The light is at the end of the tunnel - no wait, that's a train coming to run my ass over

So since my nose hasn't fallen off yet, I have been kind of scrounging around for stuff to talk about this week. This post-vacation letdown really sucks, because after Vegas somehow life at home seems kind of, uh, dull.

But then we got some big news today. Potentially life-improving news. Almost too good to be true.

As a little background, Joey is part-owner of a subcontracting company. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to name names or what kind of business it is because I don't want this Googled until the end of time. But he has two partners - one is the money man, one is the operations guy, and Joey is in charge of bidding all the work.

It's a really hard, stressful job. He works usually over 60 hours a week not including time he works out of our home office. When you have over 150 employees to keep busy, it's more than a full-time job. For years, he's been hoping to find someone to help him keep up with the estimating. About eight years ago, he had someone that he trained to be his protege and as it turns out, the guy got a little greedy and quit to go somewhere else (and of course within 6 months was back begging for his job back and Joey told him to fuck off). Since then, he hasn't found anyone even remotely qualified that could hit the ground running without years of extensive training. What they do is pretty technically complex, with dozens of systems that have to be learned and it takes years for someone to be competent at estimating this kind of work. So obviously hiring someone with a lick of sense in their heads would behoove them, but they hadn't had any luck.

Until this week. On Monday, they got a phone call from a guy who worked for one of their competitors and had abruptly quit. He was entertaining some offers from two other decent companies, but had been wanting to come meet Joey and his partners because they've been a good, stable company for almost 15 years and that's the kind of place he wants to work for.

He has lots of experience. The salary range was perfect. And they all clicked immediately. This guy can hit the ground running tomorrow and be bidding work right away. So they offered him the job, and he took it and thanked them profusely for the opportunity.

All I can think of is that after the last few years where Joey has been bidding all this work single-handedly, that maybe I'll get my husband back. There are some weeks like we've had this year where he's had upwards of 19 projects to bid in a single day. That's gotta be rough. Right before we left for Vegas, he booked almost $5 million in contracts, which sums up about 1/4 of their yearly sales. In one week. It is crazy.

But speaking of crazy, when we were in Vegas we had heard that this particular company that the guy had quit from was having a lot of internal problems. "Problems" would be a huge understatement. Let's call the owner "Bob". Bob was building this multi-million dollar house here in town and started running out of money, so he began pulling money out of the company to pay his bills. In the meantime, in the hopes of getting his business to make more money so that he could afford this house, he brought his cousin Vinny down from New York to make some operational changes. Vinny thought it would be a fabulous idea to restructure the business and include things like a CEO and a Board of Directors. Y'all, this is for a company that has like 8 employees, so in a case like that it was totally ridiculous.

Now while Vinny was making all these changes, Bob got caught by his wife schtupping their housekeeper so now she is divorcing him and she will inevitably get half of the business anyway. Well, what's left of it because the entire office staff quit last Friday, including this guy that Joey hired.

And you might think that this is all great for Joey, right? Yeah, but it sucks for me. Because guess who has Bob's company working on her latest project? Doh! All I can say is that it's no wonder we couldn't get anyone at the office to return our calls for the last three days. They're all gone.

And that, my friends, is yet another chapter in my life in construction.