune in for the next installment: 3000 Miles, 3 Days, Two Cats and a Dead Cow on the Median…