It keeps everything from happening at once.

Only twelve days in and it’s already been an interesting year.

I had a job interview last Friday with a firm that has been head hunting me for over a year. They’re a good company, a vendor that provides an essential web-based application to the organization I work for now. Smart people, progressive, both in the small and large sense, who understand that it’s what you produce not what you wear while you’re producing it that matters. They recognize the benefits of keeping their employees happy. In a lot of ways, they embody the best of the mentality that came out of the dot com era: work hard, play hard, try to remember you have a life outside the office.

My interview was at 9am and I was told to allow for an hour. It took two. I find that the interview that runs over because you ended up talking longer is a good sign; generally if they don’t like you they’ve made up their mind in the first 20 minutes or so. We talked about my philosophy of tech support – communicate, communicate, communicate – and about side projects I might be interested in doing – um, yes, the HTML code that your application puts out is unstylable because it’s not standards compliant and even unrelated elements are classed – and about which comic book or cartoon character, past or present, I would choose to be if I could choose one (yeah, it’s that kinda place). And we talked about salary, which is the place I thought it would all go to hell. They were fine with my floor, and fine with my preferred starting point for negotiations which is $5,000 a year above my floor.

I would say it went well given that in the time it took me to leave their offices, get the subway, ride one stop, and walk to my office they made me a formal offer that included a week’s more vacation than I get at my current job, 6 more administrative days off (aka: public holidays) than I get now, and $5,000 more a year than my current stated salary. The only catch was the level of support they expected me to provide to my clients.

The job would have been supporting 10 or 12 of their biggest clients, and it would have required me to be “on call” until midnight every night. That would have meant not only would I have to actually see midnight every night – seriously, that 9:30 bed time I railed against in high school…little did I know that it was my mid-life future – it would have required me to take on the additional expense of an actual cell phone plan rather than the pay-as-you-go personal pay phone I carry around now.

The expense wouldn’t have been a problem. It was the time.

I am a little OCD about my job. It’s the way my mind works about any problem, really: take the problem in, throw it into the processing unit to be worked on in the background, and eventually find a solution based on the stated parameters – you can see this process at work every week if you watch House; when he has his revelatory moment during which he solves the case after all their floundering you’re seeing the end point of this type of problem solving. And because I am a little OCD about my job, I’ve spent the last five years very consciously drawing a line between work time and home time with clear markers (that’s why when I do work at home I actually get completely dressed rather than wearing my jammies; dressed means work time).

Being “on call” would mean that I could never relax, that I would always be alert for the phone ringing, always waiting for someone to throw a hand grenade at me so I could respond to it. And while I can do combat readiness, it’s no way to live daily if not absolutely necessary.

To put it more bluntly: the idea that a client could call me at any time of the day or night actually gave me a rash while I was thinking about it. Literally, big red splotches on my chest and neck.

So instead of doing what seems even in fourth or fifth thoughts like the smart thing and taking the job – more money, better holidays, stable company – I declined the offer to stay at the creaky, robbing Peter to pay Paul, Christ, I didn’t mail my paycheck until Monday I hope it clears, what do you mean we get MLK day off and not another holiday until the end of May? non-profit because even with the shitty holidays it does give on a daily basis me more of the only thing you ever really run out of.