Going Down With The Ship

Things with the day job are winding down, it seems. Well, to be quite frank, they've been in a long slow decline for months and months now - but the downhill slide has gotten a lot more downhill and a lot slipperier. I keep looking at our course, and I know for a fact that there's an iceberg, dead ahead.

I think I've mentioned that I work for a real estate developer - I'm the person who handles escrow and loan closings on very large-scale deals. Of which there are NONE at the moment. And nothing on the horizon, not for long time to come.

I've been in and out of real estate for quite a long time now. I actually went through this sort of thing once before, in the very early 1990's. I worked in the savings and loan industry, which led to me working for government regulators. This included a huge flood of foreclosures, so I got to manage a pretty big portfolio of properties that had been taken back. It wasn't pretty. I'll spare you the details, but I got to deal with toxic waste, mismanaged nursing homes, and crack houses. Eventually the properties were cleaned up and sold, and that was the end of my career, until the industry recovered.

That crash was limited somewhat, because it was really S&Ls and the drop in value was pretty well centered in California. This time, of course, the problem is a hell of a lot bigger. Given that the last little hiatus made my line of work pretty well non-existent for five years, and that I'm getting older... my tenure in real estate is very likely over. By the time the jobs come back, I'll be too old, and frankly too tired, to start over.

I'm okay with that, really I am. It was fine while I did it, but it's never never been anything that lit me up inside. It's time to move on and move forward.

But like any other change, it's a little sad. And more than a little nerve-wracking. It'll take a couple of months, maybe less, but here we go....