#1 · Aug 12, 2010 02:02 UTC
charger — Aug 11, 2010It strikes me as strange that you would be looking for a tech job in a place that has very few tech jobs. I don't know your reasons for moving where you did but I assume it wasn't to work in technology. It seems obvious to me that it's not going to be easy to get an interview when there aren't many tech jobs to be had in the area. What piece of the puzzle am I missing?
Here's the long story all in one place. I know you've heard bits and pieces over the last few years, and it's a bizarre combination of many events.
When I moved up here was for entirely different reasons then looking for another tech job. I had six properties (me in one, parents in one, four for investment) and sold mine to move up here (late August of 2003). The plan was start a new career (I was already working on both a PhD and specific certification training) and have the real estate as diversified income. I moved into an apartment and intended to find land and build. Then, the day after my boxes came off the moving van, my father dropped in an outdoor mall in San Diego at 72, officially passing away two weeks later and, since I'm an only child, that meant I now had to think about moving my mom up here. Soon after, there were legal issues with my new career so I ended my classes and began to change my five-year plans to deal with both that the situation with my parents. After having my mom up to visit the following July she decided she did want to move up here so the house my parents lived in had to be updated (another long story of wasted money).
At this point things were weird and changing, but not bad since I still had lots of assets, however things kept going down strange paths.
While getting my parent's house ready to sell, my apartment complex decided to go condo on me. They told me I could buy my apartment for $375k (a HUGE amount up here) so I said no way. Two days later they inform me that my unit (apparently the nicest with a great view of the Columbia River) was the first sold so I would have to move soon. I went house hunting and ended up finding one that was very close to what I was going to build. Between selling my parent's house (which I had made the payments on for the last 18 years) and buying the first house up here my Mom ended up not officially living anywhere for eight days. We just got out of the apartment in time. I put 30% down on the new house and, at this point in time, I still had a healthy six-digit cash reserve, no late payments on anything in my life, zero balances on my credit cards and an 811 FICO score (even though I wasn't working). After moving in, we found a perfect smaller house for my Mom about two miles away and I put another 25% down on that.
The next whammy came when I started making some changes to my house and found that it had been built for the prior owner (a shady CPA) by the siding firm he worked for. They cut every corner they could and it definitely did not have a real inspector certify it. The home inspection that was done before I bought only found a couple of minor things, but getting my money back from them was peanuts compared to what it cost to get the house up to code (the prior owners moved to a different state then disappeared to dodge legal action and, apparently, other crimes I found out later). By the time I had done the fixes with some minor updates, $91k had disappeared.
This was followed by the real estate bubble bursting just when I was trying to sell off my investment properties.
Then the shit hit the fan in the financial and employment markets. At first this didn't affect me directly until the IRS claimed I owed over $72k in Capital Gains taxes on the sale of my parent's house. Needless to say, I didn't make THAT much on the sale but they went all the way back to when my parents originally bought it. It had been refinanced several times including a big one to pay the non-covered part of a brain surgery that my dad had to have (he became disabled before I was born). Since I had just used my exemption during my move up here I couldn't even lie and say I had been living in the house (my dad had been on title without paying just to deflect some of these costs when the time came to sell the house but, with him out of the picture, I ended up getting stuck). My investment properties took much longer to sell than anticipated and I only ended up about even when it was all said and done...
Anyway, I tried to get at some of the hefty equity I had in the houses (both had gone up in value nicely) and couldn't due to knee-jerk reaction in the housing loan markets. For a time even well-qualified people with nice jobs had issues - and I wasn't working! I ended up being forced to use most of my savings as well as taking large amounts from my credit cards. This is when I began to look for work in earnest. My two biggest hurdles were that what I knew in the tech world wasn't around any more (all of the Digital Equipment Corp. machines and products) and I hadn't been working in the field since May of 2003. I should note that I wasn't just sitting on my butt, I was the director of a non-profit organization for three years, however that was an unpaid position.
The final straw came when I transferred $4k from one financial institution to another. While there are tons of Union Bank of California branches in So. Cal., there's only one large, impersonal branch in downtown Portland up here. They put a hold on the transfer until it cleared so I called every day until they said the money was in my account. I paid a bunch of bills and, a few days later (on Friday of course), they call me and say I'm almost $2k overdrawn when I should have over $2k still in my checking. They tell me that they had to send the $4k back (but didn't tell me). Since there was no way to cover that money in the half-an-hour(!) they gave me (it took over 40 minutes just to drive to the branch), I ended up with a bunch of silly fees which I now know was probably why they did it (they attempted similar actions after this even after I'd closed the account). Anyway, I found that there really wasn't any good reason for rejecting the transfer and it was completed again the next week, but I had to call all the places I wrote checks to and let them know about the BS. Two of these were the credit card companies that I had used to pay the IRS and get money to survive with. In the beginning both cards were great! One originally was a Fleet at 7.8% fixed (bought by Bank of America) and the other (can't remember who it was any more) was at 9.2% fixed (bought by Washington Mutual). Both loans were done using checks at 2.9% for the life of the loan. Thanks to my bank's behavior, one credit card payment was two days late and the other only one day late yet BOTH raised the interest rates on my cards to over 31%!!!! This added over $1,000 to my minimum monthly fee so I told them where they could go and that they were done getting payments from me (yes, I first tried to get the situation back to where it was but failed).
Since then I've lost both houses, all credit cards, my great credit rating and over $650,000. The only work I had was two small contracts with Intel (two weeks) and a software design firm (that went under after a government project lost funding just after startup putting me, the friend that I was working with and the design firm itself out of work). I was lucky to get my mom into a senior apartment where her puny Social Security check (about $1,000 per month) barely pays for a tiny one-bedroom and expenses.
Right now I'm in a start-up company with several other experienced people who all lost jobs due to the economy. I'm the only one who didn't qualify for unemployment (though I DO qualify for food stamps though I still consider those to be for "others" and don't get them). I'm living in a small room at my business partner's house and selling music gear to survive until we start making money. We were bought by a publicly traded company and have 9.5 million shares of stock we can't sell for a year, but are STILL waiting for the actual funding to come through. I've worked about 60 hours a week for over a year now without pay - well worth it if things do take off, but another kick in the nuts if they don't! It's getting very tight for my business partner now as he tries to keep his house, however I'm still trying to be optimistic. We HAVE a good business model and the right people, we've been written up in Business Week, Bloomberg and were invited to be on Fox Business News as well as some that are still pending (like an interview with the NY Times). We've met with lots of the "right" people (including the new Governor of Alaska) and have several projects waiting to happen. I'm just hoping that we don't run out of time before the good things come.
All of that said, I may live a completely different life now, but I still love it up here!