(part 1)
Conducting a job hunt and planning a move with an unknown destination is the natural domain of someone in their early 20’s, fresh out of college (or sooner – people who don’t do post-secondary certainly fall in here too.) At that age and in that life stage, you simply don’t have a lot of ‘stuff’ to manage, your interests are already mobile (or can be mobilized quickly,) and as a result you’re able to “go with the flow” fairly easily even though it might not feel like it sometimes.
At the end of September 2021 I was 40 years old, with a full household of stuff to account for, having lived on my own with two kids for nearly 10 years, embarking on a mid-career job hunt and move that would take me at least across the US and possibly across an international border, during a global pandemic, with no way to know for sure how long it would last.
How does one even begin to PACK for this sort of thing?
What I could put in storage and move later depended on where I’d be going, what I’d need with me also depended on where I’d be going and for how long I’d be ‘living out of my suitcase.’ And if I ended up in Canada, there was a possibility I’d have to cross the border by air (like my co-parent and the kids did – they could not have made a land border crossing due to pandemic restrictions in place at the time.) In that event, anything I couldn’t take with me by air would have to go into storage somewhere else or disposed of.
So I packed and planned for the most difficult situation – a move to Canada in the dead of winter where I’d have to fly in.
This meant that anything that was banned from crossing the border in moving crates could not be packed in them. This is some wild stuff – among them, no candles, no liquids, no mattresses (we talked about that in the last one,) no batteries, no food of any kind, and no pharmaceuticals. Any of this stuff had to come with me in the car or be disposed of somehow. I also took the opportunity to purge a bit, since there was no use spending money to store and move stuff I didn’t need.
In hindsight, I could have done a bit more of that.
Into my car with me would go my ‘flyable’ items: my “checked bag” suitcase with a reasonable-but-not-unwieldy amount of cold-weather clothing, my “carry-on” suitcase with my summer-fall clothes and underthings, my “personal item” backpack with both personal and gaming laptops and all their essential cabling. Added to that were a couple baskets of cleaning supplies and toiletries, any food and drinks I needed to finish, a full set of interview clothes with a couple options, and a body pillow.
The Monday of Moving Week was load-in day. One by one, my guys picked up the UBOX containers from the storage location, brought them out, loaded them up, and took them back. I was lucky to book moving help with a guy who was very familiar with the whole process of working with those things.
As that was going on, I was sitting on a webinar about how to get the most out of a virtual job fair I’d be attending two weeks later. It was chaired by someone whose connection was dropping so often it was like the chaotic situation was on their end instead of mine. Once everything was packed in and my guys were paid (I turned out to need one more crate than planned, oof) I disconnected and returned my cable modem (though they’d charge me in full for a final month anyway.)
Gali: 0, Utility Companies: 1
As part of my lease, I was required to have the house and carpets professionally cleaned when I moved out and leave copies of the receipts to prove it. I believe this was so they could turn the property over Next Day if the property managers had a renter lined up. I also had the appliance rental company come to pick up my washer and dryer on one of those days. Renting those things turned out to be a boon – though I ended up paying rental fees adding up to more than the total cost of the machines over the life of the agreement, it was definitely worth it to not have to move or try to sell them. I’d had to do that when I moved to Texas in the first place.
My final day in Texas was set aside for “dealing with anything that went wrong earlier in the week,” but since everything had gone like clockwork, I did a final walk-through of the house, checked the mailbox for the last time, and thanked the house for its service for the prior four years. I left all my keys on the kitchen counter with my receipts and other notes, made sure the doors were locked, and exited through the garage, turning the locking knob for the final time.
I then drove over to visit with my cat one last time before I left. She refused to come out from under the bed, so I moved the bed a bit so I could lay on it and tuck my arm down and under it to pet her for a little while. I could feel her purring, but knew this was all I was going to get out of her. After about 20 minutes, I said my goodbyes, thanked her hosts once more, and got on the road back to the hotel.
On the way, I got a text message from my Retail Electric Company telling me my service had been cut over to the management company and that, because I had not given them a full 30-day written and documented notice, charged a $175 early termination fee.
Gali: 0, Utility Companies: 2
Early the next morning, I departed Austin in the POURING RAIN for (what I thought would be) the last time, making my first visit to a Buc-ees on the way out. I figured I’d lived in Texas for six years and never went to one, so I may as well on the way out.
That place is everything they say it is. Clean bathrooms, like a hundred gas pumps, and a tourist trap shopping area. I bought a Buc-ees mug as a souvenir.
As I had done six years before on the drive down to Texas, I chose to overnight in Memphis, TN, even though I knew it would make the second day longer. What I didn’t consider is how much longer it would make that second day. If I had been going back to Michigan, it would have been one thing, but Memphis was easily over 2 hours closer to Texas than I really should have stopped.
So when I rolled up to my folks’ house well after dark at the end of day two of the drive, I was DEAD. Sleep was essential, since I had a scheduled teleconference with my Career Counsellor the next morning. I was still feeling positive, expecting to hear good things from the Cloud Storage Provider soon. But that evening, as my Dad and I were picking up dinner, my phone buzzed, notifying me of their rejection e-mail. Back to square one.
A couple days later, I had a followup meeting with a Life Coach I’d worked with over the summer. She had been a member of the Austin Improv Community but had moved back to the PNW and inherited her Dad’s success coaching business. She’d been a big help early on in my job transition, giving me a place to get my priorities in order and think about what I wanted and needed. This last follow-up meeting had been scheduled over a month beforehand, and I had expected to share good news with her. Instead, I joined the call feeling adrift, but not completely without hope. I did have the virtual career fair a couple days later which would put me in touch with recruiters from several Canadian companies.
When the time came, I dutifully set up shop in a spare room with my computer and notebook and did all the things I was supposed to for the virtual career fair but it turned out to be a dead-end and complete waste of time since it was NOT AT ALL for mid-career IT people like me, let alone those hoping to find immigration sponsorship.
Another blow taken, and a scathing feedback survey sent in.
Over the next week I continued surfing LinkedIn and job posting sites looking for places to send applications, and managed to get 2-3 out per day. I also reached out to my cousin who does the same kind of work I do and had a networking chat with him, also to see if his company is hiring.
In hindsight he worked for an HR consulting company so there was NO WAY IN HELL I would have been hired to work anywhere close to his area of the company as a relative. But it was still good practice with all the self-marketing skills I’d been learning.
I was also notified around this time by my old Property Manager and the utility district where I’d lived in Texas that the water service never got properly handed off and I was now out my utility deposit.
Gali: 0, Utility Companies: 3
Then on October 14th, I submitted an application (among several others I had sent that day to companies on both sides of the border) to a new data specialist position that had just popped up at the Ottawa office of an electronics manufacturing company you have definitely heard of.
(The very next day, I took a bit of a break to watch the ACNH Nintendo Direct that featured the reveal of release 2.0. I was definitely hype, as my Discord PM history can confirm. While it’s not really on-topic for this story, it is interesting to think about what else was going on during all this.)
One week later, things were getting tense in the house. While I was welcome to be at my parents’ as long as I needed, none of us had expected it to last this long. But then I got a message from my co-parent. My youngest was in the hospital, and I needed to come up.
This began a 48-hour sequence which I knew would result if I was suddenly called to Canada – scheduling and taking a COVID entry test, registering for my arrival at the border, packing up what I needed, and heading north. While waiting for my COVID test at a local Urgent Care, I got the message that kiddo was released from the hospital after being treated for dehydration. But, already mostly executed on my emergency travel plan, I decided to go anyway. My co-parent had already stated her desire for me to come up and help with the kids, at least for a little while since their adjustment wasn’t going so well and her new job wasn’t turning out as expected.
The morning of October 24th, I set out for Ottawa, bringing my suitcases but leaving several non-essential things with my parents. I planned to be in Canada maybe through the end of November, and said as much at the border. I also checked in with my kitty-sitters in Austin and let them know her stay would be longer than anticipated.
Almost immediately when I got to Ottawa, I became part of the household. The kids, who had been in separate rooms, agreed to bunk together so I could have my own room. I continued my job searching from there, and began helping out around the house, walking the kids to and from school, and enjoying being needed while trying my best to not need anything more from them than a place to stay.
Sometime during the first week of November, I got contacted by a recruiter at The Electronics Manufacturer You’ve Definitely Heard Of to do a screening interview. This was promising. The thing I still remember most was the question about my experience working with non-technical people, since in the position I’d be working very closely with lots of them. I remember not knowing how to answer this at first since I’ve been working with “non-technical” people my whole life. To me, no matter how technically adept (or not) someone is, they are still a subject matter expert in their domain, and bringing in my technical abilities to the conversation allows for a ton of shared value creation.
Apparently this was exactly the sort of answer they were looking for, and I interviewed with the hiring manager within a day or two – an interview I was pretty sure I’d flubbed after I finished. But I was wrong – I was called back right away to meet with the retiring employee I’d be learning from and eventually taking over for. I took a meeting with him and the hiring manager together a week later, then a week after that, I received a verbal offer, which I accepted.
We celebrated American Thanksgiving and my impending new job which I had verbally accepted, but still not received the written offer for. On the first of December, I had a first informal sort of chat with my soon-to-be-boss even though I still hadn’t received the official offer letter (which is a key part of the process leading to getting a work permit, and I kinda needed it to be official.)
A couple days later, after talking on a webinar about how important it is to accept a job offer only after getting a written offer so you don’t end up like me, the formal offer letter finally arrived.
But since things were starting to move along (the day after I sent back my accepted offer letter, the immigration lawyers contacted me,) I got in touch with the folks who I had planned to work with to move my cat once I had a destination for her. They pretty much came back with “During December? To CANADA? You must be out of your fucking mind!” So I let my kitty-sitters know that trying to relocate the cat to Canada during December would be basically impossible, and we would look at January.
Once I had had my meeting with the immigration lawyers and filled out all their paperwork, it was just a waiting game. What they would give me is paperwork to present at the border for my work permit, meaning I’d have to go back to the US, get a COVID test, get my results, and then re-enter Canada. Luckily we had learned since the end of October that a full (expensive) PCR test was no longer necessary and that I could get a Rapid Antigen Test from Walgreens for free and have results in an hour.
So, on the evening of December 14 when my immigration package arrived by e-mail, I printed it out, and made a Drive-Thru testing appointment at the Walgreens in Carthage, NY the following afternoon. I packed my laptop, overnight bag (just in case) and the documents I’d need, then headed out in the early afternoon of the 15th for my border hop.
After getting my test done and then grabbing dinner in Watertown (a well-known area for Americans in this part of Canada since it hosts the closest Target) I dropped into the Office Depot and printed out my Negative Test result and then re-crossed the border with all my paperwork in hand.
During my hour’s wait in the car outside the Immigration and Customs office, I thought back on everything that had happened during the previous three months since I departed Texas with Destination TBA. Soon, I’d finally have my work permit, my destination would officially be Canada.
Then, and only then, would the move actually start.