Big news in the Hawbaker household today. Yesterday afternoon I was informed by my boss that our small section of the company was being shut down, most likely by mid-October. Counting "salary continuation" (severence pay), I will stop getting paid the first week of November... three weeks before the due date of our first baby.

I've had this job, affectionately known as my "day job" (read: the one that pays the bills), for just over three years. I work for an outsource call center doing customer support and technical support. I am good at what I do and I enjoy the "helping people" aspect of the job. When we moved to Chattanooga, my bosses thought enough of me to allow me to keep the job and work from home. That was a huge blessing in more ways than one, the biggest being that there was little to no chance I'd find a similar job in Chattanooga paying more than 2/3 of my current salary.

I consider myself very fortunate that I was given this much notice about losing this job. I've been laid off before, by a dot-com-gone-bust, and was not given a single day's notice or a single day's severence pay. Trust me, I know it could be worse. Now it is crunch time -- I need to find a job within the next four or five weeks so that I don't have to go without a paycheck.

Ideally, I'd love to find a job utilizing my web and graphic design skills to some extent, or to start getting more steady work in those areas through Esplodere, the company I started with Andy (Cole Slaw). I am also looking in the customer service or tech support fields since I have more years of experience in those areas. So consider this a bit of shameless self-promotion. If anyone reading this knows of a job that I would be a good fit for, or if you are in need of any web design services, please email me.