My Defining Days of the Decade: #9

Continuing with Brendan’s Defining Days of the Decade:

#12: May 15, 2003: Becky and I Graduate From College
#11: November 7, 2000: The Election of a Lifetime
#10: August 14, 2003: The Great Northeast Blackout

Number Nine…

September 15, 2008: The Economy Implodes — And I Get A Job

This item on my decade list is unique, in that I’ve literally never blogged about it — at least not its personal aspects — before. Because of my “no blogging about work” policy, as well as simple common-sense discretion, I was exceptionally tight-lipped about my job search in 2008. So the fact that I had a crucial callback interview in Denver, at the firm where I am now a second-year associate, on the very day that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, is something I’ve never discussed before on my blog.

I’m still not going to discuss the professional aspects in any detail, of course. But there are a few key salient facts that I can now reveal, which help explain why this remarkable confluence of events is #9 on my list of the decade’s defining days.

First, regular readers know that I took, and passed, the Colorado bar during the summer after law school, then headed to Knoxville for a judicial clerkship. What you may not know is that, in February 2008, when Loyette was not quite two months old, I took the Tennessee bar, with the idea being to expand my range of job search options. I passed it as well, so when I started job-hunting in earnest in the spring and summer, I applied to jobs in both Knoxville and Denver.

I had various interviews in both cities — the Denver interviews were the reason for my frequent, vaguely explained trips to Colorado during that time period — and although ending up in Denver was my preference, by September I was more than willing to take a position in Knoxville if the right offer came along. And wherever we landed, we were likely to stay put. Thus, much more was at stake in my job search than just a job. The geographic future of our family hung in the balance. Would we stay in Tennessee, and raise our family in the South? Would we go west and settle down in Colorado? It all depended on the vagaries of the job market.

My best prospect, as of late summer, was at a firm in Denver where I’d had an initial interview in July, followed by a phone interview, and finally by a callback scheduled for September 15. I knew this was serious, that I had a real shot at the job. So I headed out to Colorado on Sunday, September 14 — and, as I flew across the country, I had absolutely no idea of the convulsions that were rocking the financial world at that very moment.

I remained totally oblivious to the Wall Street drama until late that evening, when, while relaxing at Kristy and V’s apartment, I visited the Drudge Report, saw some alarming headlines, perused some scary-sounding stories, and whipped up a blog post titled “Sunday ‘crisis’ on Wall Street portends ‘day of reckoning’ Monday.” Even then, I didn’t really comprehend the magnitude of what was happening. As I went to bed Sunday evening, ready for an interview the next day that I hoped would land me my first job as a practicing lawyer, I had no concept whatsoever that the global financial system was about to enter into a downward spiral that would send it to the verge of a catastrophic collapse, and that this near-collapse would in turn give us the worst recession since World War II.

On Monday morning, Lehman Brothers formally filed for bankruptcy, the vultures turned their attention to crumbling A.I.G., the stock market began a single-day drop of more than 500 points — and I went downtown for a 10:00 AM interview. By 11:30 or so, I had been offered the job, and I started making arrangements to spend the next day apartment-hunting. It was official: we were moving to Denver. One of the worst days in world financial history was the day I finally got hired as an attorney, and our family’s long period of geographic uncertainty was finally settled.

Oh yeah, and one other thing happened that day. I saw Obama. Almost immediately after my interview, I hit the road for Pueblo, where the President-to-be was holding a campaign rally late that afternoon. In his remarks, Obama excoriated McCain for his tone-deaf statement earlier in the day that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong.” Obviously, the collapse of Lehman and its immediate aftermath would prove to be a huge political turning point, so, in a sense, you could say that I personally witnessed the beginning of the end of the 2008 presidential campaign on September 15. (And I even got in the paper — namely, the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News — in the process.)

But although standing a few hundred feet away from The One — ahem, that is to say, the next President of the United States — was certainly a thrill for a political junkie like me (and finally put an end to my complaining about just missing big election-related events), it isn’t the reason September 15, 2008 shows up on my decade list, or even a significant part of the reason. The combination of the Lehman collapse and my job offer are what make this day a real turning point in my life.

If I hadn’t gotten a job that day, who knows what would have happened? I know one firm where I had been under active consideration instituted a hiring freeze on September 15 because of all the financial uncertainty. Other firms’ hiring departments undoubtedly went into hibernation as well. And of course, massive layoffs followed in subsequent months, in law and in every other industry, as “Main Street” followed Wall Street into the economic abyss. Indeed, the strange coincidence of my hiring on financial D-Day is heightened by the fact that I actually started my new job in November, the very month when the bottom fell out of the job market. For a while, it almost felt like I was living in an alternate universe — a very lucky one.

In any event, as I mentioned, I spent the next morning and afternoon apartment-hunting, then headed to the airport in the evening — where I picked up a copy of the day’s Wall Street Journal, scanned at the top of this post, at a newsstand — and flew back to Knoxville, where I finished out my clerkship and began to prepare for our big move to Denver. The rest is history. Becky are I have settled down in the Mile High City, and we’re thrilled about it. We own a home. We have every intention of staying put. Our decade of wandering the country, in which we moved a combined total of 27 times in 10 years, and lived in 7 states and 11 ZIP codes, is over. And our final stopping point was decided on September 15, 2008.