CATCH UP LETTER

I never sent this out - So, I wanted to post it here.

Dearest Friends and Family,

Okay, this is the story and I am sticking to it. If you can make it through the whole letter, I applaud you. The last year (2005) was a real struggle for me with my job and all that stress it had on my family. I had started what I thought was the job of a life time in November 2004. I was to be working for a start up Home Building Company and working for a really dynamic woman named A. She hired me on as a contracts administrator, someone who takes the bid from a contractor, and turns it into a contract. Well, I never wrote a contract. She hired me to be her right arm and help her get the projects out of the ground. She just needed me to get my foot in the door. She wanted to replace some folks in the dept, but couldn’t just yet. So, she and I worked hand in hand to create model specs, option packages and do all the necessary stuff involved in starting 6 new communities out of nothing in a very short period of time while others wrote contracts. Well, as it turned out, we pulled it off and started 2005 with a bang. We didn’t have much to go on and I was learning as I went, but I had a good background in just about all aspects of the homebuilding industry by working for John @ anothr Dev. co. He ran out of land and stopped building homes and I had to find another job. At this writing, I have had 3 since and starting a new one on April 3rd, but I am getting ahead of myself.
So, come April 2005, they fire A, my Mentor. She is crushed and devastated as am I. We had worked so hard and for some many months, and she wasn’t going to be able to see the fruits of our labor. I am left dangling. They bring on a new woman to be the director in May, turns out; she is the neatest woman too. She and I clicked right away, her name was K. She and I were a lot a like and she has been in the homebuilding industry for ever, so she knew practically everyone in the industry and proceeded to introduce me to everyone she knew. This created instant legitimacy for me in my job. I loved working for her. Still, there was a lot of turmoil and red tape and it was frustrating as heck to get anything accomplished. In June 2005, “they” started firing people. We called it Black Monday. It was a scary thing. And I survived the big chopping heads day. Lots of people didn’t. Come to find out, this was par for the course in this company. When they didn’t think it was working, they hired someone to fire people and out you went. No warning. Well, come October, K was pretty much getting frustrated with what was going on at E, and she quits. Now, left dangling AGAIN. So, a couple of weeks later, “they” announce we are merging with another homebuilder. The son’s company of the father who owns ours. F Homes - We are to vacate our offices and move to trailers on our projects out in the field. I say, okay, I can handle this; it’s going to be alright. But they don’t tell me where I am going. No one wants to take me with them. I am continually feeling invisible. The elephant in the room no one wants to talk about. What are we going to do with Snoozer? – I keep asking. No one will look me in the face and tell me where I am going. I finally find out I am going to a trailer in C. Cool, ½ hr from the house working on the project A and I started with 1million dollar homes. I thought, easy street baby! Well, we move our selves. We have 1 week to get out of our suite and box everything up. November 1, 2005 I am in a trailer in C. I am getting adjusted. The gals and I that got evacuated to there are making the best of the situation. Getting comfortable. 2 weeks later, we all get an email. Come Monday 14th, we are to start ‘training’ up in Hell- 90 miles away from home one way. I kid you not. They tell me it’s Temporary. I don’t believe them, I am devastated. I start really looking for a new job that day. I had been slowly looking for a job, but not seriously looking for a job. Heck, I was 1/2hr from home and I knew what I was doing at that point, so it didn’t seem necessary. Well, the new purchasing manager, CL, decided we all had to be with her in their offices in Hell. That’s a place I like to say, is proof hell is full and the dead are walking around in where I was going to be working. Tumble weed city. One horse town, truck stop. It’s nasty. You know where they send all the clothes no one wants to buy even though they were marked down to practically free? Hell. White Trash, double-wides, methamphetamine junkies etc. You name it, they got it, and we were right in the middle of the flipping high desert. That’s what they call it. Right at the top of what is know in these parts ‘The Cajon Pass” it’s a 20 mile stretch of highway that climbs to 4000 feet from low desert. 2 fatalities happened on that stretch of road while I was commuting up there. Yes, I put up with it. The job search was slow going. CL had a sit down with me on the second day I was up there. I was trying to make the best of a bad situation and she calls me into her office and tells me I have a bad attitude and no one wants to work with me or be in the same room as me. Gee, could it have anything to do with the fact that these bozos are ruining my life? She tells me I am to blame for how messed up all the E projects are and that I just dumped stuff on a new co-worker in October. I said, you know what, I knew this would happen eventually, go ahead, blame me for everything that is wrong with E, cuz you don’t have anyone else to blame, they are all gone except for me. So, bring it on. And if I am so horrible, why don’t you let me go? She said, D (the president of F Homes) wants to, but she thinks I can be ‘saved’. I am thinking, crap! So, I tell her the real story of how it was all left up to me and how much I had been doing and putting up with before she got there and she realized it wasn’t all my fault, but the damage had been done, I was trashed at that point and a pariah to the company. There was no going back and proving to them otherwise. So I sat there, did what ever stupid little task she needed me to do, helped everyone else like an assistant or a temp, and prayed for a new job to take me away from all of that. December rolls around and we get notified that we have to work the Friday before the Christmas holiday weekend and the Monday after. No exceptions. My Christmas was trashed at that point. I am driving 180 mile round trip to work, I get home at 8pm and fall into bed at 9:30 if I am lucky. I was looking forward to a long weekend to catch up for the holiday and I was a lost cause. This was my life for 4 ½ months. I attempted to get a Christmas tree decorated, didn’t happen till Christmas eve – Saturday night- I never got to do my favorite holiday traditions, make sugar cookies with our son, send out holiday cards with a picture of our handsome boy in his Sophomore year in High School. Nothing! New years rolled around and I was even more exhausted. At least I got that day off. The year was over, and I was still in Hell working for a company that hated to even see me show up every day. People would give me these strange looks and I was perplexed. I had about a dozen recruiters calling me; I went on ½ a dozen interviews. No one thought I had enough experience. Everyone wanted to know why I was looking for a new job. I wanted to scream out, “hello….don’t you know who I am working for?”But I kept saying, it’s the commute, it’s a real killer, quality of life is important to me. My husband and son are so very important to me, and those new companies still didn’t rescue me. The owner is an ex-con who got this company by his father starting it for him. He is a drug addict who has a rich father. To boot, he is a jerk. Not a nice reformed junkie, but a real horse’s ass. He is very full of himself and loves living in excess. The president, D, is a megalomaniac. He is a horrible person, He revels in demeaning people –his own – in meetings while other watch. It’s embarrassing and uncomfortable. I vowed to myself that he would never do that to me. I am proud to say, he never did. I never gave him the opportunity. I hear a story, and I know it’s true, I wasn’t there when it happened, but someone actually took a dump on his office desk. I am not kidding. Just think to what point does someone have to be pushed in order to go to that extreme. That my friends, is who I was working for by default through the merger.
However, over time, I became friends with the support staff in the building. They found they liked me in spite of what they had heard about me. I am a fun gal to work with as you all know. I find humor in almost anything and try to make work a fun place full of jokes and laughter. It’s a stressful place and I have to make it fun. I sucked them all in to my vortex and I earned some of their respect I hope. They don’t have a choice but to work there, so they think. They live up there in that godforsaken place and it’s the best job around – otherwise you work at Bob’s Big Boy or Jack-In the-box. . They have to pay people well; otherwise, no one would work there.
Then the news came in: The ‘training’ was to be extended another 2-4weeks I was told. There was lot clean up to do and housekeeping of sorts in our computer system to get paperwork to subcontractors so they could be paid. That was another thing. “they” say they pay their subs every week, but they try really hard not to. That’s embarrassing on a whole other level. I am good on the computer, they had to admit I was good at stuff, and they kept me on to work on the computer lot clean up. It was mindless data entry, but it was a job. No stress. While all the other Purchasing Agents where busy bidding new jobs, I was doing data entry. It was a joke.
CL ended up quitting at the end of January. Yup. Boss #3 was gone. I was going through them pretty fast. 1 every 6 months or so. And I was hanging in there. After CL quit, we were told it would be another 6 month or through the end of the year that we would still have to be up there in Hell. The assistant manager, TF, was a decent gal. She liked me. I don’t know why, but she did. She got me a car allowance, gave me 3 new jobs to bid and I was getting into it again. But, I was given impossible deadlines, and set up to fail and when I went up against D to tell him why I didn’t get something accomplished, TF had already smoothed the waters and told him I was just given this assignment 1 week ago, when the last guy who had it went to lunch and never came back. So, he cut me some slack in that first go round. I knew I wouldn’t get a second chance.
I got a call one day a couple of weeks ago from a recruiter in SD. Said he had my name in a data base from a long time ago, and wanted to know if I was still interested in a new opportunity. I said, absolutely! He said he had a company in E, 1/2hr from Home, just south of the border patrol. Yes, we have a border patrol crossing before you come into Home. Been going through it for years. My Husband even gave the border dude in the road a cold diet Pepsi one summer afternoon. It must have been 100 degrees out and we came up to him, he had us stopped as all are to stop before continuing, and we grabbed a DP out of the ice cold cooler we had in the back and handed it to him. He smiled as soon as my Honey put it in his hand. My Honey is going great by the way. He has been with TJ, a commercial concrete contractor over 2 years now. It’s great. He loves the guys he works with, they gave him a small job to run. He is content so far. He is out riding his beloved blue Harley Davidson Soft Tail Deuce – she is a beauty. Lots of chrome of course. Still needs new chrome wheel rims front and back I am told. Does it ever end? I don’t think it does. He hasn’t done much physical labor on the job lately, just reading, studying the blueprints, laying out the job, checking and rechecking the measurements. They poured 190 yards of concrete on Friday. He had figured 185. Under is good he said. He was in the ball park. He always wondered why I was always so tired when I got home when I hadn’t done anything physical all day but talk on the phone and sit and type at a computer. I tell you what, he is more tired now, than he is when he has his bags on and he is working as Mr. Carpenter. He finally understands that the mental stress and strain is sometimes more exhausting than the physical labor.

So anyway, this recruiter, D, was an Indiana U. Alumni! We got along very well over the phone, and as some of you may or may not know, IU won its first game in the NCAA tourney, but lost to Gonzaga in the second game. So, he says they want to meet me. I say okay. I meet the Director of Purch on a Tuesday morning @ 7am in a Starbucks in E-how Southern California is that? Very covert I might add. Apparently, they were going to have to let someone go to hire me. So, we had to meet off site. She was a really nice lady and needed help desperately. I said I could help her immediately. We talked for 1 ½ hrs sitting there. She said she would let me know. They all said they would let me know. No one ever did. So, I though it was another waste of my time. Turns out, she loved me. She didn’t want to talk to anyone else, she wanted to hire me. I had to meet the HR lady – so Friday morning, 7am, same bat time, same bat channel, I go meet the HR lady in Starbucks, same table. We get along very well. We talked for an hour. Turns out, she loved me too! Go figure. I get an offer then next Tuesday. Same rate of pay, but I don’t have to drive 180 miles a day. I take it! I fax over my signed offer letter on Weds. Morning. I go in to quit that day. I have to wait till the afternoon to get a sit down with TF. She says why?, things were getting better, I said not good enough. Sorry, and that was that. D was on vacation, and he told TF to have Friday be my last day and they would pay me through the end of the month. They took me to lunch on Friday and that was my last day with F Homes. I haven’t wiped the smile off my face since. I start my new job with people that like me already on April 3rd. I had to take a Drug Screening test and a personality test and they have to check my back ground. Never had to take a Drug screen test. I figured if carbs, chocolate and caffeine are still legal substances, I am cool.
I was off all this week and was able to drop my son off at school and pick him up every day this week. I am off all next week too. He has the next 2 weeks off. I feel so relieved not to have to drive up that hill any more. I was able to be home each night and make my boys dinner. There’s a welcome switch. I am so glad to be out of that nightmare. It took a lot out of me and I don’t want to have to be in that situation again. Some of you may know this story or parts of it and some may not, but this is my only reason why I haven’t been in touch as much as I would have liked over the last year & ½. I also vowed, I would make my favorite sugar cookies this year and get my tree up Dec. 1st. 2006 is going to be the best year yet.

I miss all of you!
Love,
Susannah


P.S. Just to let you know, I never stop thinking of each and every one of you!