Thank you, everyone who wrote. I most sincerely appreciate your emails. My self-doubt is firmly squashed, and I will stop worrying about whether the audience is out there. I got more than a flood of email from it. I was able to step back long enough to see what did and didn't work on pages other than the journal, so I'm not entirely sorry I gave in to the seductive dark side.
This entry will be a mishmash of stuff. My brain isn't awake and it's after noon. I wish, oh how I wish, I lived in a town that understood people want to be able to buy coffee before 10am. Pardon me while I rage in headachey bitterness. Why, where I come from there are coffee kiosks on every downtown street corner, and I mean both Seattle and San Francisco. None of this waiting until the malls are open stuff: America has to go to work, dammit, and America needs caffeine. Gah!
So I've done three more interviews. I saw another two ads in the paper Sunday, and will be ringing one of them up later. The other one is looking for an agent with tons of experience, blah et cetera blah, and is offering 20K a year. Puh-lease. I assume they offer commissions on top of that but still, that's an appalling figure. Excuse me while I laugh at the notion that any perks such as reduced rate travel begin to make up for the poor pay. There are virtually no free tickets any more, you know. The days of free this and that are gone. I won my fair share of free tickets, I'm not complaining about the past, but the flow trickled down to almost nil by the time I left the last agency I worked for. It's not a glamorous job. It's hard, hard work and I think we should be compensated with salaries instead of vague promises. If I went to any other office job that required five years experience, excellent computer skills with a variety of hardware and software, top customer service skills, and specialized knowledge of an industry, would they be paying me $20K a year? Ha.
To balance out that rant, I will tell you that my job interview on Friday went very well. In fact, it lasted 2 and a half hours. I asked for $26K a year, which is what my sister makes at Microsoft as a travel agent with five years experience. They didn't blink an eye. Is all this talk of money vulgar? Maybe. But sometimes I wonder if people realize how much their travel agents get paid. There's a sort of general notion that we flit from exotic location to exotic location in between screwing up their car reservations. Sorry, no, mostly that's not the case. So I'm giving you the specifics. Now you know. And now I'm done ranting.
