Employed!

Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been on a quest to find the world’s perfect job. Most of you thought I’d found it when I was working from home in a beautiful small town on the west coast.

So, yeah, it’s fun to work in your underwear all day long. Or not. That’s fun too. But come on. I was sitting in front of a computer all day long. I didn’t have any coworkers to tease. And in the end, I just wasn’t sure I really wanted to be a fundraiser.

And here I was thinking about settling down in the near future: tricking some poor dame into marrying me, starting a family, buying a doublewide.

It seemed wise to explore alternate careers ASAP, before all of that got started.

I’m still doing that. But, let’s face it, unemployment is not exactly lucrative, and I’ve got to EAT, dagnabit.

So here in DC, while I continue to search for an answer to “what do I really want to do when I grow up?” I’ve found a short-term home with Experience Corps.

Experience Corps is a national organization, and is the key partner of the place I used to work for in Boston, Generations Incorporated. Experience Corps is building a nation-wide network of projects that recruit retirees to meet their communities’ most pressing challenges. Right now they focus on engaging retirees to serve as mentors and tutors to elementary school children. The basic idea is perfect, their programs are awesome, and - like Generations Incorporated - they’re filled to the brim with good people.

I’ve signed on to work for them through the end of August.

It’s perfect for lots of different reasons. For one thing, it’s going to help me pay the bills. Plus, the short-term contract allows me to settle into DC and explore my full-time options. Moreover, it won’t take me long to get up to speed in the organization since I’ve worked in the Experience Corps network for 5 years and I know almost all of their staffers. Perhaps most importantly, they’ve got me working on some really interesting projects: working with their in-house fundraising experts to develop/refine their sustainability plans, creating content for a website, yada yada yada.

I’m stoked.

I started on Friday, and it went smoothly. Nicole even baked a “thanks for hiring me” present for me to take in on my first day. I forget what it’s official name is, but it was basically a strawberry/cheese Danish the size of a football. They all had the same reaction to it that I did, which was to say: “holy crap, that Danish is as big as a football!” It was gone in an hour.

Now Nicole is talking about making éclairs for me to take to work on Monday. This girl. I’m telling you.