Burning Flares

“Is there gas in the car? Yes there’s gas in the car.”

                              -Steely Dan, Kid Charlemagne

On Thursday I’m scheduled for an interview with the County for an IT position.  That would be Placer County.  Placer County stretches from the Sacramento suburbs though the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the Nevada State line.  The position would be in Auburn, the county seat, which as it happens is just about 200 miles from my front door.  Thankfully the interview will be over the phone.

Should I be offered the position, and should I accept, although I don’t see myself turning down any offer at this point, either my family and I would move to Auburn like we did back in 2006, or I would move by myself and continue to look for employment closer to home, hoping someday to return.  My likely tiny apartment would serve as a weekend getaway for the rest of my brood, or I would make the drive to Fresno on weekends to try and retain the family unit.

            Does applying for jobs hundreds of miles away make sense?  Is it logically sound to apply for a job from so far away when it’s likely that there will be local applicants?  In this day when relocation assistance is so far removed to have dropped into fable, is it wise to apply remotely?  Would a business consider looking at an applicant from so far away, running the risk that after the entire hiring process the prospective employee might decline an offer, prompting said business to start over from scratch?

            Yes I’ve heard the “we’ll retain your application on file should another position come up,” but I believe that like I believe the check is in the mail.

            But back to applying remotely and back to logic.  Logically it makes sense to stay in my yard when asking for work, but perhaps there are times when acting illogical is the logical thing to do.  In an episode of the original Star Trek show a number of the crew, including Spock, Bones, and Scotty among others, were marooned on a hostile planet when their shuttle threw a rod or something.  After the red-shirt crewman was killed by giant cavemen, Scotty used the group’s phasers to give the shuttle enough power to lift off.  But once out of the atmosphere, it was determined that they could not achieve orbit and would fall back and burn up.  In a move that smelled of emotional desperation, Spock jettisoned and ignited the remaining fuel in what the others thought was a last ditch effort to break away from the planet’s gravity.  It didn’t work.  Bones said something about Spock abandoning his strict adherence to logic but just when it looked like the red-shirt guy had been given the easy way out, the Enterprise appeared and scooped (beamed) them up.  Kirk had seen the trail of burning fuel.  Spock made some snarky comment about acting illogical being the logical thing to do and everyone had a good laugh.  Star Trek, is there nothing it can’t teach us?

I have to write in the names and contact information of six businesses I’ve applied to every time I fill in the form for unemployment benefits, but other than that no one other than me is tracking where I apply for work (I’m doubtful that anyone at the unemployment office reads those entries but they are all true and verifiable).  But I’m ensnared in a no quit scenario where I must keep trying to find work because the alternative unthinkable.  But there are days when there is nothing, absolutely nothing out there locally.  So that’s how I ended up interviewing at a small Catholic College in Oakland, at a broadband fiber provider in Utah, at a world class aquarium in Monterey, and with, believe it or not, a telecommunication company in Illinois.  I was this close to moving to Champagne. 

Then there is karma.  Will the employment gods bestow upon me a cubicle and paycheck if I only apply within the greater Fresno area?  I’m not taking any chances.  So every day I search first in Fresno then I expand my search.  It doesn’t always reach to Illinois, but as far as the Golden State is concerned, I’ve got it covered.  Now if only a passing star ship would see my flare of burning fuel.

Greater Marysville

We got an early start.  It was a 225 mile drive from our humble front door to the two very large brass doors on a building on 7^th Street in Downtown Los Angeles, and I didn’t want to risk being a minute late.  Three and a half hours later I was changing into my suit in the Macy’s parking garage.  I kept an eye out for paparazzi, because it seems like a decent, law-abiding person can’t take their clothes off in public these days without getting their picture taken.  This is a particular problem for celebrities in Los Angeles.   

After lunch in a food court (yum right?), found myself on the eight floor of a 1925 office building (pictured), begging for a job in what may be the last city in the country in which I’d choose to work. 

Los Angeles was founded by the Spanish in 1781 and either named El Pueblo de la Reyna de los Angeles (The Town of the Queen of the Angels), or El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de Porciuncula (Our Lady of the Angles).  It’s not named after angels, but after Jesus’ mother, Mary.  Really it could legitimately be called Marysville.  The town was originally established as a pueblo, a sort of civic go between that separated the military presidios from the missions, in an effort to limit secular power over the citizens.  Pretty good beginning, but Los Angeles went from rich farming, to cattle and tallow, to violent racism against Indians, to violent racism against Chinese, to newspaper backed anti-union violence, to that all powerful greaser of the industrial economy; oil.  Oil and the railroad arrived in Los Angeles so close together that it created a perfect storm of migration, consumption, and soon questionable appropriation. 

The population exploded and when the aquifer under the San Fernando Valley dropped enough, the city leaders needed to find new water supplies or the growth of Los Angeles would slow and possibly stop.  Imagine Los Angeles as a ghost town, there are your angels.  So they tricked the ranchers in the Owens Valley, 250 miles north, into surrendering their water rights and tricked the citizens of Los Angeles with a fake drought, by well-placed false newspaper stories, and by emptying reservoirs into storm drains, into voting for bonds to build an aqueduct between the two.  An act of Congress allowed cities to own land outside their boundaries, which allowed Los Angeles to own the land, and the water on and under it, in the Owens Valley.  In a statement of extreme arrogance, the architect of this massive appropriation (theft?) of water, William Mulholland said when the water started flowing, “There it is.  Take it.”  He’s said worse.

I’ve met people from around the country and whenever I reveled that I hailed from California, I leaned to brace for the inevitable comments about how my Golden State is full of nothing but lazy surfers, gang-bangers, narcissistic actors and wannabe actors, one-person-to-a-car smog creators, plastic-surgery lovers, and generally shallow and dull celebrity-obsessed malcontents.  My answer usually was something along the lines of, “That’s just L.A., and the rest of the state isn’t like that.”

So when I found this job that paid well, was interesting, and fit very well with my skill set, I applied, even though I was about as eager to move to Los Angeles as the daughter in those Liam Neeson Taken movies is to get a phone call from her dad.  But I revisited my comment about how Los Angeles isn’t like the rest of the state.  Perhaps I was being  like those other 49'ers (People from the 49 states other than California).  Perhaps within the greater Los Angeles area, one neighborhood isn’t like the next, one group isn’t just like another, each person is a complete, complicated, individual and grouping them together makes about a much sense and saying a wine-sniffing Marin County yoga instructor is the same as a surf-riding Ventura County um…yoga instructor.  Perhaps that’s a bad example.

On the way home we decided to visit a neighborhood where I might live, should I get the position.  Since I know very few people who live, or have lived in Los Angeles, we decided to just pick a place and take a look.  Since we didn't have a dart and map at our disposal, we choose by situation comedy.  We thought the view out the window on the show Big Bang Theory looked nice, so we chose the City of Pasadena.  It did indeed look nice as we cruised by the City Hall and a downtown farmer’s market, and as we accidentally found the Gamble House at the exact moment we started looking for it.  Apartments were priced higher than Fresno, obviously, but not that much higher and there is some sort of train that runs to downtown Los Angeles, just 11 miles away. One of the few people I know who has experience living in Los Angeles suggested I look for a home in the Chinatown area, where I could literally walk to Dodger Stadium.  I don’t know about that, after all, one does not simply walk into Mordor.

Here’s the deal.  I’ve been out of work for 14 months.  Seeing as how beggars cannot be choosers and seeing as how the job I interviewed for is a pretty good one, if I’m offered it, I’ll go.  I’d be giving up a city where I know all the streets, where I have a support system of family and friends, and where my commutes have been about as hectic as a stroll through park, to move to a city where the streets are all unfamiliar and expanded exponentially, where I know nearly no one, and where my commute might look like a parking lot at Walmart on Black Friday.  I’ll give Los Angeles a chance.  I’ll find the better places to eat than the Macy’s food court, I'll find the quickest route to the beach from wherever I end up living, and maybe I'll volunteer at a museum like I did in Auburn.  Who knows, I may someday “walk into Mordor."