Jobs and houses and moving, OH MY

Ok there is a lot going on in Kara’s World at the moment so I thought I would just put it all down here so everyone has access to the latest information (as of this minute, and things change minute to minute it seems so this will probably be outdated as soon as I post it).

First and most fun – I resigned on Tuesday! Woo hoo! I have been really unhappy in my job for a few months now. I’ve been wanting to resign for ages and I am thrilled that things have finally come together enough that it could happen. I will miss the people I sit with, as I’m around a fun bunch of people, many of whom are my age. But even having a laugh with people every day isn’t enough to keep a person satisfied in a bad job.

Second, the house – we had sold the house about a month ago and found out on Tuesday (about 20 minutes after I resigned) that the buyers have backed out. So it’s back on the market now. We spent Tuesday and Wednesday nights getting the house spic and span as the house wasn’t in tip top cleaning shape anymore having been off the market for so long. We’ve got a few viewings lined up and hopefully it will sell fast again (and stick!).

Third, the new job – I have been interviewing for consulting jobs at SAP and IBM. This has been going on for a few weeks. The whole time I have been wanting to go with IBM and SAP was my sort of fall back company. I’ve reached the end of the interviewing process with both companies and within the last few days SAP has started to win me over. Everything has been a struggle with IBM throughout the entire process. Every communication I’ve had from them has been initiated by me, and it’s not uncommon for them to not even respond to me. SAP has been very responsive and even proactive, and the topper was when I interviewed on Tuesday with the woman who would be my manager. I really liked her and felt like she would be a great person to work for, and she really made me feel SAP understands and appreciates the sacrifice consultants make by travelling all week and that they do their best to keep you as close to your base city as you can and on a Monday to Thursday schedule as much as possible. IBM’s message is more that they try to accommodate you but you need to be prepared for inconvenience. There’s no guarantee with either company that you will always be home by Thursday evening or not working weekends, but SAP made me feel like they really strive to prevent interruptions of personal time and IBM made me feel like I just need to be prepared for anything.. Anyway, SAP extended an offer to me yesterday! Woo hoo! I have not accepted yet because I’m waiting to get my offer from IBM. They annoyed me even further yesterday however when I was pushing them to finish up the process and they had another manager call me for some type of interview which seemed to have no purpose and was me answering questions I’ve already answered loads of times for them before. She made it quite clear that she used to be employed at SAP and I guess the purpose was for her to ‘subtly’ point out the advantages of IBM over SAP. She did this pretty clumsily, however, and it only served to reconfirm my apathy towards IBM. At this point my mind is pretty made up on SAP, but I am trying to wait to accept until I’ve seen IBM’s offer so I can make sure SAP’s was on target if nothing else. They are both really great companies in the end so I feel that I’ll win no matter which I choose.

So those are the three big things going on at the mo. There are lots of other things happening in the background, like deciding what we’re taking with us and what needs to be left behind, how to get rid of the things we can’t take, apartment searching for when I get to Indy, thinking about what car to get and how to get around before I’ve bought one, and of course organizing the cats’ travel.