06.17.05
all night long
It’s 10:57PST, which means it’s 1:57AM EST. I’m sitting on the appropriately tacky casino-carpet floor of Terminal B in Las Vegas McCarran International Airport, en route back home to New Jersey after what may very well be one of the most stressful, interesting, engaging, terrifying, uncharacteristically spontaneous adventures of my adult life.
It all starts with the fact that I’m quitting my job. When I took this job, I thought it was my dream job, but things quickly turned sour. A bunch of circumstances got in the way, and all of a sudden I found myself back in the same place I was when I was looking for work the last time. My philosophy has always been that when it stops being fun and starts being work, it’s not worth staying. So I’ve been playing the job-hunt-recruiter-laden-suit-and-tie-wearing-interview-going game for the last few weeks now.
I’ve even accepted a position already, with a really great technology company back home in NYC, and I’m all set to give my notice on Monday. So what, you may be asking, has all this got to do with my so-called “adventure”?
On Thursday morning I when I would normally be leaving for work, I was driving to the airport to catch a flight to California to interview with one of the biggest names on the Internet. The position is everything I could hope for, and has completely redefined my impression of what a “dream job” would be: Getting to work at a company surrounded by the people who practically (or in some cases, literally) invented the technology to begin with.
The interview went really well, but now the hardest part for me begins — the waiting game. I should be hearing from them by the end of the week, and while I feel really great about how things went, now is when I begin obsessing about all of the negative possibilities that I can dream up.
I have never been great at dealing with anticipation, even in situations where whatever I’m obsessing over isn’t that big of a deal. In this case, it really *is* a big deal. If I receive an offer to work for this company, my entire life will change. I’ll be moving across the country to start a completely new life, and the life I’m living today will become a distant memory. I see a very obvious fork in the road, and what I do with the rest of my life will be completely determined by what happens this week. I’m sure I will look back on this a year from now and laugh, but at this moment, that future seems a lifetime away.
The area of the floor I’m sitting in seems to have become the gathering and gossiping area of the people who clean the bathrooms here at the Las Vegas Airport. Since I’m now being overtaken by a group of lovely overweight janitors of various sexes in baby blue shirts and navy blue pants who may very well run me down with their Rubbermaid carts, I should wrap things up. See you back East in the morning.
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