Lifechanging is the word that I’m using to describe March 9.

I started the morning thinking about sweet it was that it was the two year anniversary of when I met the SO. Aw, how sweet. It was my day off and group sewing day. All good things. I ended the day laying in bed with the SO singing “Take This Job and Shove It” to me.

In between I got in a fight with my boss on the phone. He called me to start the fight. It is a horribly long and convoluted story but I’ve been there 10 years and it has been crazily dysfunctional from day 1. I have a high tolerance for crazy. I can deal with most stuff for steady work and not having to do surgeries for the last few years. That’s how much I like my job. I have a mantra of listing off everything that sucks (and that takes a bit) and then saying but it is steady and I don’t have to do surgery. Well, my no surgery perk was just yanked out from under me through no fault of my own. The clinic owner has been making bad life choices and now needs us to try to fix what he as broken. Again. On top of this the feeling in the clinic is that he is about to do something highly illegal. Not just his normal forms of illegal but more “Hey, let’s all go to jail!” illegal. It is time to flee like rats off a sinking ship.

I spent the rest of that day trying to line up an escape plan. I made some calls and got great feedback. Sadly, it took me a while to have the life lesson sink in. If I’m calling people I’ve worked for in the past and they are jumping at the chance to work with me again, why am I staying in a crappy job?

I called one place with a plan to talk him into a day or two of work a week. My plan collapsed when he got on the phone and I just said, “I need a job.” (I know this vet well. I’m not just begging random strangers.) His response was, “Seriously?” I said yes. He said, “Part time or full time?” I was flummoxed. I know this clinic very well. I know the finances. To my business mind he can’t hire me for either option. But he doesn’t seem to care about making money for himself. I said I was flexible to buy time. He just said, “Ok, we can do that.” We are meeting at 10:30 today to work out details. I have fingers and toes crossed. This clinic has issues but it is holistically based. He’s chiropractic certified like me and works homeopathy into most of his cases. It would give me an opportunity to do the stuff I really want to do. This has not been encouraged where I am now. It would be worth a slight pay cut to be able to learn and implement this type of medicine. I’m worried about getting my hopes up too high but I’ve given this practice a lot of thought with hopes of buying it sometime and have lots of ideas of how to fix areas where it is weak. I could really help them and they could be saving me. It seems like way too easy of an answer and I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and crush my hopes of an easy escape plan. I’m such a pessimist!