Things aren’t all doom; all the time, around here, contrary to my wallowing in it this morning.

I may have mentioned that my day job, she is running out. I’m frantically busy with some of the death throes right now, and really kicking ass at that, but at the end of the year, I’m out on the street. Possibly sooner, if they look up in July and notice that I’m out of work, a scenario which doesn’t amuse me.

Sure, I could stay with my company; they’d love to keep me, and I’d be OK with that. I’m finally vested, and get all sorts of really good benefits. But to stay means to move, and I’m not leaving the kids. I don’t have the resources to fight for them, if I wanted to bring them with me, and that’s sort of a horrible choice to present to a kid anyway. “Which parent do you want to live with? C’mon, pick, I don’t have all day here!”

Yeah, no. I’ll stay here, even if it means a drastic cut in pay.

Which it will. I tried to get on with the County in an environmental job in the fall, and was passed over. Theoretically, I could go to one of the neighboring counties or another position could open up here, but I’m not terribly enthusiastic about that.

I’m not sitting back waiting for the axe though. What I’ve been doing is using my business to get a foot in the door with the County department that’s actually four buildings down from me here. When Big Jeff went to Iraq, I suddenly became the only water operator for nine months, and they liked my work.

They liked my work enough that the guys on the ground here are finally listening to what Jeff and I have been saying for years; that in order to be in compliance with State laws, they need to have a full-time operator, not only part-time contract operators.

They’re working on making a permanent position, although that’s a fight, especially in the middle of the budget year. And they want me for the job. Jeff would do too, but they want to wrap the leftover on-site environmental stuff into the operator’s job, and I’m really the best man for that. That’s my job now, after all. Besides, Jeff’s getting out of the water business.

So today, I made a step forward on that. They’d asked me to contract with them for a certain number of hours to help write a document. Today, I signed a contract for that, making myself an official consultant in both of my jobs, although I’m much more proud of the one that has my name on the letterhead.

It’s a perfect situation too; I don’t actually have to produce the document, just assist the manager in producing it. I’ll get my 50 hours without having the stress of signing my name to it in front of the State. (Not that I won’t have stress enough; it’s due June 30.) And it’s not just this one product; I know damn well that it’s an audition for the real job, the one we’d all like me to have. And getting to keep my hand in writing the operations plan from which I’d have to work is sort of a gift.

The two hitches in my carefully laid out plans (do they ever go right?) are one: the pay rate stinks. Like, a 20% paycut from my day job’s rate, not to mention the loss of the business income from the County work that I already do, and two: one of the County Supervisors got cold feet about making the position.

The money thing is surmountable. It’ll be tight rations for a couple of years, but this job has the potential to move back up in the ranks; I’ve hit the top for this location in my current job. I’ll get back up to an acceptable rate sooner or later.

But the cold-feet thing, now that could be a problem. Last week, the manager came to me and told me what was going on, and asked me to write a bid on doing the whole thing as a contractor. And please to have it by the end of the day, which sent me into a little bit of a panic. After all, my business has only ever been a part-time one, and it’s a whole different ball game when you’re entirely supporting yourself independently. You have to think about things like self-employment taxes, and hiring backup, and health insurance and all of that. So I took a fairly standard equation of doubling one’s billing rate to cover all of that overhead, checked the numbers to see if I could do it and wasn’t fooling myself, and sent him up my bid. They wanted it to show the Supervisor how much more it would be to contract someone, but I tried to keep it realistic. After I looked at the numbers, I sort of hope they take it, even if it does put a metric ass-load of stress on me. The money would be good!

So, step one; sign small contract: done.

Step two coming up! (I hope.)