I didn't hear back from K on Monday. Initially I was upset as she normally works early and isn't bothered in the mornings. It's when she's best at catching up with her email. So when nine o'clock rolls around, I'm fairly sure she's either seen my email or isn't at work. As far as I'm concerned there isn't any other option.
I don't want to be the annoying 'Hey Hey HEY, Did you SEE THAT! HEY!!!! DID YOU SEE THAT!!!' kind of prospective employee. At the same time I AM anxious about getting back to work and know that it's a long process. Longer when it's delayed at the beginning. I decide on the side of caution and wait.
Tuesday comes and goes with nothing. While it's been four days since I sent the email, I do have to take out the weekend. She might not have even been in the office on Friday when I sent it, so I may as well consider that I sent it Monday morning. In that case, it's only been a day and a half, so still no reason to reach out.
Then again, I do have to consider that K isn't great at managing her email. I can't count how many times I've seen her computer showing off her unread emails. It wasn't one or two, it was more like fifty or one hundred. Yeah, she'll try to look at the subject line and sender and look at the appropriately important emails, and I DID title my email 'Hey Boss!' so it should have caught her eye, but it still could have gone un-noticed. I gave myself one more day.
Wednesday morning came and went with no response. As she I know she checks her email at home AND she's posted on Facebook since I've sent the email, I know she's at least had the opportunity to see the email. So she's either seen it and is ignoring it, or she's seen it and is working on an answer, or she hasn't seen it and recognized it was me. I wanted to stay in the professional realm, just using her work email and maybe her work phone. I felt that taking advantage of knowing her more personally on Facebook and having her private number was almost cheating... but hey, all's fair in love and getting a job, right?
So, I sent her a text. I included who I was (in case she'd deleted my number), and mentioned that I sent an email to her work address and was just making sure she'd received it). I sent that at eleven in the morning knowing that withing a couple hours she'd go out for a smoke/lunch break. She'd check her phone (remember, it's prison and she couldn't have to keep her private phone in her car) and get the message then. Not surprisingly, I got a response two hours later. K isn't great at email and this is a good example. The message I wrote to her was thirteen paragraphs long. It was descriptive and left really no room for interpretation. It explained my history, my path to recovery, my acknowledgement for leaving during a difficult time, my apology for doing so, stating my desire to come back, and a direct request to see if I could come back as a supervisor.
K's response was basically 'Glad to hear you're better. Understand you want to come back, but that's not an option.'
I get it. She doesn't want to spend a lot of time writing something out. But at the same time, COME ON! That leaves so much room for interpretation. Me coming back isn't an option? Is it ME coming back that's not an option? Is it me coming back NOW that's not an option? Is it me coming back as a SUPERVISOR that's not an option? Why isn't it an option? Is it budget? Is the position full? Is there a black mark on my record that prevents her from hiring me? Is she just upset at me?
Fuck.
I don't want to burn a possible bridge by being annoying, so I just consider the door closed and respond stating my regret, thanks, and wishing her and her staff well. I then send an email to the HR rep at that facility since she's been helpful to me even when I wasn't an employee at that facility or that department. I simply told her what had been going on, my desire to come back, what K said, and then asked if there was anything preventing me from gaining state employment. I mean, if there's something like that on my record, then I need to fix it. If it's as a manager or a floor nurse, if its at this facility or another, if its in the department of corrections or the department of health and human services, I want to become a state employee again and K makes it sound like that's not possible.
As I had contacted the two nurses earlier about coming back, I sent them both messages on Facebook, letting them know that I wasn't going to come back as a manager. Immediately after that, I went to the state jobs website and started the application process for the local facility. The one the other nurses had told me about.
While I was updating my profile there, one of the nurses from my previous facility, B, reached out on Facebook and told me that he was told they had another nurse manager transferring in from a facility that was closing down. That has a LOT of information in it. One, when a facility closes down, those employees are given a LOT of power in finding other jobs within the department. Basically, they're given the option to take any open position that they're qualified for without question. They'd just have to know that the position was open and they could take it. The information that a facility is closing down doesn't happen suddenly. It comes early. Like months before it happens. And it goes out department wide. Everybody in the department of corrections would know that a facility is going to close down in like six months. So K would know that this facility was going to close when the other supervisor was fired. She'd know that any of the supervisors there could just walk in and take the open position at her facility. If she didn't want those supervisors for any reason, it might be a big reason for her to NOT publish that she has an open position. It might be why I've never seen the position on the state jobs site even though its been open since February.
And finally, by saying the manager was transferring in instead of 'being hired in' or 'coming over' is likely because that's the way the information was laid out to him. In other words K sent an email out to all the nurses saying 'This is the supervisor transferring in from this closing facility, she'll start on this date'. I can even read that email in my mind, cold, quick, right to the point. 'Transferring' says that K didn't have an option. It can even explain K's short email to me... she's not happy that she doesn't have the option of hiring me.
But no matter how much I read into it, it means that they are now fully staffed on Supervisors. They can't hire me even if they wanted to.
I continued applying to the other job as it was my second option and I no longer had any reason to wait. While I'm fairly sure K wasn't upset at me at this point, she still might be and I had her listed as one of my professional references. That's not great. She certainly can't say on a reference check that she thinks I'm a bad employee, but she CAN point out that she had to write me up. She CAN point out that I took another job while they were short staffed near the end of the COVID crisis. She can do harm without being illegal. So to be safe, I took her off my list of references.
For any state job, you need to have three professional references. It's always best practice to have your last/current supervisor as one of your references. So I had my last supervisor, S, as one. I had a nurse that I'd worked with most of my prison career, that trained me that worked along side me and that I eventually supervised, G. And then I had K which I just removed.
To be on the safe side, I sent out emails to both S and G just to be both professionally courteous (hey, do you mind if I use you as a professional reference?) and to make sure they'd respond to their emails. I then picked one of the nurses that had clued me into this job, J, and asked her if she could be my other professional reference. J responded first and seemed excited to be a reference. That's good as she works at the facility I'm heading to, which means she can speak directly to the HUM professionally on my behalf WITH my permission. And she wouldn't be speaking about me as a supervisor as I only worked along side her and never supervised her.
I didn't hear back from G, but that's not a big surprise. One, he works 12 hour shifts so he might not be there for three or four days. And Two, I don't think there is another person on earth that hates email as much as G. He can go over a week without checking email. While I was his supervisor I trained him to check it every shift at least once and to specifically look for emails form me as that's how I communicated important information to my nurses. He'd ignore the emails at his own peril. Without me being his supervisor, he could easily have slipped back into his old habits and might not have seen that email even now two days later. I was told by two nurses that he's working at my previous facility, so I'm not worried about him NOT working and I'm not worried about him giving me a bad reference.
I didn't immediately hear back from S, but she works the afternoon shift and generally doesn't get to her email until later in the day. The start of her shift is for immediate needs and then for tasks that need to be completed within the first couple hours of her shift. So not hearing back before five o'clock isn't bad and I'm doing this at two o'clock.
I updated my resume to focus more on my nursing as opposed to my nurse managering and uploaded it. I also wrote a new cover letter explaining my two year absence and at least giving a head nod as to why I'd want to come back as a floor nurse as opposed to as a manager. Once that was uploaded, I finished the application.
Now, a word about this application. There are about twenty six prisons in Michigan. Around six of them are considered 'Northern' prisons while the other twenty are 'Southern' prisons. Individual prisons will list nursing jobs for managers and health unit managers. But they won't list jobs for RNs or LPNs. Those, they list as South RNs and South LPNs. When you apply to the South RN position, you can list which prisons you are applying to. When I first applied to the prison system, I listed almost all of the prisons. I just wanted my foot in the door and would have considered a three hour commute. Now, at most, I'd apply to twelve of the prisons as they're under an hour and a half commute. But in this instance, I specifically selected only the one local prison. At this point, I'm only interested in this particular prison because I've had two nurses I know personally tell me about it and that it's very local to me.
With that done, I notified the two nurses at that facility, B and J, that I had the application in. Once they responded, I asked them both to poke their HUM about it as that's the person that would decide if they need/want to hire another nurse. Remember, they're technically fully staffed. Their afternoon shift though has only contract nurses and they don't like that, so they can hire me (and I should be coming in with two glowing reviews from two highly regarded nurses) and have at least one state nurse on that shift. It just depends on if the HUM has a backbone and is willing to push aside a contract nurse that they know for a nurse, no matter how highly regarded, that they don't know.
B told me he'd certainly push the HUM but that he wouldn't be back to work until Friday (today). J said she'd certainly let the HUM know and she should have done that yesterday. So far as I know, J had already mentioned me to the HUM so that way should already be buttered up. Like I said, it's just a waiting game.
I think my timeline is going to be one week. I won't see any activity online unless I get an email invite to an interview. There won't be any job listing that changes as it's the general 'South RN' position that's been up for two years now (and that's just because they changed the wording on it two years ago... technically it's the same listing that's been up for a decade as the state has NEVER been fully staffed on nurses). So if I don't hear anything by next Friday (June 27th) I'll reach out to J and B and see what they say. And no matter what they say, if I don't hear anything in two weeks, I'll look at other options. I DO want this particular job, but even more, I want to be working.
As is, it's now a certainty that I'm going to need to dig into my 401k. It's just a matter of how deep I need to dig in. I won't be able to pay all of my bills as of July 15th and there is now now way that I can get paid before then. If I were hired RIGHT NOW, I could probably finagle my finances and maybe borrow a few hundred from Mom to get by, but otherwise I'll need a couple thousand at least, and likely several thousand. I won't borrow that much so... 401k. I'll wait until the first week of July to decide how deep to dig into it.
That was where I was going to leave this post. I initially was going to write this up yesterday but I ended up with a pretty bad migraine. My first migraine day that I wouldn't have been able to work since April 10th. Not exactly something I want to celebrate, but it still prevented me from writing.
Yesterday though I heard back from S, my supervisor at the state mental health hospital. She said she was glad to hear about my recovery and that she'd be pleased to be a professional reference for me. That's all I really needed from her. But I figured as long as I was in contact with her, I may as well start on the buttering up as I might be going to her for a job if this current facility doesn't hire me. Returning as a manager there is my next option after all. So, I replied and asked how she was doing, how the facility was doing, and how they were doing for afternoon nurse managers.
The answer was a little chilling. She was obviously upset about it, but I can easily see it happening in the department of health and human services where it wouldn't happen at the department of corrections. Due to budgetary reasons, they went into a hiring freeze just a few days ago. They couldn't hire me even if they wanted to. She didn't say if there were positions open or not was technically with the hiring freeze there were NO positions open.
We chatted back and forth a bit longer but that was the biggest news that came through. It looks like if this facility in my home town doesn't hire me, for whatever reason, I need a new third option. My plan within one day went from three almost guaranteed jobs to one.
Fuck.
I've started to think along that path, but I need to spend some more time doing that. Per my timeline above, I have a couple weeks to figure it out, but if nothing happens I'll probably make another 'Get To Work' post with my thoughts along those lines.
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