I think it’s a great start, but the heads of these car companies need to agree not to accept any bonuses, and not to allow any of their companies’ executives to take bonuses, until the government has been paid back. And once the government is paid back – maybe they need to rethink that whole bonus business.

In terms of the Bookstore, I’m still thinking I’ll jump ship to the competition in February. This is largely motivated by the large loan the company had to take last March to keep itself operating for the fiscal year. Although, as a store, we’ve been hitting our sales goals pretty consistently (the only days I can think of that we haven’t have been the days leading up to Thanksgiving, but we’re located in a business district so never do well when people take off from work), I can’t speak as a whole for how the company is doing meeting its nation-wide sales goals. The talk was optimistic a few weeks ago, but I don’t know how much of that was “Yes, we’re genuinely 100% actually looking like we might not have to have a firesale” and how much was “Please don’t look for other work during the Christmas season!”

As far as my Office job goes … my original plan was to work a year before I started exploring other job prospects. Speaking with a friend with experience in hiring, she advised me that with my previous work experience, I should really shoot for two years before rewriting my resume and hunting.

I’m still hoping I’ll get a promotion to Team Leader, but the downturn in the economy, and the resulting hiring freeze here, have pretty much all but nipped that in the bud (there was a time I thought I’d be offered such a position by late October, early November, having interviewed for it for a few months past). Now it looks like my only chance at Team Lead falls squarely on at least two of our current Team Leads leaving for greener pastures, which seems unlikely as one recently had child numero four, and another is about to have his first. Unless my direct boss gets his visa revoked, or the other team lead decides to go back into the Peace Corps, I’ll be soldiering on as a lonely foot soldier for the months to come. In terms of competition for the promotion, there are only three other people in the department with seniority to me … one categorically doesn’t want it as this job is actually something he does to keep him busy in retirement and it would interfere with his travel plans, and one is managing a project that she’d have to drop to take it. So I think I’d have a decent shot at it should the opportunity present itself.

As far as the Office job itself, despite the fact that we’re a start-up, and our sales department hasn’t quite been, um, making sales at quite the pace they were two months ago, things are still looking good. The upper management is pretty good about sitting us down as a group once a month and talking about where we are (financially) and where we were projected to be (usually, we’re far ahead of projects), and where they’re projecting us to be a few months down the line (don’t quite know how things have adjusted).

We’ll see.