Different kinds of crazy

The last couple months have been a whirlwind of madness; even for, you know, us, it’s just been…devastatingly crazy around here.

The husband started a new job last week, after having been approached out of the blue by a former client of ours; this set off a lightning storm of rearranged schedules, car issues (since instead of working from home “almost always,” he now has to go into the office “always,” and the nanny is a) sharing a car with her SO and b) doesn’t have a four-kid-sized car to begin with), scheduling issues (suddenly neither of us are home by dinnertime) and so on and so on.

That kind of crazy.

The middleman between myself and the client started having increasingly bad (cough-cough) cash flow issues; what had started out as about a six week lag between “invoice approved by client” and “paycheck” grew slowly…yet inexorably…to eighteen weeks.

That kind of crazy, too.

Right around the same time the problem with the middleman became so glaringly obvious that even I couldn’t reason them away as being “timing issues” around when invoices were approved and when bill cycles were going through, the husband’s soon-to-be-former manager contacted me to say, “Soooooo…what are you up to these days?'” He’d tried to hire me back in February into a very similar position, but we’d been blocked by the whole ‘husbands and wives cannot work together’ policy; the offer being a very good one and the current situation pay-wise being a very bad one (shoot, even the pay rate was rather ‘eh,’ considering that it was less than I made on the W2 contract previous to it and was straight 1099 – so the burden of self-employment taxes, insurance, permits, blah blah blah, was entirely on me), I immediately made the no-brainer call and turned in notice to the client – my last day to be December 21.

That kind of crazy.

To my infinite surprise, they not only countered, but went to astonishing lengths to try to keep me – including fast-tracking an investigation that as it turned out was already underway into said irregularities. Within a week, I was receiving release forms from my former contract, had been told by the gentleman from the accounting team that they would be more than happy to offer me a very very slight increase in bill rate to go direct, said, “Eh, actually, I’ve got this other thing…” and was immediately told “Never mind. You can get the same exact thing they were getting. Now will you stay?” – which brought the nets up to a point where in terms of cash in my pocket the contract was suddenly a sweeter deal and turned my “I have made up my mind” back into “damn, now I have to THINK. Again.”

That kind of crazy.

And of course the move to SCRUM has been exhausting and constant…as the ‘first among equals’ for our team (read: have to have my finger in every.stupid.pie we make) I have been turning in timesheets showing between 50 and 60 hours for the last month, solid. And it shows in my attitude, my red-rimmed eyes, and my blood pressure.

That kind of crazy.

I have been sitting on the fence between the two options since the holiday break (whiiiiiich I didn’t actually get, because since I wasn’t leaving yet while All This was going down, it became the perfect time to work on some things that have proven verrrrrrry tricky to get done thanks to things like ‘contention on the box’ and ‘ack, whaddya mean the server is down?!’), thinking and thinking and thinking until I wanted to scream with frustration.

Both things have their own charms, their own pros and cons. Emotionally I felt like the full-time offer was better; financially, the contract one was. For work-life balance, definitely the FTE…for being continually challenged, the contract…

Trying to choose between them was like trying to pick between two equally-loved flavors of ice cream…until the husband came home with the benefits information for his new job.

Ouch. More than double the premium and the deductibles…spotty prescription coverage…back to That Thing where trips to the pharmacy were $300, $400, $500 a crack…yeahhhhhhh, suddenly, that FTE position with the pimped-out benefits package is worth a lot more than it was a second ago…

So…this coming week is my last week where I am, and I’m going to be starting as an FTE at MegaBank shortly.

In related news, I don’t think I’ve ever had this much drama around something as simple as getting a new job.

And I’m very glad it’s over now.

Kind of like getting a shot, the lead-up was far worse than the actual jab.

This last week is going to be pretty crazy, though.

Can’t wait for it to be over.