A Job?!?!

A Job?!?!


Today I had an interview for a Housing Assistant job. The job was to be a part-time social worker and document guru for people needing more permanent housing, whether it be from no housing to temporary housing or temporary housing to more permanent housing—at least if I understood the job correctly. It was exciting pay, and an exciting opportunity to work in my field of choice: helping people directly! I met with my job coach beforehand and gave her the list of questions that I looked up and pondered yesterday while doing a bit of research about the company, and she said it looked great! We talked a bit, and while talking, she decided to look up other jobs at the same company to see if I would qualify for any of them with my no driver’s license and no social work license. Lo and behold, there was one other job, this one full-time, that I qualified for. She emailed me a link to it minutes before the interview was about to start.

My “job coach” is a supported employment specialist, and no, I’m not going to explain what that is, but she’s her own type of caseworker, so she has a dozen different places to be in town with a dozen different clients trying to help find jobs, build resumes and interview skills, help schedule interviews with/for, and support throughout the day on any given day. Her phone rang, and a second later, so did mine. Panicking, I picked it up and answered it like any other phone call. I rehearsed it in my mind (like I do almost everything) that I would put the phone on speaker phone, introduce her as my “job coach” is on the line with me, and start asking the questions, but it turned out I did the entire thing myself!

It started with pleasantries and then “I have some bad news for you… we hired the last Housing Assistant this morning…but there is this other job I think you are well-qualified for if you would be interested in it…”. I open up the link my job coach sent me and asked “is it for Family Specialist?” and we both laugh because I explain the exact coincidence that happened. I quickly try to skim through the hefty wording of a job description and qualifications asking right off the bat “does it require a driver’s license or social work licensure” and she said no. After a few minutes of small talk I say “so it basically looks like I’m connecting families with resources about children and child-care, doing case management, from a desk, no traveling, and it’s directly helping people, right?” She’s like, “yep, that’s the gist of it,” and I’m like “I haven’t worked with children before, so it will be a new situation for me, but I’m in!” She took me through grueling screening questions, skipped over the “what do you know about ‘the company’” because what I had researched was the part of the company that helps the people who need housed, not the people who need resources for their children and families (whole different set of resources, grants, etc.), and was extremely kind throughout the whole process. She gave me a potential start date, said there were six weeks of paid in-office training I had to do, and asked if I had any big plans in the near future…

She said she would call me sometime at the beginning of next week! I’m so excited! I spent most of the afternoon napping, spending time with my husband, and researching what I got myself into. I got myself into a whale of a research chunk! There are all these acronyms, some of which are nationwide, but some of which are Pennsylvania specific, and as someone who didn’t grow up in Pennsylvania, I didn’t grow up knowing a lot of the acronyms. And looking at the 200% poverty rate for 2024 vs remembering about what it was years ago when I was in Missouri… it hasn’t gone up very much… which means more people are falling into the “not making enough money to live but not qualifying for state or federal funding from anywhere”.

I’m grateful I probably found a job. I’m hopeful that I can make an impact on a couple people. I know the burnout rate for people in social work is high. I’m hoping that not working in my “comfortable population” will actually expand my skill set and make me more cognizant of taking care of my mental and physical health.

What are you grateful for today?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Drunk Uncle Boundaries

Did That Seriously Come Out of Their Mouth? We all have that friend or family member who we wince when cornered by. They lock eyes, and it seems the conversation never ends. Worse, it seems like they have opposite views as you do, but they don’t care. They just nod their heads until you nod your head and pretend like you’re enjoying the conversation. Then they take that as their cue to continue for half an hour more. If someone tries to save you, there’s a 50/50 chance they will be pulled into the conversation too, depending on how skillful they are it could lean more heavily on the side of damage. I get you. There are fortunately many Facebook reels about this very topic. Just keep researching “narcissist” and eventually Facebook will point you to these very people. Some of them don’t possess empathy. Some of them have no idea what another person could feel or think besides themselves. They are stuck in their own corner of the world. I am no expert in this, but I took classes on bound...
Read more

Autism in My Own Words Part 1

Autism in My Own Words Part 1   I don’t know how we do it. Or how “normal people” do it… they gather, have parties, talk, drink, eat, “mingle,” etc. I find myself talked at while I find a person’s eyebrows or lips moving and try to lipread to help decipher through the noise what they are trying to say. I thought I was the only one contorting my face in a carefully practiced dance of lips, cheeks, and especially eyebrows to make level expert look what everyone else looked like what level easy looked like. I’ve been doing it my whole life, and I’ve been doing it so long that I’ve forgotten I’ve even been doing it. Until I got diagnosed with autism and found others like me. And my mask slipped. Suddenly I was “being autistic” and “not who I was before.” Everything was harder, and my eyebrows took more energy to move, my eyebrows could hardly stay awake, and so many more things took so much more energy. I have hardly been to a social gathering since then. But today I was talking ...
Read more

From A Candle

Let It All Burn To The Ground No, don’t let it all burn to the ground. Then you would be left with nothing but grief and nothing to start from. Change comes slowly and from using what you already have. I had a brilliant idea as I was falling asleep for a blog post, but of course I didn’t write it down or type it up, so poof it went! I needed some time by myself (which isn’t that difficult since I’m alone when my husband goes to work in the mornings as I’m searching for a job). I made it my self-care today to stare into a candle for five minutes and put on some music, hoping that would rejuvenate me. I was also hoping it would inspire me to write a post. I’ve been holding off on what I’ve been learning in Partial until after the New Year, making way this past week for change and hope and New Year stuff, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I felt like Christmas just went awry in my attempts at changing others. And I shouldn’t have been seeking to change others in the first place. So I’m sittin...
Read more