On March 10, I started a new part-time temporary job at a Raleigh healthcare company. Initially, I was working second shift, 5:30 to 10:30 p.m. The job itself was good news; the pay isn’t any better than unemployment insurance, but my unemployment benefits were getting close to being exhausted, and this will help stretch them out. It created some other difficulties, though. I had recently increased the amount of time I was spending on my job search and related activities (such as going to networking meetings) during the day, and when the job took over my evenings, I found that I had no time at all for anything else. (Now you know why I’ve been blogging so little recently.) I realized in the last couple of days that my schedule was not sustainable, and was trying to figure out a new strategy for managing my time.
Now things are changing again. Beginning March 26 (that’s today, since it’s past midnight), I’m on first shift, working 8:30 to 5:30. This is going to be a disorienting transition — I got off work at 10:30 p.m., and I have to be back at work at 8:30 a.m. I have to transform from a night owl to a morning person in ten and a half hours. (I’m guessing that large quantities of coffee will be involved.) But once I adjust, I will at least have my evenings back. It will be nice to see my family again. I’m going to have to figure out how to keep my job hunt going while working full-time, though. I’ll have to drop out of most of the networking events I’ve been going to, but of course there are evening meetings that I can now attend. And working full-time means I can earn more, stretching out the unemployment benefits even further. This is definitely a mixed blessing, but it is a blessing.
But this job is still temporary. At the stroke of midnight on the last day of May, it turns into a pumpkin. Well, I’ll just have to find a more permanent job by then. In the meantime, I had better get some sleep.