Dream a Little Bigger, Darling

Okay, so, as promised, it's time to get back to the normal stuff. :)

The most important thing: I HAVE A JOB!

A real, honest-to-goodness job. Shortly after my February post, I interviewed with a company that I'd been talking to for about a month and a half, and she pretty much offered me the job on the spot (though not technically, since that's not how it works). I knew about it when I wrote, back in February, but I didn't want to jinx it, so I didn't say anything.

Anyways, about this job.

The company is called KPMG. They provide audit, tax, and advisory services for a significant number of the FORTUNE 500 companies (and I believe they are one themselves). They're one of the Big Four such companies in the country. I'm one of only seven editors in the whole company (the U.S. branch, anyway). We handle almost all of the client-facing proposals, emails, presentations, etc. that the company produces. It means I'm crazy busy pretty much all the time. (I even have homework about half the nights of the week, because I don't have time during the day to edit everything by the deadlines.) Working for a financial services company might seem boring to a lot of editors, but it's pretty much where most editors end up. And you know what? It's not all that boring. Most of it is business writing (which occasionally makes me want to smack my face into a wall because it breaks half the rules of concise writing that were pounded into me all through college), and business writing is much less dry than some of the other stuff I've edited over the years. Every document is its own little treasure trove of grammatical mistakes that I have to dig up and correct. It doesn't get tedious because each one is also written by a different author, so there are distinct voices and syntactical quirks to each piece.

I probably can't convince most of you that any of this sounds like fun, but that doesn't matter. I love it.

I had my doubts about editing for a little while. After two straight years of proofreading (which is pretty grueling, to be honest), I was second-guessing my choice to be an editor for the rest of my life. I wasn't sure I was cut out for it. I also wasn't sure that I would get the kind of job that would make me happy. Editing jobs are few and far between out here in Utah. My original plan when my job with the Church ended was to find something well-paying for a year or two and then pick up and head out to New York City, where all the publishing jobs are. I figured that's when my career would start. If I still wanted it to start.

I'm glad that the Lord has bigger plans for me than I did for myself. I was dreaming small, honestly. And this job was definitely His doing. A friend recommended me for an admin assistant position in the Salt Lake KPMG office, so I applied, because I was applying for everything. One interview in, the recruiter was like, "Wait, you like editing?"

"Yes."

"We have a position posted for an editor in L.A. Let me send them your resume."

I didn't really want to move, but I figured it couldn't hurt to explore it a little, so I let him. Turns out that they liked my resume so much that they decided to open the same editing position in Salt Lake so that I wouldn't have to move (my work is not region-specific, so I could literally move anywhere in the country and still do the same job).

I found out after I was hired that this whole situation was pretty much love at first sight for both me and the editing manager. She thought I was perfect and spent the better part of a month trying to find something wrong with me. When that failed, she kept trying to figure out how to get rid of all the other applicants, because she didn't want any of them. On my side, from the first time I talked to her, I knew that I wanted this job. It sounded right up my alley as far as my background went, and I knew that the position would be well within my abilities and that it would push me to be better, too. It also offered the possibility to work from home, to move wherever I wanted, and permanence. Plus, the editors on the team tended to retire. That told me that they didn't get dissatisfied and quit. They stuck it out until they weren't working anymore. I wanted this job so badly. I've wanted it since about the second week in January, but I was terrified that I wouldn't get it, so I was very close-lipped about it.

Turns out, I didn't need to worry. This is exactly where I was supposed to be, and things just worked out. Right down to the fact that I kept coming in second place for all of my other interviews. I had so many interviews, and they all went really, really well. But almost every time, I found myself thinking, "Please don't offer me the job, please, please don't. KPMG hasn't called me back, yet." Since I was collecting unemployment insurance, turning down job after job would have caused me to lose my income, which I couldn't afford. But despite their obvious interest, none of those other jobs extended offers to me. (Well, one company extended me a frankly insulting offer to write out descriptions of bedpans for their website for $12 an hour, even though they knew I'd been making twice that before. I turned them down, obviously.)

So, after two months of unemployment, I landed my dream job. Seriously. If I had stuck to my original plan and gone out to New York, this is probably the kind of thing I would be looking for, because everyone wants the book-publishing jobs, but the positions like this are more stable and pay a little better.

So I got everything I never even knew I wanted from a job about two years earlier than I'd planned. And I can stay with this job for the rest of my life if I want to. No expiration date built in. If, on some crazy chance, I do want to leave it, it's an incredible thing to put on a resume, and I'll have a huge boost finding my next one, though, frankly, I don't ever plan on leaving. I want to build my career here.

So yeah. I'm doing what I love (and rediscovering just how much I do love it in the process), and I'm doing it in an environment that offers me the kind of stability that I've been craving ever since I graduated from college. I'm pretty happy with how my life has gone so far. It really does get better with time. :)