What am I doing here?

Just for a lark, I went online to a job site in Ireland, similar to our Workopolis here. I did a loose search for publishing industry jobs and the third one that came up was for a production manager. I clicked, I read. The skillset seemed to be pretty close to what I already do right now. Not exactly sure what the product is, but it's some kind of publication - books and magazines, I think.

They even quoted a salary range - $50,000-$65,000 Euros. That didn't mean anything to me at all, so I went to another site to convert the Euros into Canadian dollars.

And almost crapped myself. Even their low range was way more than I make right now. And the high range...well, put it this way - I never expected to earn that kind of money in my entire life.

The only thing that stopped me from sending off my CV right away (besides the fact that I haven't updated it in about eight years) was the fact that I would in no way be able to make a change like that so quickly, on the incredibly remote chance that a company in Ireland would be interested in hiring me.

Makes you think though, eh? Makes me wonder what my skills might be worth elsewhere, even in other parts of this country. What about a newspaper publisher up in Nunavut, who might have difficulty finding highly skilled professionals in that field locally? Would I ever be willing to move to a place that remote for a job?

I might...under certain circumstances, but probably not long term. Who wants to live in perpetual nighttime for six months of the year? Talk about your Seasonal Affective Disorder! But I hear they pay well Up North, and there's nowhere to spend your money! Great savings plan.

What about overseas? That's a huge and terrifying proposition. You're not even on the same continent as everyone and everything you've ever been familiar with. They may not even speak the same language, or they may speak it with an accent that is currently foreign and exotic to your ears, a constant reminder that you're not where you're from, and you're different from everyone else.

But what an adventure it would be! Ireland...home of my ancestors. The Emerald Isle. It's so beautiful there. I'm sure I'm entirely mistaken in my naive dreaming that things would be less stressful and competitive there, especially outside the big cities. Realistically, I'd have to assume that the same thing that's happening here is happening there...big companies are buying up all the small papers and running them like profit-centres rather than the voices of communities. And the big dailies are laying people off left and right and centralizing common tasks in editorial and production sweatshops. That makes a lot of sense budget-wise, but it castrates the newsroom and turns production into menial labour (which, at a newspaper, it practically has been all along anyway...only centralizing things would just make it worse). And that doesn't even touch on what it does to the quality of reporting and the sense of a newspaper belonging to the community it serves.

Dang...I went off on a tangent, didn't I.

Back to relocating for work. I've done major relocations three times in my life. At age not-quite-18 I moved from my hometown of Ottawa to live in a nurses' residence in Mississaugaso I could begin my higher education at the main campus in the next town. I stayed in that area for 12 years. Then I moved (avec The Effinex) to British Columbia, where I stayed for 7 years. And after 8 years back in the Ottawa area, I went and lived in the Halifax area for a year for a special work project.

Now I'm back in Ottawa again, and less than a year after getting here and saying I'd never leave again, I'm getting "those" thoughts. The ones that start with "I wonder..."