Month: August 2023

This was one of those odd stories where I honestly would love to know what the reason was that I was had been brought in. There had to be something, but I doubt I’ll ever find out. So I had previously applied for a fair number of jobs with the local municipal entity. I had prior background working for several other larger cities so I vaguely figured they would pick me up for something. They never did. Not that I didn’t interview with them from time to time. At this point, I think I had interviewed with some department or another on probably 3 different occasions.

Anyway, this particular time… I didn’t apply to anything. Instead one of the senior attorneys reached out to me directly and asked me to apply to a position. Far be it for me to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I rightly assumed they were interested in hiring me for this position specifically, based on seeing my resume in the general pool. So I shoot off the application on the city website and rather quickly have an interview setup.

I show up, and as this happens to be in the midst of COVID we are all sitting in a large room, strangely distant for each other. This wasn’t the 6 feet everyone was asked to give.. no. There were 3 interviewer, the senior attorney and two counsel, and a paralegal. And they were arrayed about 20 feet apart from each other in a circle, a very large circle, with me in the middle.

The interview went very well. It was a litigation position so we started sorta going back and forth on cases we had done. The senior counsel was asking questions which were basically just to show that you knew WTF you were talking about regarding the local scene. I.e. how many trials, what firms were you most often opposed, what’s your opinion on judges… basically things you’d only know if you actually worked in the area for awhile. The short version is I answered correctly and ultimately we were joking a bit back and forth about some of the opposing counsel and some judges. I had been working the state and federal side more than enough to be able to match anyone in the room. The interview went really well.

I never heard anything back from them. I don’t even think there was a rejection. Just silence. I think I was brought in to interview for a position they already had a candidate for, but they needed to pad the paperwork to show that they interviewed more than just their one person. I will never know, but that is my guess.

Sometimes, the right thing comes along at the wrong time.

I had just quit my more recent firm job because of COVID and conflicting family commitments. (read small children with no daycare). Anyway, without knowing how long things would be in the state they were with COVID, I figured I should try applying to jobs because it usually took months of applications and multiple interviews at various places before a decent offer was presented. In this case, I was wrong.

So within the first week after I start sending out applications I get a response back. A small construction company was asking me to interview for a general counsel position. It seemed interesting so I showed up and talked to everyone involved. It was a small operation, but they usually had a large workforce. Construction often has a core operations group and hires (potentially hundreds) of contract laborers when they are staffing up for a job. The company was nice, it had some rather clear ideas of where it wanted to go, had a good revenue stream, and everyone seemed super friendly (which is damn rare)… and they really wanted me. Within 2 days they sent me an offer.

The problem was… I had literally just quit my other job 2 weeks ago because there was no daycare to be found, and I was going to handle the kids until things started opening back up more normally. It would have been an awesome opportunity and I really liked the company… unfortunately it was the most perfectly bad timing. I really killed me but I had to turn them down because I didn’t actually expect anyone to move that quickly in the hiring process.