One of the first job offers came in this past Friday. It cames with a dollar value right in the center of their disclosed range, and health benefits reflecting ever-upward-trending deductibles for self and family. That was disappointing to be sure, but I did manage to let loose an ironic chuckle on seeing that the dollar figure was precisely the same as my first job offers on leaving federal service some 20 years ago.

I sat with it over the weekend, putting my mind elsewhere, deliberately letting it all swim around in my subconscious while I carried on with my own busy work. I figured that, if there was an answer, it’d reveal itself in time.

The weekend disappeared into a blissful haze that few could appreciate – just me and and the laptop on the patio, or me with the tower and larger monitor at my desk, moving around invisible things from cloud to cloud, migrating some of my personal websites, services, and so forth to a new server – all with frequent breaks to spend time with family and to help care for my son…

and that’s pretty much the job description that they offered – technically more coding than infrastructure, but all the same kinds of environments and puzzles. Work from home (or wherever), flex your time, … just be responsive to clients and get the hours in? It wouldn’t be a bad start for a “third career”…

During the first interview, I told the fellow straight-out that, without any real data yet about my current “market value,” I’d probably accept any reasonable offer without much question, but with the caveat that I’d be quite pissed to discover latter that I’d been taken advantage of.

TBD.