In which the business community of eastern Oklahoma relents and provides our hero with a job.

This is a slightly retouched photo of the building that houses my new office. I've taken the logo off the crown of the building to preserve a modicum of corporate anonymity. You can't see in this picture, but I'm on the ground floor under the cupola down in front. I have one very busy window I can look out of. There's a good deal of coming and going outside.

It's a hotel, if you couldn't tell, and I'm one of the new sales managers. This means I sell the meeting space, and I also sell blocks of rooms to groups who are passing through town. If I can combine the two things, then so much the better. I wear a tie, sometimes even a suit, though things here are generally much more casual than at some of the bigger hotels and in some of the bigger cities, and I can get away with much more. The occasional open collared shirt, for instance. Perhaps khakis.

I was hired on Monday of last week, and started on Wednesday. It's a salaried job, rather than based on a commission (thank sweet jesus), and comes with amenities like a 401k, insurances of various stripes, the requisite vacation days, and free food in the restaurant. I get to order, tip, and just sign my name on the final bill. This is -- almost as much as the regular salary part -- the best part of the job to date. I'm expected to treat clients to lunch, if possible. They expect me to do this.

Now that I've landed on a relatively steady island of employment here in Oklahoma, I can look back and actually count the days I was adrift. Considering that the last day of my job in Chicago was October 19, 2007, and I was given the offer here in OK last Monday February 25, that adds up to four months and one week of sporadic employment. The "sporadic" designation comes solely from the generosity of my former employer, who payed me to do consulting work on the web for them in dribs and drabs.

I think you can agree, though, that 4 months+ is a fuck of a long time. It sure felt like it from here. It wasn't for lack of trying, though there were times that I'll admit that sometimes a day or two would limp past and I couldn't even begin to think about tweaking or retweaking my poorly functioning resume. Or overwriting my letter of introduction --again -- into something either far too formal or insultingly familiar, just for variety's sake. Or shuffling through the local paper's appalling job database and hoping against hope that my queries would bring back something less depressing than "call center representative."

I'd had so little success here that I was beginning to think that the proverbial job market was telling me that I wasn't marketable at all. Or rather, that my rather rarified set of skills (independent film producer? check. long-time barkeep? check. Client Services Manager at a . . . whatkindofplaceisthat? check.) was, in the end, unexplainable to anyone who didn't already know me. Which is the entirety of our new fair city. I'd begun to get this sick feeling that my worth as a worker had been grossly inflated in Chicago, and here I was getting a sense of my true value, which was essentially bupkiss.

But someone at my hotel made an obviously rash decision and took me on. From their point of view, anyway, it looks rash and risky. From my point of view, they gave me a hell of a break, and hence well get my sustained best efforts. That is, until I can be convinced that I'm a touch more marketable here than when I started out.