Promoted

In a recent post, I mentioned how my wife became emotional thinking about the possibility that we might move away and our kids wouldn't get to see Santa come by on a firetruck anymore. That possibility was probably news to you. The possibility that Rish and I might soon live in a different state from each other sounds pretty grim. Well, you can put it out of your mind now, because it has been decided, and we're not moving after all.

Where my wife works is going through some changes. Her job was kind of up in the air for the last little bit. She was stuck in the same position for a while, unable to move up, even though she was ready to do so. Her company has been doing a lot of expansion lately, however, and the position she was looking to move into has become available in other cities.

She started looking into the possibilities available to her. It seemed like not a week would go by without her asking me if I was willing to move to another new city. Memphis? Norfolk? Tacoma? London? (The answer to that last one was an emphatic yes). Finally, an opportunity in Houston, Texas surfaced that appeared to be the one we were going to actually take. Conditions were likely to be so favorable that there was going to be no way we would turn it down.

She started preparing the kids to the likelihood of our departure. She spent days worth of her free time browsing real estate listings in the area trying to determine the best neighborhood to live in. She started working out a strategy on how we would go through the process of moving. Would we all go at once? Would I stay to get the house sold? Would we let the kids finish out the year at school before uprooting them?

After months of anticipation, in the last few weeks the dominoes finally began falling. Her boss was hired as a supervisor in Houston and wanted to bring her along to the new location. My wife applied for the Houston job, but her boss's recently vacated job here was also posted. So she applied to that one too.

Houston seemed like it was probably going to be our only choice. My wife worried about our kids, and how they would take the transition. She also worried about what kind of job I could get in Houston once I knew for sure that I needed to start looking. Would she get a big pay raise, only to have me get a big pay cut, and have the whole thing be for no gain whatsoever?

All this stuff kept circling around and around as we waited to see how the various opportunities turned out. Then we finally got some news. She was offered the job right here in town. Despite all her pessimistic views of what would happen here, she bested her competition, and won the position. However, they lowballed her on the salary. She was frankly a little offended by their offer. She asked for some time to discuss it with me, and that night, we went over and over all the possible aspects of the decision.

Eventually, it came to this, she would go through the first phone interview with Houston the next day, and ask them about what they would likely be able to offer. Then she would call back to her present job, and counter offer for a higher salary. No matter what they offered, she would take it, but if they stuck to the lowball figure, she would keep after the job in Houston to see if it would come out better.

When she put our plan in to action, it turned out that Houston didn't look quite as appealing as it could have, and the job here gave her the salary she wanted. It just didn't make sense to go through all the hassle of moving our family out of town--taking the kids away from their friends and schools to start all over again, send me in search of a new job with a possibly worse schedule and lack of equivalent benefits--when there was an equally great opportunity right here.

So, stay we will.

It's not a permanent thing, for sure. It's possible that things could change and we might have to hit the road eventually anyway. But, for the time being, we remain here. Houston...and even Norfolk or Tacoma or (please, please, please) London...may still await us. But for now, I'll be hanging around town with Rish the same as always.