Moj_ Patti
Alas, my job!
Oct 05, 2009
For those of you who don't know, my husband and I are $600 toilet seats. I mean to say that we are government contractors at a military base (can't go into a lot of details). We are a little different, because rather than sitting in some nifty office building in the city or in an industrial park, we work on base with our customer. Right now, I'm sitting in a 20-year-old building made up of 36 trailers stacked on one another. My 20-year-old cube walls are a hideous shade of orange (they had to be on super duper ultra closeout when they bought them). My desk is probably close to 30 years old. The civil service folks I support live upstairs.
I don't get paid a ton of money for what I do -- if I worked in Los Angeles, I'd probably be making at least $30K more. But I don't want to live, work/commute 2 hours to Los Angeles, so I'm fine with what I do get paid to work here.
Last week the government hosted a job fair that seven different people bugged me about going to. There are two others coming up – I’m going on Wednesday. I figured something was up because government job fairs are basically targeted at military getting out. They have riveting seminars on how to dress like a professional civilian, what’s a resume?, stuff like that – which are a joke for people like me. And most open government jobs are restricted to current government people and former military. It’s like they go into the bathroom at their office and change from their fatigues into shirts and ties. (Don't want to bag on the military -- they are tremendously underappreciated for what they do for all of us. But a lot of them are also 24 years old. I'm 40 and I've been working on this base for 18 years.)
Today I heard a rumor from two people in the know who said the government is converting 90 of the 130 contractor jobs here at my office to government positions. The remaining 40 jobs will just go away. We don’t have enough contractor dead wood to make keeping all the good people possible.
I’m not sure how they’re going to do it – functionally, I am not an technical person like my husband. I’m more of a public affairs type. And that office continually gets lots of extra work, no new bodies, mostly positions cuts and crap for funding. The good news is that the people I know in Public Affairs who work there now that I know have good opinions of me. And the Government chief here at my office values me. But in hiring priority, I’m still below a 24-year-old military person who worked in Public Affairs for two weeks before they got out.
This is sort of weird for me because I have applied for almost every open public affairs position since 1996. It has been a goal to become a government person. Their benefits are a lot better than what I have now (a Mom concern), they pay better, and they have a retirement plan that’s pretty cool. I just didn’t want to do it this way -- with unemployment looming if it doesn't work out. There are just NO JOBS for what I do in the area.
I am trying to expand my bailiwick a little to cover more technical work. Thank GOD/BUDDHA/THE FORCE I had my surgery, because trying to find a job as a 388-pound person is impossible. (I was 297 yesterday – and I think the loosing is picking up a bit.) With this economy, I don’t think I can get a transfer with my present company.
However, another thing I know is that no one really knows what’s going on right now. The “plan” will change 37 times before the end of this October. The changeover won't happen until next October.
I do know that the young and mobile will start running from the building, like the proverbial rats from a sinking ship. Which will dump work on those of us who are not as mobile. I saw this when my former employer lost their contract in 2002.
P.S. -- Just got an e-mail invite to a mandatory meeting this afternoon. Yikes!
