June 02, 2006 Friday

On the way to Bend, OR

8:45 am

The car is packed, and we're ready for our first road trip in the Cherry Bomb (our 2001 red PT Cruiser). We're psyched, we're packed, we're still half-asleep—conditions are perfect!

9:00 am

Conditions are perfect, that is, for a stop at Krispy Kreme, which conveniently has a store about 10 blocks from our new apartment. (and we have a Krispy Kreme Kash Kard, which contains about 25 donuts worth of eating on it.)

We even get a free, hot and warm Krispy Kreme glazed donut (we always think of this as receiving donut communion—it's free and it's heavenly!).

Now we're ready to sit in the car for 7 hours, staring out the window and trying not to ask "How much farther now?"

10:00 am

So why on earth are we headed towards Bend?

Well, it's kind of a long story, but we don't have anything better to do while we drive down I-5 staring at the odd items being ferried by various tractor trailers. (Our favorite so far is some 10-foot lengths of 15-foot-diameter tin pipe. Somebody has a very serious sewage system.)

About a week ago, we finished up our applications for Americorps*VISTA. (There's several branches to Americorp, such as the Brownshirts, which is only for 18 to 24 year olds and you have to wear a uniform. The VISTA branch is where you get paid very little money for working to help folks less well off than you are. That's the branch we're interested in.)

The cool part is that the application is on-line and you can take your time filling it out. Sadly, that's about the only cool part. The application is clearly aimed at college kids--there's room for two (2) volunteer experiences and four (4) jobs (and the job descriptions consist of the name of the company and your position).

Oh, and you have to explain how you acquired each skill you have (such as "Writing") in 25 words or fewer.

These applications are perfect for somebody just finishing up college, and woefully inadequate for grown-ups with some 30 years of professional experience each.

Still, this is the government, and the government loves its hoops, so we squeeze ourselves through them. When you submit the application, you also enter numbers for the jobs you are interested in (which you can find through the AmeriCorps incredibly clunky and poorly designed search engine).

We were waiting until May 25^th because there was a job that Laura was interested in that didn't open until then. (It wasn't clear what would happen when we hit "Submit" on the application. It was entirely possible that it would clear every field on every page, requiring us to start over, so we didn't want to hit "Submit" until we were ready.)

Of course, for reasons known only to bureaucrats, the job suddenly opened on May 18^th (which we found out about by accident). So we were racing around finishing up our applications (Laura: well, one of us was racing around finishing it up, but the sensible one had her application already completed).

We pushed "Submit" on Wednesday.

Friday morning, Robert gets a call. It's from one of the listings he applied for, asking if he can do a phone interview later that day.

Robert would like to remind everyone that he managed to secure our current apartment in one (1) phone call.

As it turns out, he may have managed to secure both of us jobs with one (1) phone interview.

Needless to say, he's been insufferable since, and if it works out, will probably be more so. (This week, he's convinced that he's a mutant X-Man with special Phone Powers. "I must use my powers only for good! Unless, you know, the Dark Side has a better dental plan.")

We'll talk more about the job in a bit. Right now, we're enthralled by a trailer carrying 2-foot thick slabs of concrete, about 10 feet high and 20 feet long rolling down the freeway at 60 mph We're thinking how large a hole it would make in the pavement if it fell...

12:00 noon
(167 miles)

We pull off at the rest stop just north of Battleground, WA. Although it seems obvious that some kind of warfare occurred here, Laura (who had to take Washington History in 1^st grade, 2^nd grade, etc.) doesn't have a clue who fought whom or why. But we're pretty sure the good guys won.

So, about this job in Bend. The lady we talked to, Felice, is a consultant running her own business. She's managed to score a couple of government grants (one from the Feds, one from the State of Oregon). She's in that awkward position of having more work than she can handle, but not enough to justify hiring an actual employee.

Enter VISTA. It turns out that VISTA people make very little money. Like really teeny amounts of money. Like poverty wages. The logic is that you'll be at the same economic level as the folks you're working with (which, frankly, makes us want to be assigned to Beverly Hills). We've heard numbers as low as $750 per month (which is what we used to spend on groceries).

If you're a business person looking for cheap help, though, this beats the tar out of having to pay an actual living wage. And it's legal!

Felice has got several projects she's working on, which she's planning to assign to the VISTA (and yes, they use the noun to describe the person who's in indentured servitude) depending on what his or her interests are.

Pretty much all of them are about helping people start small businesses in rural Oregon. Some of them are helping artists figure out a way to make money doing artsy stuff. One is getting some farmer's markets going. Another one is to write a manual on how to start small businesses in rural areas.

The job skills she's looking for are almost exactly the same as the job skills we have (communication, writing, speaking, organizing—all the stuff you learn when you have to run your own business).

She was hoping to get a college kid who might have majored in one of these areas. She was not expecting to get a couple of people with years (and years) of experience in almost all the fields.

Because she's a consultant, not a government agency, she knew better than to lounge around and mull over our application—which is why she was on the phone within 48 hours of Robert's application going in.

And, in the course of the phone interview, Robert mentioned that Laura (who, after all, has an MBA) was also looking for work, and Robert bemoaned that AmeriCorps makes no provision at all for married couples. (You can't even search for jobs by city, to make it easier to get two jobs in the same city.)

This got Felice fired up because she (like us) thinks this is a pretty darn good chance for the government to take advantage of our naivete and rope us both in. She said she would make some phone calls (since she knows the other VISTA folks in the area) and see what she could arrange.

In the meantime, Robert & Felice agreed to meet halfway in Portland on June 16^th.

1:00 pm

We're discovering something about asking Google for directions. Google likes straight lines. It also knows that going along the hypotenuse of a triangle is shorter than going along the edges.

Of course, right now, the hypotenuse is running through Gresham and is going through about 8 billion lights (to make it easy to get in and out of the many, many strip malls that line Highway 26 at this point). The edges of the triangle (I-80 and Hwy 35) are zooming along at about 80 mph.

Beware Google map directions.

Okay, where were we?

Oh yeah, Robert & Felice agreed to meet in Portland on the 16th and it sounded like pretty much a done deal. But Robert got to thinking (always a moderately dangerous activity) and realized that:

1. We need to tell our landlady (Starr, if you've been following recent entries) that we're moving out by the 10^th of the month.

2. the contract for the job starts August 15^th

3. if we don't nail it down until Jun 15^th, we couldn't move out until the end of July.

4. Oh look—Laura is running an Autoharp festival the last week of July.

Hmmm....Of course, all these problems go away if we move at the end of JUNE, and in fact, we get some extra time to get settled (and find all the donut shops).

So we e-mailed Felice (Robert: "It didn't seem like I needed to use my phone powers for such a simple task. With great power comes great—ow! Quit hitting me!") and pointed this out.

We said we would be willing to drive down to Bend to help wrap this thing up early.

By then, of course, Felice had received Laura's application and we're pretty sure she was trying not to explode when she saw LJ's qualifications (certified Quality Manager, MBA, three small businesses—all kinds of hoorah). So we arranged to meet on Saturday, June 3^rd (tomorrow) at 10:00 AM in Bend.

And that is why we're driving endlessly down the highway towards Bend.

1:50 pm
(233 miles)

We're at the summit of a ski area that's right near Mount Hood. We can't see Mt. Hood, because of all the clouds, which have been raining on us for most of the last half-hour.

But we can imagine how this would be a whole heap of un-fun in the winter if this were snow. We have no idea which passes stay open and which ones close during the winter.

If we take this job(s) in Bend, we might find out.

Oh yeah, one of the things that Felice mentioned was that she might go through her budget again and see if couldn't afford two VISTAs. This would be ideal for us, because we'd get to work together and our skills tend to complement each other. (LJ's good at working while Robert's good at whining).

Plus, she'd get about six standard VISTAs worth of work done.

2:54 pm
(295 miles)
Madras, OR

We stop for gas, and immediately commit the faux pas of trying to pump it ourselves. Robert is busy navigating the menus for the pump, trying to activate the "Dispense Gasoline" mode when the attendants kind of freak out and assure him that they'll be there to take care of it real soon.

Oregon: The only place in the country where they don't allow self-serve gas. We have no idea why. It seems like if it were a safety issue, we'd be reading about Seattle fireballs on a regular basis. Maybe the service station attendants here have a strong union.

We've talked about what happens if there's only money for one VISTA job. Since we're pretty insistent about sleeping in the same bed every night, it wouldn't really work for us to live in different towns.

We could conceivably wait around to see if any of the other ones worked out (and there's at least a couple of the ones we applied for that are in the same town).

On the other hand, we very (very) much like working for somebody who's a consultant and can move quickly. One of our fears is ending up in some typical government gig where nobody can wipe their ass without filling out a form in triplicate and getting it approved.

And so far, after 10 days, Felice is the only one we've actually heard from (60% of Robert's listings have acknowledged receiving the application; LJ's running at 80%; so some of these people can't even be bothered to check the responses to their listings).

So, we're inclined to favor the person who got off her butt and got ahold of us.

Also, this is pretty much exactly the kind of job we were thinking about when we decided to have our mid-life crisis (they even use words like "micro-enterprise" and "growing communities"). We're serious believers in small business and we'd love to raise a bumper crop of them in rural Anywhere.

There might be another VISTA gig in Bend (we can't really tell), but if not, we're going to let Laura take the job for a couple of reasons. She's got the stronger business skills (Robert has learned his the hard way, but doesn't have any book learning to back it up). Also, it would probably be easier for Robert to put together a consultant gig in Bend (doing web pages for small businesses, for example).

Isn't it fun not knowing what direction your future will take?

3:29 pm
(321 miles)
Redmond

Yikes! We're back in Redmond?!?

Oh wait, this is Redmond, Oregon. But it's about the same size as the "real" Redmond—it claims a population of 21,000.

We drive past a Redmond Police motorcycle and speculate about whether the two Redmonds go in together on equipment and such ("Just paint 'Redmond' on it!").

3:51 pm
(334 miles)
Bend, OR
(Population: 70,000)

Okay, Google said it would take us 7 hours 43 minutes, but we managed to shave 43 minutes off that (despite taking a 20-minute lunch). We did it totally legally by um, taking shortcuts. Not by speeding. (Not by Laura speeding anyway—sheesh, talk about poking along at the speed limit!)

We managed to hit a traffic jam in Redmond (just like home!), but Bend traffic moved pretty well. The Deschutes river runs through the center of town, so it's kind of like Chicago. Only without all the people, the tall buildings, and the wind.

We drove past our motel (which we booked on the Internet) about four times, because its name on the Internet isn't the same as its name in meatspace.

We're not going to tell you its real name, so that Robert can brag about hacking into their router. Robert, who is one of the worst hackers imaginable, managed to guess their system password and hack into the hotel's router while he was sitting in the car waiting for Laura to get us registered.

What this means is that he can lock everybody else out of the system and change the password so that nobody else can get in.

And it means that a real hacker could easily penetrate any computer hooked to the network (unless you're paranoid like we are, and you've got your firewall up and running and sharing turned off—and even then, we're not staying connected any longer than we need to).

Robert's comment: "Well, there's a business opportunity! Lock them out of their own system and then drop by to see if they're having computer troubles!"

Robert & Laura
Mid-Life Crisis Trip Log