I had moved to a new city and found myself in a job that I didn't like at all. It was the first job that had come along and I knew the person that held my position before I was hired. She had nothing but good things to say about the company and had arranged for me to meet her boss. I had an in, the pay was pretty good and the interview process was going fast. It seemed like it was meant to be. Looking back now, there were some obvious red flags that I ignored: 1. During the interview, it seemed as if the boss was more interested in finding out about my current company than he was about me, and 2. The person I knew was leaving the company. If she loved it so much, why was she leaving? A week in to working the job, I met up with her for lunch. After our conversation, discouragement was settling in. While she never directly said anything bad about the company or the people, she told me honestly how things were and that it wouldn't change. I went back to the office and told myself, No! I can change things and it will work out. I have ideas and can make this happen. After a couple ideas were shot down and I witnessed my boss' leadership style (or lack there of), I understood what she meant. After that week another member of the company left. With that, they decided not to replace him but to hire an additional person to do my same role. At the time, one of my really good friends was job searching and the job was along the same lines of what she had gone to school for. So, I sent her the job description and tried to sell her on coming to work with me. I was successful and my boss really liked her. The first few weeks were great! That was until we started going on walks at lunch. Our lunches consisted of us venting about all of the things we hated about our jobs. It was obvious that neither of us liked it there and felt that the expectations set forth in the interviews or at the beginning were not what the boss truly expected or wanted out of us. We needed to get out! The company that I had worked for in a neighboring city had just opened an office in Omaha and a job that I felt was a good fit was posted. PERFECT! I was so excited to apply for the job. I had friends at this company, it was going places and it prides itself on taking care of its employees. I contacted a friend in HR and told her I was interested in the position and that she could expect to see me at the open house they were hosting. Seeing my former coworkers at the open house made me realize how much I missed having a sense of belonging and how I missed being proud of the company I worked for. I applied for the job, went on one interview and waited for two extremely impatient weeks. Lo and behold, I didn't get the job. I was devastated. When I decided to apply, I had told my friend/coworker that I was job searching and she decided she wanted to as well. In an ideal world, I was going to get the job at my old company and she would get a job shortly after. But it didn't work that way. She found an amazing company with truly outstanding benefits that fit her experience and interests far better than our current job did. She was leaving me in two weeks, I hated my job and wasn't happy. I was going to bed depressed every night knowing that I had to wake up the next morning to go to a job that I hated. I wasn't proud of the company that I worked for. Not because it was an awful company but because I could no longer see myself working there and I literally stopped caring about my daily work. If I was going to spend most of my life at work, then I was determined to find something that I loved. Something I would be proud of. After a few extremely rude comments from my boss, I couldn't stand the thought of working in that place any longer. I so badly wanted to be reckless and quit on the spot. But that wasn't me. I hadn't gone a single day unemployed since my 14th birthday. I didn't know what unemployment looked like and I sure as hell didn't want to find out. I knew that I didn't want to accept the mold of going to work, hating it, going home, eating, going to bed and repeating. I wasn't going to go down that road again. This time around in the job search, I wasn't going to settle. While I had begun my search, I still wasn't happy at my current job. Yes, it was paying the bills but I was falling even deeper into a depressing quarter-life-crisis. I needed a career reset and decided to start my quest for happiness with a total YOLO move. I had been a barista before and while it wasn't a job that I was going to make bank off of, I knew it was something that I liked to do, was good at and would be relatively easy to get hired for. I sent my resume to a coffee shop a few blocks away from my house and waited to hear back. My plan was to quit my job, work as a barista until I found a job that was a perfect fit. It wasn't going to be easy, but I was going to be happy. My number one goal in life is to be happy and if I needed to make an outrageous career change to accomplish that goal, I was going to do it. There are some really exciting things in the works currently and if I wouldn't have quit my job and started working as a barista, I wouldn't have had the time or energy to dedicate myself to them. While I understand that not everyone can make a move like this, I am extremely thankful for the supportive people I have in my life that accepted and stood by me in my YOLO moment. Don't accept life for what it is, make it what you want it to be.
