Tag: job

2 Under 2: Days like today I’m over parenting (#075)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I should be happy and excited right now.  I have received some very good personal news.  But I’m not.  I can’t be, because parenting two under two is soul sucking draining and there’s no room in my life for anything me, because I’m dealing with two crying kids all fucking day every fucking day and I have no idea when it will ever get any easier. 

#2 sucks at sleeping and doesn’t nap or stay asleep which already drains me daily, but has now devolved to where it encroaches into my one-on-one time with #1, because she’s insisting on waking up earlier than ever, despite not getting any more nap time or night sleep, so I am literally handcuffed to her from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed.  And to think she had one really perfect day earlier in the week where she slept until 8, had two perfect naps, and didn’t fight me Mortal Kombat when it came time to sleep.  

To make life any easier, #1 has apparently begun entering the terrible two phase where everything warrants crying and tantrums, and we’re talking real tears and snot and screaming and shunning.  And there will be moments in the day where both kids are crying, fussing, screaming, or all of the above to where I just have to stop, stand there still, and contemplate that this is where my life is at, and wondering, what. the. fuck. 

Obviously I’m not the only dad or any parent who’s ever been in this situation, but I would really like to know how other dads have fared or handled this specific scenario of simultaneously raising two under two, in similar aged kids to my own.  I need to know I’m not alone here, because I’m constantly overwhelmed, constantly overworked, often miserable, and at times completely over being a parent and just wanting a fucking break that will never happen because two under two is too much to ask of anyone to alleviate me of and I can’t rely on anyone and I don’t know any two people or don’t trust anyone to do a fraction of shit I do on a daily basis to get me one. 

I know that I’m not alone under these circumstances. I just want to hear it. 

But the disheartening thing is that I don’t know anyone in these circumstances. My friends and our generation itself are all so anti-kids or they have just one kid, or they’re fortunate enough to have family and other free care to lend hands, that it really does feel sometimes that I am alone.  

All I want for Christmas is a single day where I can turn off dad mode and live like a regular human being for a day.  Sleep without an alarm. Past 7 am. Eat when I want to eat and not when #1 eats so she doesn’t get pissed that I’m eating without her. To have a moment where I realize that I can run, write, or workout or watch tv for an hour without getting interrupted. Not be on double duty with two kids by myself for 3-5 hours a day.  Not to have to deal with pets.  To have an evening where I don’t have to sprint upstairs at a moments notice 3-5 times to pacify a kid because they can’t stay asleep.

Just one fucking day.  Happy Kwanzaa 

Oh, and my nanny just called in sick. Today’s going to be awesome.  Happy Hanukkah 

I had no idea it would be so satisfying

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Last week, I had a job interview.  It was from a company that had cold-called me from LinkedIn, so needless to say, I didn’t have any particular interest in them upon finding out who they were and what they did.  But they didn’t bat an eye when I dropped some inflated salary requirements, because I wasn’t really that interested, so I decided to take the interview anyway, because it would be good practice and who knows, maybe they would have wowed me in some way to make me reconsider.

The interview had several warning flags from the onset, specifically the fact that one of the guys on the call, I recognized their name, and I knew our paths had crossed at some point because if nobody’s ever told you, Atlanta isn’t as big of a place as people think it is, which is why it’s particularly important to burn your bridges with peril, because you just never know if you’ll run into people again.  I just couldn’t place it, but I know that I knew this guy from somewhere.  He didn’t seem to indicate that he remembered me, either.

Second, the nature of the company practically bored me to tears.  Something about transaction technology, development of some apps and shit, and honestly, I was already hard leaning towards not wanting this job in the first place, since they had listed for a “UX Graphic Designer,” to which most people aren’t aware, the two things aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but there’s a far bigger divide between the two than the working world is aware of.

Needless to say, the indication I got from the position is that the company doesn’t know what they want, and mashed two disciplines together, hoping they’d be able to find a singular person to do two jobs.  But it also meant that for a company that doesn’t know what they’re looking for, I could’ve either gotten into the door and coasted to a good salary, or I’d fail to meet expectations that I wasn’t aware of and be in a disadvantageous position.

But it’s the third strike where I completely checked out and definitively knew that I was going to turn this opportunity down: the sample project.  Basically, because “they wanted to get in my head and get a sense of my style,” they wanted me to reimagine and redesign one of their landing pages, “in my style.”  

Basically do some work, for free.  I have no problem with competency tests or assessments, because those are usually pretty quick, and can show a lot of insight.  But to be assigned a multi-day project, for no payment?  No fucking way.

In my mind, upon hearing this, I’m basically saying, bitch, I’ve got two kids and no time as it is, and you want me to do some fucking work for free?  Fuck.  That.

*no joke, I might not have written this post if I didn’t realize it was great opportunity to use this Sonic gif I made eons ago because I actually do like it that much

Continue reading “I had no idea it would be so satisfying” →

I was interview ghosted today

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As if the job searching process wasn’t frustrating enough, today I had an initial screening with some company, scheduled between 4-6 pm, that completely ghosted the fuck out of me.  I am quite unhappy about it, and I’m not entirely sure what my next steps are at this point.

I mean, a 4-6 pm window was already a small flag to begin with, seeing as how there’s an implication that someone is going to be continuing to work after the traditionally conclusive 5 pm hour, but I always like to remain as flexible as possible, even with babies handcuffed to me, I can get out of those temporarily for a noble cause like job interviewing.

But when I didn’t get a call early on in the 4 pm hour, I snidely remarked to mythical wife that, watch them reach out at like 5:55 pm.  But by the time 5:30-ish rolled around, I began to think that there was the possibility that they weren’t going to call me at all.  Sure enough, the clock hit 6 pm, there was no call, and worse off, there was no email or any sort of message or notification that this wasn’t going to happen.  I had just been ghosted.

The thing is, I had actually emailed the recruiter earlier in the day to see if they could narrow down the window of time, so that I could make sure my children were accounted for, plus the question on whether this was going to be a phone call or a video call, since all correspondence prior had been fairly informally through email.  That message was surreptitiously not responded to, which did slightly tingle my Spidey-sense.

So job ghosting really is nothing new to today’s spineless world, but most peoples’ stories about job ghosting is that the ghosting typically occurs after the interview, in which people’s hopes are high after landing an interview, and then doing the interview, but then never hear jack shit from the potential employer again.  However in my case, the ghosting happened before any sort of verbal communication could even happen.

Who knows, it could just be some recruiter just being bad at their job and genuinely making a mistake and maybe tomorrow I’ll get some apologetic email about how they’re soooo sorry for missing it, and try and schedule some other immediate time, or maybe they really are just a fucking asshole and decided to ghost me, after getting me to commit to a time appointment.  Frankly, I don’t really know how I’m going to react regardless of which of these outcomes is.

Honestly, this isn’t even really a job I’m that genuinely interested in.  I’m pretty sure it’s not remote, the area it’s in is a traffic shitshow, it might be considered a step backward from where I’m at, and the only reason I applied to it in the first place was that Glassdoor said the high-range of the salary was something I’d have been interested in, which means it’s probably nowhere near it, and I felt that I was a shoe-in to get their attention based on my current employer, which actually proved true, since they reached out to me, even if they did ghost me.

That being said, seeing as how I’m below lukewarm about this company in the first place, and don’t think I’m going to lose any sleep by severing this bridge, I kind of want to email or even call and try and get in someone’s e-face, and say my piece about how I don’t appreciate the time commitment I made being wasted by their lack of professionalism.  Or if it was an honest mistake, do I retaliate by ghosting them in return, if they dare to reschedule?

The likelihood of me enacting any sort of ghosting is probably not high, seeing as how I live my life a quarter mile at a time by the general rule of treat those how I’d want to be treated, and even if they ghosted me first, I fucking hated it and wouldn’t want to be ghosted, so I probably won’t be doing any ghosting no matter how much I’d really want to.

But it’s fun to imagine.

2 Under 2: No time like the present (#068)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

About a month ago, I wanted to write a post about how I was embarking on my paternity time for the second time, on account of the arrival of #2.  How I was looking forward to not having to worry about work for 12 weeks, and all sorts of ideas of ways I could be productive and get shit done with no work looming over me.

Well it’s been about a month since I’ve started my paternity leave, and unsurprisingly I have not accomplished nearly as much as I hoped I would prior to the start of it.

Who would have guessed that juggling two kids would consume so much of my capacity, even without having to worry about work?  Pff certainly not me.  In all fairness, our Disney trip consumed nearly two weeks of my leave, since it encapsulated a Tuesday through a Wednesday, and trying to accomplish anything before or catch up afterward just weren’t going to happen.

But going into my paternity leave, I made goals of accomplishing several tasks:

  • Refinance my home: rates are crazy low and with a second child in tow, refinancing my mortgage to try and bring down my monthly payment and free up some cash sounded like a tremendously good idea
  • Look for a new job: the cat is out of the bag by now, and most everyone knows I’m quite unhappy with my job, and would like to seek out a new one now
  • Explore the possibility of upgrading to a larger car: my car of two years and less than 15,000 miles is already too small for the size of my rapidly grown family, and I would like to capitalize on the potential of the also-hot used car market, and try to trade in my car for maximum value, so that I may upgrade to a larger vehicle
  • Yard work: there are some shrubs I want to get rid of, and some general cleanup I’d like to do around my driveway and walking paths, as well as reclaim some of the wild land in the field adjacent to my home, while the poison ivy is wilting and the snakes are going into hiding

So nothing too lofty, provided there’s a reasonable amount of time to do them, but therein lies the biggest problem – there’s just simply never any fucking time.

Continue reading “2 Under 2: No time like the present (#068)” →

What job searching feels like these days

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There’s an anecdote where a hungry lion leaps into a herd of gazelle, ready to hunt.  But the lion can’t seem to focus on a single target and is overwhelmed by the mass variety of options around them and runs around in circles, allowing all of the gazelle to escape.  And so the lion goes hungry and takes an L for all their troubles with no payoff.

That’s basically pretty precisely what job searching feels like to me now.  It doesn’t help that I’m at this stage of my career and life where I don’t really know precisely what it is I want to do, whether or not I want to continue to try and climb up a ladder that I’m more disgusted and jaded with more often than not, or if I just want to seek out a more menial job that might pay well but have little room for advancement, but would provide me a steady paycheck, financial stability, and the ability to be more available to my budding family.

Furthermore, I’m in this pool of indecision on whether or not I should be looking at actual companies in the Atlanta area, or if I should be seeking out one of the supposed thousands of remote jobs out there in the new, coronavirus-aided working world, where I might consider taking some cuts for the right to work 100% remote.

What it all amounts to is me sitting in front of my computer with very finite amounts of time dictated by the sleeping/eating/awake times of my children, trying to find adequate jobs to apply for, much less even hope for callbacks, and hope that I have a modicum of capability to weed, vet and find potential without completely killing my career.

Needless to say, I’m often times feeling overwhelmed and dejected by the whole process, and I’m beginning to understand why there are services out there now where you pay to set up a profile and have someone else pimp your name out there for you.  There’s just so much variety and options in the searching fields now between numerous search engines, job boards and social media services, and that’s not even including the wealth of options out there that are remote.

And much like the lion that gets overwhelmed and owned by the gazelle and indecision, I’m left feeling dejected and a little hopeless that my search during my leave will bear not fruit, and I’ll be relegated to going back to work at a job that I’ve grown to loathe over the last few years.  Sure, I’m fortunate to have that to fall back onto, but in not even a perfect world, change is still the priority objective.

556 days later

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I went into the office for the first time since March 16, 2020.  I know this to be true, because the desk calendar of daily dad jokes that I have, that’s the last date that was shown, and my my morning routine typically consisted of setting my coffee down, tearing away the prior day’s dad joke, turning it into a paper ninja star, and putting it into the spindle lid, as shown above.

The thing is, I left on the 16th with no intention of returning to the office for a while, because it was not long after the birth of #1, and I was going to flex some work from home in order to best be available as brand new parents.  Sure, I had an inkling of the news rapidly spreading around the world about how coronavirus was ravaging China, and initially finding their way stateside, but little did myself or anyone else really know or understand that the office was on the verge of indefinite closure on this particular day.

By the end of the week, the building was vastly shut down on account of the rapid spread of coronavirus throughout the country, and businesses and offices all across the world were doing the same thing.  In between learning how to be a dad for the first time, and trying to keep up with the new rhythm of the work day, I had to sign off and fill in numerous requisition forms for my reports to be taking their physical iMacs home with them, so that they could embark on the new world of working from home.

Frankly, this is no new story for just about anyone with an office job, and I’m stopping myself from reminiscing too much, because I’m trying to remind myself that I’ve got many other retroactive topics I want to brog about and a very finite amount of time in which I can do such.

Regardless, the plant pictured to the right, now that was one of the few things that actually worried about, at the office, when the world shut down.  It was but just a small succulent that was given to all employees at the door in promotion to spread awareness of the arrival of spring, and seeing as how I have a window cube, it was quite easy for me to put it on the sill, and see how long it would take before I would invariably end up neglecting it and it dying.

But succulents are some tough motherfuckers, and it persisted all through occasional watering droughts, time off, my wedding and honeymoon, and not only survived, but thrived.  What started out as a little nugget of a plant branched out into these lengthy, snakey vines, and to where I eventually put a little bit of effort into its general growth and development, like the tape-rubberband combo to help it stretch out and sun.

However, as pandemics do, 500+ days is too much to ask of any plant, and when I popped into the office for the first time in 556 days, the anticipation of what I’d see from my little succulent was answered, in a reddish, dead husk of a succulent, almost frozen in time, by virtue of never being molested at all during that stretch.

And with my biggest curiosity answered, I finished up doing what I came to the office for in the first place: removing all of my personal effects in an attempt to low-key clean out my desk, because I have no intention of ever coming back to this office again in my life, if things go my way.

But as many of my peers and co-workers have said to me, it was as they described – it was almost as if the entire floor were frozen in time, as if the calendar never moved on from March 16, 2020.  Calendars all around the floor were still in March, name plates of numerous people who have moved out or moved on are still in place, and lord only knows what’s living in the break room fridge at this point, but it was an interesting field trip all the same, and I’m glad that all my personal shit is out of there, but sad all the same, to see the fate of my determined little succulent friend.

2 Under 2: Hold please (#063)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ve resigned myself to the notion that until #2 gets onto some modicum of a sleep schedule, then my personal life is more or less on hold.  0-120 minutes a night to not be on either double baby duty, baby duty of one plus work, or work plus two kids?  That’s life as it is right now.  And the sooner I try to expect to have some free time in which I can actually sit down, relax, and not have to be on high baby alert, the better things might be.

Because that’s probably what’s been the greatest source of my angst and frustration over the last few weeks, is that I want to do things, but in almost all of the time, I just simply don’t have the time to do such.  But if I can mentally accept that there will be no time for me for a little bit longer, then it’s slightly an easier pill to swallow.

Sure, I still feel overwhelmed and miserable when I’m in the way-too-frequent scenario of where my wife is unavailable, I’m on both kids at the same time, and I’m getting blown up by my work email.  That happens way more than I wish it would, but tis the season in my particular line of work.

Salvation is, however, the fact that I am less than two weeks from starting my paternity leave, eliminating one of the biggest roadblocks to parenting for a substantial chunk of time, and I will get the opportunity to be nothing but a dad, instead of dad + corporate bitch, which I believe will take a tremendous load of anxiety off of my docket.

I have a few major objectives I’d like to approach while I’m on leave this time around, but one of the things that I plan on getting on sooner rather than later will begin some sort of sleep training with #2, as I had done with #1, which I like to credit as laying down the groundwork for her outstanding sleep habits to this very day.

And once #2 starts to get on some semblance of a nap schedule and a formalized bed time, things can really only go up from there.  Because this current operation of basically surviving infanthood has been pretty brutal due to the compounding of responsibilities, but as most people describe parenthood, things tend to get easier for a little while before the cycle of difficulty begins spinning as the years progress.

But until those supposed things begins getting easier, I just have to accept that I won’t really have the time to do so many me things, be it running, watching wrestling or other television, and even writing, as much as that one hurts me so.  I still jot down notes and reminders of the things I’d like to touch on, and I’ve gotten to where I don’t discount the Notes function in my phone if I’m feeling so driven.

This is parenthood, in a nutshell, where sacrifice isn’t merely a choice, but often times a necessity, in order to keep things moving with some degree of harmony.