Sunday, February 01, 2009

Old news

Right before my Thanksgiving trip home, I was laid off (or "made redundant," for the Brits) from my job.

Now, let's get this straight: being laid off sucked. Huge donkey balls.

But...but...

This does rather solve a lot of problems for me and The Limey. The silver lining shone quite brightly, as a matter of fact. My commute was getting increasingly unbearable- almost everything had moved to the science park outside of Southampton and I was spending upwards of four hours a day getting to and from it. And the golden lining behind the silver one: there is now no reason for us to stay in Woking!

Oh yes, as soon as I find a new job, we are out! And now, of course, I have a much better idea of what kind of commute I can tolerate and what kind of work I want to do.

Sure, job-hunting sucks, as it always has, and not having my income sucks, but we can live pretty much indefinitely on The Limey's salary. I'm so glad now that I insisted on renting a place we could afford on one income. Without my hugely expensive monthly train ticket, we can get by pretty well. There's not much money left over, mind, so I can't go jetting off to London whenever I want, and- horrors!- we've had to stop shopping at Waitrose, but we're comfortably in the black. Plus, I got some redundancy pay, which went directly into a savings account for the house/flat/whatever we want to buy eventually.

Anyway, what this means is I have the luxury of time in finding a new job. I'll need it in this job market, for sure, but it does mean I can look out for exactly what I want.

I didn't post about this on the blog because, unlike the last time I was job-hunting, it is now easy to find this blog with a search on my full name. And any hiring manager worth his/her salt would do such a search, I believe. But not working has such a big effect on my day-to-day life that not blogging about it seemed weird to me. So, although I won't blog about the job search itself, I will be able to talk about what the heck I'm doing with all this free time.

6 comments:

Lien said...

Good luck with the job search! I actually thought that science/health and education were pretty safe industries.

Anonymous said...

Good luck with the job hunt, and I'm glad that you are bearing up well after being laid off. If you are interested in doing some pattern design work (for a small, small, independent company), let me know!

Sinéad said...

So sorry to hear about your job woes. Hopefully this is a good thing like you said! Best of luck with the job hunting.

Woolly Stuff said...

ooooh, good luck!

mooncalf said...

Fingers crossed for you. I'm impressed by your attitude and I'm sure any recruiter would be. Hope you have every success with whatever (and wherever) you plan to do!

Anonymous said...

I hope it all goes well for you. The power of positive thinking! And in the mean time you can keep make us jealous of all the knitting you´re getting done and all your beautiful FOs.