Thank you, Steve Nootenboom

A week and a half since my last teaser of a post re the job. Hmm. Didn't mean to go so long to follow up. Well. Let's do that. The job.

As you're all steadfastly loyal readers of this blog (surely!), you know all about my travails of the past several months: Lost my job. Couldn't find new job. Found pseudo job. Almost lost all hope. And now, I've got a real job! One that pays!!

To fully appreciate how we got here -- well, more just to appreciate the title of this post -- let's go back to September 1995. Yeah -- nearly 14 years ago. My freshman high school class had a retreat to some camp a few hours outside of LA. To be honest, I can't even remember where it was. Big Bear? Lake Arrowhead? Maybe one of those. But what I do remember, what left an indelible impression on my young mind, was that Steve Nootenboom came to speak to our class.

Nootenboom was a motivational speaker, and he fit the Matt Foley-esque mold* of motivational speakers in every way possible: He was exuberant. He was passionate. He was verbose, going on (and on and on) much longer than any of us (teachers included) cared for. He desperately wanted to connect with us. And connect with us he did, probably more so than he could ever realize. In fact, he said one thing in particular that, for whatever reason, has always stuck with me: If you want to get a job, if you want to break into a new field, if you want to try something different, you have to offer to work for free.

*Actually, that's not a bad comparison. Because when I think of Nootenboom after all these years, I think of a skinny version of Chris Farley's Matt Foley. Honestly. Yeah, I'll allow for the very real possibility that time has completely warped the image of him in my head. But let's go with that image.

Accepting the "offer" for the pseudo job the other month, this very thought crossed my mind. I can't say it's why I took the job, but maybe a week or two into it, the connection occurred to me. And I thought just how ironic it would be if I actually got a job out of working for free.

Working with FG, one of the clients for LV (the website development firm I've been working for),* I formed a rapport with the head guy. And in a meeting a few weeks ago, he casually mentioned that he was looking for someone to head up the marketing efforts for the new site we were putting together. It sounded interesting and something that I could be good at, so I offered up my services. He responded enthusiastically, and we scheduled an interview.

*For the sake of retaining my anonymity on the World Wide Internets -- and I have a variety of reasons for doing so at this stage -- I'm not gonna refer to these businesses by their full name. The client will be FG. The website development firm will be LV. These are actual acronyms.

Since last October, I've been on more interviews than I care to recall. Some were awkward, some were intense, some were friendly, but all were relatively formal. My interview with FG was over dim sum.* My future boss and I talked. Some of the discussion touched on my past experiences, some of it touched on ideas I had for the company, a lot of it was just pleasant chit chat. We had some good food. I tried chicken feet for the first time, which were really good, although with so many bones, quite a chore to eat.

*Called "yum cha" in Australia. No idea why there are different names. If someone wants to look it up, please feel free to let me know.

Lunch ended with a job offer: Spend the next several weeks developing and starting to implement a marketing plan for the company's new online business, and see where we go from there.

After all the uncertainty, after all the stress, that's all it took. I'm still shocked by how quickly and simply it all went down. So one more time, I say to Steve Nootenboom: thank you!