Seems the IT industry is picking up a bit here in Michigan, or at least it seems to be. I’ve gotten a few emails recently with companies that had short-term jobs on offer and if I were out of work I’d probably have tried for one or two of them, but two to six weeks isn’t anything I’m going to quit my current job over unless it pays a helluva lot more than the ones I’ve seen are paying. Last Friday I was contacted by a company that was looking for someone with UNIX and Linux experience of which I have some. I sent back an email saying that while I had some experience I was far from an expert on either OS thinking they’d probably rescind the offer, but it turns out they still wanted to talk with me. So tomorrow I have a job interview in the late afternoon which means I’ll be leaving work early to make it there as it’s all the way back over in Ann Arbor which is south-west -ish of where I’m currently living. Friday afternoon rush hour traffic is notoriously bad so I’ll definitely want to get a head start.

I don’t know if I mentioned that the company I’m contracting to at the moment has offered to hire some of us contractors on internally and they had us all fill out online applications. We’d been told that not everyone would get an offer and today we found out who did and didn’t. I wasn’t one of them. Which is OK because it’s not that big of a step-up to go from contractor to employee. It would have netted me affordable health insurance and the chance to earn vacation time, but not much of a pay raise so it wouldn’t have stopped me from looking elsewhere in the long term. This new possibility I’m interviewing for would bump me up to $20 an hour, still not where I’d like to be, but $5 more than what I’m currently making and should also offer health insurance.

Still just having things show up in my inbox is good call for a bit of optimism. With a little luck maybe I can get back up to what I’m used to earning before another year goes by.