In the South & The Incredible Disappearing Contract

The oth­er big dif­fer­ence here in the south­ern US (and when I say ‘south­ern’, I mean ‘Mary­land’, which is as far North as you can get and still be below the Mason Dixon Line — which runs between Mary­land and Penn­syl­va­nia) from the Pacif­ic North­west is the heat. It has final­ly start­ed to cool off a lit­tle since I got here, now at about 26 C, which is a lit­tle warm but tol­er­a­ble. Pri­or to today, I pret­ty much had to stay inside with the air con­di­tion­ing going all day. The same was true of going out — all stores, cars and restau­rants have their air con­di­tion­ing blast­ing so hard that you fre­quent­ly have to take a jack­et with you to keep from get­ting too cold when inside! I can’t bear to think what the elec­tric­i­ty usage is here. The Onion made fun of the whole glob­al warm­ing and rise in air con­di­tion­ing sto­ry this week.

The heat means lots of insects, plants (my par­ents live in a lush area to the north of the Bal­ti­more belt­way), birds and ani­mals. We’ve seen car­di­nals, finch­es, hum­ming­birds, mourn­ing doves, mock­ing­birds, wood­peck­ers, chip­munks and if course, squir­rels. I missed the vis­it of a semi-reg­u­lar vis­i­tor to the prop­er­ty, a red-tailed fox, who my par­ents spied this morn­ing as he loped across their back­yard and woods.

It’s a Done Deal. Or Not.
I’m still deal­ing a bit with the time change, and try­ing to stay in touch with work and life back home. The day before I left, I had an excit­ing poten­tial con­tract that I respond­ed to imme­di­ate­ly with a major web com­pa­ny (whose name I’ll with­hold for the time being) that looked like it was about to go through. While I did­n’t burn any bridges back at my cur­rent job, it looked like upon my return to Van­cou­ver, my old part-time job would be more or less over (with a few things to tidy up, some good-byes, etc.) and I’d be start­ing a new 6‑week con­tract. Resumés, sam­ples and a fol­low-up phone call had all gone through with encour­ag­ing words from my con­tact, a staffing per­son with the company.

Some­how all of that went ter­ri­bly wrong while I was on the road, and the staffing rep’s emails got sketch­i­er and vaguer with each pass­ing day. Now it looks as if that per­son over­stepped their author­i­ty in offer­ing me the job, and that some­one else was referred to the com­pa­ny. Since I was out of town (and our phone voice mail was still MIA), I was too hard to reach, and the whole thing has now van­ished and anoth­er staffing per­son from that com­pa­ny is telling me to ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you’. I’m real­ly dis­ap­point­ed about this, and feel like I was treat­ed pret­ty shab­bi­ly (The orig­i­nal con­tact has still not con­tact­ed me with a defin­i­tive ‘no’ and any sort of apol­o­gy.) If I had got­ten the nib­ble at any oth­er week of the year I could have been able to push for it (or at least I thought I could — this is, in all hon­esty, just spec­u­la­tion). Such is the way life goes. Some­times it is indeed, all in the timing.