Well, I cracked.
I had resisted taking a PA job for three months, since I didn’t want to take a minor step back professionally just because I didn’t want to sit around the house all day.
That resistance came crashing down yesterday when a friend emailed looking to replace herself, and I’ll be working on a pilot for the next few weeks to months starting tomorrow.
The pay is crap (as all PA pay is), but when you add in the mileage, it’s at least more than I’d be making sitting on my ass and collecting unemployment.
It will hopefully have the added benefit of the restoration of my sanity, which has recently been hanging by a frightfully thin thread after three months of unemployment.
The people seem cool, and luckily fairly okay with the idea that if I get a better offer, I’m going to take it. The transience of employment in pilot season actually works in my favor there.
The main downside is that the office is in frickin’ Santa Clarita, so that’s a nice little 70 mile daily round trip, before I even start doing runs. At least it means I’ll get a lot more mileage, since it’s way far from pretty much everything.
The people who sell me gas and change my oil are going to love this job.
Any employment is good employment at this rate. But I hope they send you a lot of places to make up for that commute — isn’t gas nearing 4 bucks out there?
Yes. Had my first $40 tank of gas in a while the other day. I remember when I was aghast that it was $30/tank. Oh, the quaint old days!
The good news is that it’s an HBO pilot, and I live very close to HBO HQ, so I’ll hopefully get paid to drive home on a fairly regular basis. As long as I break-even on the gas/oil changes, I’ll be coming out ahead of unemployment. And I already feel like I’m getting out of my rut, so I’m already quite glad I took the job.
HBO? Sweet. Go find someone and kick the shit out of them until they bring back Deadwood.
Heh, a bunch of the staff worked on Deadwood. And believe me, if it wouldn’t cost me my job and my tenuous grip on sanity, I would already be kicking some ass about that motherfucking great show.