Off the Mark is online

I hope readers will enjoy this new online “Off the Mark” blog (short for weblog). I’ve had so many requests to continue a column somewhere, somehow, that I decided it was time to drag myself into the 21st century and post it online. I know that for many of my former readers, finding it online isn’t a possibility. If some of you out there know of an older (or younger) person who would like to read “Off the Mark” in its current state, please print it out and give them a copy!
You will be able to read new columns in the future by checking back at http://markwilmes.blogspot.com/ or “friend-ing” me at www.facebook.com/mark.wilmes; just click on “Add as friend.” Then, each time a blog is posted on blogspot it will pop up on your news feed.
The third way, and probably the best way to make sure you don’t miss a post, is to email me and ask to be put on the email mailing list. Each time I post a new column you will receive an email with a link included. I hope to post a new blog every 1-2 weeks.
Let me know if you are interested in receiving columns in the future by email or by posting a comment on the blogspot. It’s nice to be back!

Six weeks of living the life of my cat

It has been awhile, 18 weeks since my last column to be exact, but at least for the foreseeable future, I’m back.
My first order of business is to say thank you. What a remarkable show of support I’ve received throughout the county and around the state. From letters and cards to emails, phone calls and people stopping me on the street to tell me they miss my presence in the local papers. It all helped me immensely in getting through a difficult time. For the first time in my life, the decision to leave a job was not my decision, no matter what you heard in the story being circulated.
Of course when you find out at the tender age of 51 that you will be job-hunting again, it puts you in kind of a state of shock. In the past 30 years, every time I’ve left a place of employment, I’ve always had something else lined up in advance.
Not this time.
So, for five consecutive weeks, I tweaked, printed and sent out resumes to nearly every place of business within 40 miles.
I hadn’t had to search for a job in over a decade. Somehow in the last 12 years, however, I became immune to the usual feelings of anxiety and intimidation that comes with the anticipation of a job interview. My best explanation would be that there is not an interviewer alive who could put me through some of the stuff I experienced in the newspaper business. I actually looked forward to some of those interviews.
This time around, however, the bar seemed to be set a bit higher. I could not possibly have been let go from a job at a worse time. The economy was in the tank and companies were cutting positions, not looking for new hires.
The companies who were actually hiring had scores—maybe hundreds of applicants for a single position. The interrogation process was bordering on brutal. I had four interviews in excess of a half hour, two that cruised easily past 40 minutes. The feeling fell just short of being in a smoke-filled room with a light shining in my eyes. Usually there was a panel of two or three waterboarders…um…I mean interviewers.
Questions ranged from the expected, “why do you think you would be a good hire for this position?” to the difficult, “where do you see yourself in five years?” to the bizarre, “would you have a problem working in an office with a cat?” and “what would you think if you were the cat?”
If there was a beneficiary of my turn as an unemployed vagrant, it was our cat, Joe. He loved hanging out in my back-room home office with me. Every hour or so, whenever it seemed to him I may have forgotten he was there, he would give me a quick “meow” flop on his side, and then raise his head to see if I noticed he was in position for a chin rub.
A combination of the season (February), the fact that we only had one income in the house (Kathy’s) and I actually like the room a bit chilly, Joe was probably a bit needier than usual. He would regularly scale the side of Mount Mark and curl up on the shelf that protrudes from just below my chest, settling in for a long winter’s nap. On the mornings I couldn’t quite produce enough heat, he would be drawn to the keyboard of my laptop, curl his paws up underneath and plant himself on the rising warmth, purring steadily. Despite repeated removals, he was persistent, and eventually he knew he would win the battle because I didn’t have the heart to deprive him of one of his favorite activities. Each time I would diligently lift him enough to see the start menu and shut down the computer.
On one of those occasions, however, my favorite cat managed the correct key combination to activate a sequence that selected the “Mark” folder on my desktop, delete it, and somehow bypass the recycle bin, obliterating every valuable file contained within. I’ve never heard of a combination of keystrokes that will do that, although considering Joe’s girth, it might be activated by pressing all the keys at the same time.
After six weeks of cat-bonding and an increasingly skittish wife, who was beginning to wonder if I would ever work again, my luck began to change.
I got a couple of call backs, and ended up getting offers from both. Offer number one was as writer and copy editor for a regional magazine produced in Brookings, SD. I was impressed with the publication and the management and was ecstatic about working for a quarterly publication that only had four deadlines per year, after working for publications with 52 deadlines per year.
The only thing, I thought, that would dissuade me from accepting their offer was a better offer, which I didn’t think was possible. Not more than six blocks removed from that interview, however, I received a call from offer number two, with a wage and benefit package that would blow any I’ve ever had out of the water, albeit in a position I would have to learn from the ground up. Again, despite what has been “put out there,” I am now employed at an office south of Chandler (not Edgerton) working for enXco, a growing wind power company.
I am thankful each day that anyone would take a chance on a middle-aged out-of-work former editor. For the scores of people who still ask me to “start up a newspaper,” – sorry that is not going to happen. Been there, done that. But it makes me feel good to know you cared enough to ask.
That answer, however, doesn’t hold water with one lonely kitty in Tyler who doesn’t think being employed is all that it is cracked up to be…