California, 2007

They say San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities in America. I’d probably agree with that.

Heading north on 101, as it crosses Mission Street and turns onto Van Ness, I look out of the car window to the left, and see the sunset burning the fog off Mount Sutro, great billowing layers of gold and gray.

Breathtakingly beautiful.

Heartbreakingly beautiful. Heartbreaking, as I remember that I don’t know how long I can stay here. I don’t know how much time I have left before I have to leave for yet another city, looking for work.

It’s the uncertainty that gets you. Waiting for word on yet another interview. Yet another recruiter calls, and you can tell she’s reading buzzwords off a checklist, ticking off your career in a dull monotone that tells you that to her, you’re just another out-of-work schmuck stuck in the debris of the dot-com crash.

As Manuela, the Chinese apartment manager we met in Richmond says, "You in IT? You come at bad time."

There’s the requisite re-reading of your resume over the phone. Ten years of Solaris, nine on Linux. Eight years of script programming, seven of Perl and PHP. And a partridge in a pear tree.

And the uncomfortable questions that inevitably follow. Why did you leave your old job? What were you doing outside the US all these years? Why did you come to the US just now?

And on, and on, until she’s satisfied. Follow up email comes in, and I can tell by the date stamp that it’s originated somewhere in Bangalore or Chennai. Offshored HR recruiters. Again, this tells me I am only one in a large stack of resumes, submitted by God knows how many other recruiting agencies, competing for a three-month contract position that has a small chance of getting converted to a full-time position.

So. I send off yet another copy of my resume (as they invariably lose the one I’d sent them in the first place), and it’s back to the interminable waiting.

Oh, maybe the followup calls in the days and weeks afterward, the investigative sleuthing through Google and the web to find phone numbers for HR, for department heads, for anyone who can tell you that your application is "still in progress".

And the long silences, answering machines and unavailable people, until the inevitable rejection e-mail. Oh, sometimes they don’t even want the speed of an e-mail, you get a formal rejection through snail mail, two weeks after you’ve verified through follow-up calls that yes, they’ve hired someone else.

And it’s back to waiting for the next application, the next recruiter, the next interview.

Nothing to do but wait for my ship to come in. Well, at least I could have chosen far worse places to do my waiting in.

Nothing to do but wait. And hope. And try not to dream.

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