So you know it’s going to be a long day when you get up at 4 am so you can make a 6 am flight from the east coast to the west coast, where you’ve magically picked up 3 hours so you’re at work by noon (their time) and can then work till 9 pm (your time) before you crash into bed (thereby losing all sense of time). I can’t help thinking there must be a better way to make a living!

 

As luck would have it, I got a call shortly before takeoff from a client who needs a CFO at their New Jersey subsidiary. I will be talking to them about this as soon as I manage to extricate myself from my current client’s Seattle slew of crises, but until I get home I’ll be weighing the pros and cons.

 

Pro: Having a job where you can make plans for the weekend and keep them. Since this is our annual Apple Weekend in Connecticut, I am right now missing Crust Detail, in which I load fragile sheets of dough into pie pans, and Lucy attempts to pinch the edges into shape. Sir William the Loud called reveille at dawn this morning, and I was amazed to find the sound did not carry 2500 miles. I missed it.

 

Con: Moving away from the friends I have made over the last nine years. When I moved to Boston in 1995, the first two years were difficult and lonely. It’s very hard to move into an area where you know no one. North Jersey is at least closer to family (about two hours), but so much further away from friends (four hours, anyway). I can’t quantify how much I’ll miss them. Miss OT has also warned me about this, having moved away to Florida in the summer of 2003 and then returned in the spring of 2004 in order to rediscover a social life.

 

Pro: Onward and upward. This is a great job – CFO of a good sized company – and would be a stretch for me. According to the Ewe, I'll be the boss of everybody! (Well, I know better, but it's a nice point of view.) I probably wouldn’t hit the ball out of the park on Day One. However, I think I'll have a lot of support within the company and would be able to call for help as needed during the ramp-up phase.

 

Con: Fear that, right now, my client thinks I am tremendously capable, and I will manage to destroy that image. When I write this stuff down, it looks silly, but nevertheless this is how I think. Always have. I often think the Richard Bransons and Jack Welches of the world aren’t any more skilled than anyone else – they just don't worry about stuff like this.

 

Pro: Exiting the firm. I used to see senior managers leave the firm and never thought it would be me, but it’s time. For a lot of reasons I won’t get into.

 

Con: I love, love, love my house in Watertown, overlooking a golf course. I bought it in 2000, gutted it, and essentially redesigned the entire interior. My parents have done incredible work inside and outside the house, building a lower deck out back, repairing/repainting the front porch, rebuilding cellar doors, and a host of other, smaller projects. It will be very hard to hand over the keys.

 

 

The family, of course, is supportive of whatever I want to do. I spoke to my father yesterday, who tells me I am doomed to give it the full Schwabenbauer Worry. (Although he is retired, he tells me he still does this even though the decisions he makes are less important now. To keep his skills sharp, he sometimes devotes whole nights to which ski trip he should sign up for, or how far to trim back the magnolia.) The Schwabenbauer Worry requires many days of angst, filled with under or over eating, sleeplessness, and much rational analysis followed by a decision made on the gut level. (Sometimes a shopping spree is involved, although my father claims not have experienced this symptom. However, I cannot help noting that Seattle is home to the original Nordstroms.)

 

And so I interview next week, and as I told my client, at the end of the process I may not be the person they want, or I may decide not to take the job, but the important thing is that we remain friends.

 

It's an important decision, and it's not all about the benjamins. I think the rightness of my choice here won’t be measured in terms of my paycheck, but rather, by how happy I am to go to work in the morning one year, two years, or three years from now. A crystal ball would be nice here. What I’ve got right now, though, is a round white moon hanging in the clouds outside my window that makes me think of a cocktail onion in an ice-cold Gibson martini. And if I can’t get to sleep soon, I’m headed down to the hotel bar.

 

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