Thursday, November 3, 2005
I remember sitting on our couch going through the want-ads in our very small town newspapers one night about 6 or 7 years ago. Pat and I have always struggled living out here as most of life evolves an hour from our house but that takes a toll on the vehicles leading to more expense, gas, time away from family etc. So, to compensate for that we have sacrificed good solid careers that would make us money to mediocre, small time jobs that make enough for us to live on and leave it at that.
Anyway, in this newspaper over the years there had been sporatic ads about a newspaper reporter or sports writer/photographer. I would jokingly tell Pat that he should look into. Although because Pat is such a news hound, curious about everything and seems to just be a wiz at everything--jack of all trades is the term--inside I wasn't entirely joking. He of course would say that he would never qualify, didn't have the education for it, basically was very down on the idea, until I finally said hey, give it a shot the worst they can do is tell you no. Finally he took the advice.
He landed a stringer job at a little local paper covering sports in the Wisconsin area. He blended right in, learned photography in one night and fell in love with the work. So much so that he continued to move up, got his own column which turned out to be very popular in the area, political of course but also funny stories about his family or childhood. Soon he had moved into the managing editors position and the guy was absolutely never home. He was in charge of writing up one entire section (roughly 4-6 pages of news) of the three part paper, sports as well as editing and running the office of reporters. He put himself out there, threw himself into this job and I knew that he had found his niche. He had made plenty of enemies with some of the other local newspapers for scooping them. Pat has not fear, says it like he sees it and outs whatever he sees that should be outted. Scams, scandals, criminals, you name it, he was not afraid.
Since it is such a small area that he covered, the money was not that good. In fact it was nibblets and it was not putting food on the table. My daycare has sustained us for many years and could do so on it's own. I don't mind that as I am able to be home with our kids.
Pat wound up getting burned out from all the work, the responsibility of running the reporters, management was stubborn and paid him no compliments for all the work or the good feed back that was coming into that office. No benefits for the family, got grief for taking his paid vacations.
Basically, like daycare can sometimes be in regards to parents, it was turning out to be a thankless chore for him. I felt that he deserved better as I was/am very proud of his accomplishment. I don't say this out of bias. He was getting letters in the editors section, letters in our home mail box, letters at work, invitations to lunches, he quickly became well known in this area and very well liked. So much so that I absolutely HATED going anywhere in public with him because our time out together became me standing around looking at the sky while him and others would discuss issues. Ho-hum.
We had discussed his conundrum at length. I had decided that while I was at home, I would be his secretary since my daycare was going to be slow for a bit. We had a resume written up for him, got together examples of his work, put together a whole package of things. I began the search. I must have sent out 30 packages to different newspapers. But sadly, only about 2 showed any interest. The paper that Pat worked for was a weekly with a circulation of about 3000 and we were looking into dailies-serious newspaper jobs for him in other states. We were ready to uproot our entire family and just disappear with other things that had been going on in our life. Start out new somewhere else. Well, perhaps the idea of relocation didn't appeal to these other papers or that his background was lacking, or they simply didn't like what they saw. No matter.
Once summer came my daycare was going to be more than enough for us to survive on and we had given up on numerous life plans to relocate, we had decided that Pat should quit this specific job and work on the computer. Blogging to be exact. Perhaps to build a reputation on-line or something. I am not exactly sure but it seemed solid at the time and we were making more money now than when he worked anyway. Pathetic to say the least.
He did this for about a year and a half and more bricks fell on our life and changed the capacity of my daycare from 14 kids down to 3. HUGE income loss, lots of trouble for us. So, it was job search time.
Well, during his hiatus from full time employment, he had been working for another newspaper doing meetings for a small town and writing them up. He had interviewed at this particular company but they hired someone with more computer experience. The reporting skills were not a factor?
Anyway, Pat was feeling pretty hopeless for awhile and finally settled on a job with a satellite dish company. I swear, we just find bad luck or something but this was an absolute nightmare for all of us. The guy who ran the company was a loose cannon and that is putting it mildly. The money was outstanding but the cost was very high. Put it this way, we were calling the MN Dept. of labor, lawyers, better business bureau. We found out about a month ago that this guy lost his contracts with all the cable places and is out of work....that was probably a wise decision made by the satellite companies.
To be continued.........
Written by louie0768 .
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