The view from here....

We're starting to get a little better feel for this private sector thing. It's not easy, but contrary to the belief of military wives never asked for their opinion and curmudgeonly in-laws whose opinion we didn't ask for either, we didn't expect that it would be. (Seriously, why do so many people think that others are incapable of making the distinction between "worthwhile" and "easy"?)

Thak's still interning until the end of the week when he'll have enough hours to call it done, and while he's interning, he's not making a lot of money. It's really ok. He'll get a raise next week, and we timed things in such a way that we could manage on this lesser pay for a while. Needless to say, we're not frequenting any restaurants these days, or taking any "just because" trips to New Mexico, and we're pretty relieved that our homebirth is paid off already, but we've got a roof over our heads, plenty of good food on the table, and the lights still come on when we flip the switch, so we can't complain.

Thak's job at BMW is everything he hoped it would be, maybe more. The shop is amazing. The cars are amazing. The people are cool. We can't ask for better. I mean, in these times of so much unemployment and people having to work outside their fields just to have a job, Thak is working in pretty much his dream shop. It's definitely no small thing. As with anything else, there are politics, and people have their quirks, but Thak is good at dealing with that kind of stuff, so he's fine. He's just trying to get a feel for everything right now. There are some people who are still on hourly pay despite being there for many months, and that kind of scared him/us for a little bit, until he realized that those are the people who just don't hustle like he does. Once he saw that the people who work like him aren't on hourly for long, that was a relief to us both. We know he'll be hourly for probably 3 months, but we're prepared to deal with that. Longer would be problematic, but seeing how it's gone for others in the shop who are similar in style to him, it seems like he should be flat rate (the way mechanics usually bill, where industry standard trumps the clock itself) before it becomes a real issue for us. There is also the fact that one of the people who's in charge doesn't necessarily like to give the more challenging jobs to newer people, even if they know how to do them. This was frustrating for Thak because he prefers the more challenging jobs, and is good at them, so he wants to be able to prove himself. The one who actually assigns the jobs understands this, though, and he kicks one in Thak's direction every now and again, as he can. The main thing is that we know it's important that Thak proves himself ready to go on flat rate and work on his own as soon as possible, and in order for that to happen, he can't just change oil and program new cars every single day. He has to have at least a little bit of chance to do the hard jobs and show them first hand that he can.

Luckily he IS getting that opportunity, which is actually somewhat uncommon for someone who's been there as short a time as he has. He'll move up before we know it. He's doing all the right things. He's been asked to come in pretty much every time the shop's open, and always gets out of work later than anticipated, which means he's working a lot more than 40 hours a week. It's not easy having only one-day weekends, but the cool thing about the private sector is that there's this magical little thing called overtime pay.

So is it perfect? No way. Had we not prepared for this, we'd have been really screwed when he got out of the Army. We definitely see why some people just come right back in after they get out. If you don't prepare really well for getting out, it won't work. We are pretty glad we did what we did. It was worth the two years of hard schedule for our family while he went to school and got ready to get a good job on the outside. It was worth every fun thing we didn't buy and every trip we didn't take so we could save up money in order to stay afloat while he gets established. It was worth not really taking leave for two years so we'd have a couple months of Active Duty pay while he finished school. We're going to succeed because we made smart decisions (even if they weren't easy decisions), and made it so. It's like we said all along, that we we know very well that nothing's guaranteed, but we knew we could give ourselves the best chance. So far, the best chance we could manage, has been good enough.

It's also amazing just how little we care about the whole military thing anymore. It all just seems so trivial. It's like, you don't have to live it anymore, and all the day to day crap just goes away. We've made some interesting observations about military people in general that we hadn't noticed while in the thick of it. It's pretty funny. That's a story for another day, though.