Contemplating Heresy

Gentle readers, this is only hearsay heresy at this point (in the absence of a formal offer letter), but Stella is considering...

...taking a job that will require her to go to a real office.

A lot.

Like, every day.

I'm not really in too much of a quandary about the job. It's a great job in the my chosen field, a reasonable bump in salary and a lot of growth potential raising money for a place that is coming into its stride, development-wise. I did what you're not supposed to do and said yes yes yes, not bothering to negotiate maximum salary or any of the things you're advised by myriad job sites to do when you receive a job offer, because I really want this job.

And I must say that I'm excited to be going back into a Real Office setting, a fast-paced one doing a job that requires a ton of face-to-face contact with colleagues and prospects.

I'm not particularly sorry in the strict career sense to be giving up the full-time offsite work either. What's been missing from my work from afar is a sense of being in play.

As in being a player.

Being a player is something I really enjoy. I love being the person at the holiday party who knows everyone and spends the evening introducing people who should really know each other based on my knowledge of what they do and what they ought to be doing. I love sitting next to older ladies on airplanes and hearing about their daughters moving to Albuquerque to open Trader Joe's stores, or about how they've moved around because their husbands were in the military and now they come to Albuquerque for three weeks at a time to take care of their sis...

Oh, wait, maybe you're not like me and aren't that interested in those kinds of things. But I am.

No, dear reader, the real quandary is this: what will be the fate of StellaCommute, the online persona I've been cultivating?

I think that she will continue as a part time telecommuter. The fact is that the job I've (nearly) been hired to do is quite a bit more than a full-time job, and the only way to be successful at it without moving into one's office is to spend time at home doing it too. There is research, writing letters, proposals, notes, and other material, making phone calls to people who are hard to reach during the day, so many things.

So we'll continue this journey together, even as I hang up the slippers and reinvest in grown-up costuming for Real Office wear.