When It Rains, It Pours

I had 2 – count them, two! – job interviews today!

The first one was with ASRC, or Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (as in, Big Oil). A guy I used to work with way back in my Fluor Daniel days is the manager of the EIC group (electrical, instrumentation, and controls) and had recognized my name when my resume made its way across his desk.

In fact, he had tried a few years earlier to get me to work for him - but at the time I was happily employed and didn’t want to switch gears.

He invited me to lunch with him at the Peppermill restaurant, just on the other side of the parking lot to his building. We had a nice lunch (I ate an Ahi Tuna sandwich that was truly scrumptious) while catching up on old times and going over the job parameters.

After boxing up the leftovers and paying the bill, we headed over to his office to go over the particulars.

The building he works in is relatively new, and is really a nice building. It has a good feel to it when you’re walking down the hallways, even though they are stuffing as many cubicles as they can into an open space – a concept that managers love but worker-bees tend to hate.

The work I would be doing is basically the same as what I did in my pipeline days – it wouldn’t take that much of a learning curve to get back in to the swing of things. I’d have to learn their layering system, their plotting styles, and all that sort of thing - of course. But I’d have to do that no matter where I end up. At least at this place it’s got a familiar ring to it.

I saw quite a few familiar faces while walking around: people I had worked with both here in town and down in Valdez. Quite a few of them recognized me in return, even! One guy actually said, “You used to have red hair!” in reference to the grey I now have. Oh well… he’s a guy – what more can you expect?

The offer that was made to me was quite impressive, and very tempting. Not to mention the fact that they would like me to start today if at all possible (it’s not). But – since I had another interview scheduled for today that I still had to go to, I told them I would decide once I knew what I had to choose from and get back to them.

So, off I headed to my second one of the day: at NVision Architecture.

This company is located in a building that’s not quite so nice and is in a part of town that is trying to clean itself up but hasn’t quite gotten there yet.

Inside is very nice, however. The floors are poured concrete made to look like marble = very classy. The interiors and special features are obviously created to impress clients, and are very warm & inviting.

I like it!

I sat in the conference room with the lead architect and spoke to him for about half an hour. Apparently, he has spoken to other people about me (that’s always an uncomfortable thought) so had an idea as to my capabilities already – he mostly needed to hear what I had to say about things before making up his mind officially.

He did say that I had some of the best references that he’d ever come across before! That’s quite the complement, I think. People think well enough of me to actually recommend me for employment – even without me asking them to!

This firm is considerably smaller than ASRC; they have 12 people right now and are hoping to ramp up to about 16. There’s no chance that they could come even close to the pay-scale that Big Oil offers, but they are offering slightly more than I was making at my last job.

I haven’t made up my mind officially yet.

Do I work for Big Oil, make buckets of money, have awesome benefits and loads of work (mandatory 16 hours of overtime each week) for years to come?

Or do I choose the work I went to school for, where the jobs are not guaranteed and the work load fluctuates regularly from “pick-your-nose boredom” to “oh-my-god this-has-to-be-finished-tonight”?

Call me crazy – but I think I’m actually going to turn down financial bliss.

Either way, I start on Tuesday!