Well, I'm unemployed again.

Friday morning, I was invited up to HR for a brief meeting where my manager told me "it just wasn't working out" and they let me pack up my stuff and go home.

I guess the plus side would be that my now ex-manager went out of his way to state that it wasn't me or my work ethic, and in fact he had me listed with HR as "Rehire-eligible" (I know that's significant) and encouraged me to apply for several other open positions since he felt I could still do some good there.

Just not for the team I was on.



I just spent all weekend at LL Bean in Burlington, working at the Outdoor Discover School registration and transportation kiosk. I'd try for full time there in a heartbeat, but retail doesn't pay nearly enough to live on.

So this has all got me thinking again. A dear friend told me elsewhere, 'maybe this is the universe's way of telling you you made a mistake'. When this happened in February, you know how agitated I was...maybe I was more worried over losing a convenient workplace and a dear friend more than anything else.

This time, I hardly did more than shrug my shoulders and say 'thanks for the opportunity'.

Instead of diving right back into the hunt, I'm planning on taking the next week or longer to re-evaluate just what direction my life should go. I was thinking earlier that maybe I've spent enough time on the light side of healthcare and I should become a Sith again. For the first 20 years of my career, I was the guy you hated; I took great pride in exploiting every loophole and denying claims. The hell of it was, I was good at it, and I liked it...in addition to it paying the bills quite well. I could do that again.

Could I live with myself? Well....it beats starving to death under a bridge, doesn't it?

I'm also wondering if there's any money in consulting. I do know how to exploit the loopholes, so I also know my way around them. Do you think anyone would pay me to sit on hold with their insurance companies and figure out why their claims didn't get paid?




I know many of you followed my weekly updates over at facebook last time. I'm not going to do that again; I'd feel like such a fraud.

In the end, we're not going to stop living just because I stopped working. There are worse things than to be out of work in August. We'll probably head for the beach one day this week, and we can always check in with Mama TriSec and her pool....and she'll feed us, too!

I'll call unemployment in the morning to see what I need to do to re-open my claim from earlier in the year. And curiously, an agency I registered with in February called me Saturday am with a position. It's just a call-center rep, but I was good at that too back in the day. Might be good just to listen to people yell at me for no good reason, I'll call the agency tomorrow, too.

God bless this blog and everyone here; you mean more to me than you could possibly know.

Things are tough out there; this is round two...I already depleted most of our savings the first time this happened. The IRAs are next.