Thursday, January 26, 2012

The Job Hunting Blues...

Its 3 in the afternoon and I desperately need to take a break from Craigslist and various other job sites.

I arrived on the 9th and spent the first week find the apartment and getting settled in.  Last week I started to casually searching for jobs - applied for a few, sent in applications and got listed with a temp agency.  This week I've been following up on the applications I had submitted and started scouring the web for more local job posts.

The truth be told, there are LOTS of jobs in Honolulu and the surrounding area.  The issues are: 1) they're usually seeking someone fluent in Japanese or Mandarin or 2) the pay is in the range of $8 to 11/hour.

When I was in Cali - everyone warned me it would be hard to find a job and I told them that I wasn't worried about that because I'm open to all kinds of jobs. I have a strong background in the legal field, but I can easily work as a receptionist, or dispatcher, or a waitress, or anything. Anything that would allow me to live here.  What I wasn't prepared for was the abundance of jobs, but all that pay a wage that would make it very hard to live here.  I can see if it were a two income household then yes, perhaps folks are able to get by with those wages, but for single income - its nearly impossible.

So now I'm facing a tough choice.. do I accept a position paying $12/hr and give up my events/volunteer group (www.meetup.com/virsa-events) and use my evenings to work a second job? Yikes.. if that's the case, I won't be able to even get a glimpse of the Hawaii that I came here to see and enjoy. :/

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