The holiday came in the middle of the month and swallowed it whole. For eleven days my outbox had nothing in it. No applications, no pitches, no follow-ups. Last month I'd written that I stopped applying. For a week and a half that spring I stopped everything.
Then the holiday ended, and on the first afternoon back I sent three emails in an hour.
I've gone through that month carefully too, and what I see is two stories running side by side. In one I was still knocking on any door that looked open, faster and less carefully than ever. In the other I was quietly walking back into a room I'd been thrown out of in February.
Three job emails in one hour
The first, at ten to three, was a one-line link to a fitness programme, sent to a rabbi. I can't tell you why. The second, at 3:27, was to the sports desk of a national paper that had advertised for a sportswriter:
"I feel that I am suited for this job as I am an avid sports fan, I read many sports columns daily and I have experience writing many essays. Attached is my CV as well as an essay that I wrote."
The essay I attached wasn't about sport. It was a piece I'd written the autumn before, about death. "Time is so cheap to us that we are more than willing to 'burn time.'" It ended: "We are tiny in our existence but we are huge in our impact." That's what I sent a sports editor as a writing sample. The doc's last edit is stamped the same minute the email went out, so by the look of it I opened it, maybe touched it, and hit send.
The third, at 3:50, was to a holiday resort at the far end of the country: "Hi my wife and i are interested in details about the lifeguarding job. Certified by red cross. Any information would be great!"
A sportswriter and a lifeguard, twenty-three minutes apart. Nobody wrote back to either one.
A Sunday-night application spree
Five days later, on a Sunday, I did it again, harder.
At 9:32 that night I wrote to a car garage in my new town: "Hi my name is [me] and was wondering if you have any job openings... Im interested in learning car mechanics and i was hoping to possibly get some experience."
I'd typed the address wrong. It bounced. Twenty-five minutes later I sent it again to the right address, word for word. In between I'd applied for a sales job off the classifieds board. After it, a "Job" email that said, in full, "Hi replying to ad for job opp. Attached is my CV." At 10:26, an operations coordinator role I'd seen on Facebook.
Four applications in under an hour. A mechanic, a salesman, whatever the "job opp" was, and operations. I'd stopped pretending to have a plan for any of them.
The garage answered two days later, kindly: "Sorry, we are not currently hiring." That was the most real reply I got.
The one that actually moved came the next morning. A recruiter from a tech placement firm called me. I don't have the call, only her email at 11:33: it was a pleasure speaking with you, please send your CV as a Word document and we'll pass it on to the company.
I didn't have a Word document. I had a resume in a cloud doc, rebuilt three times since my laptop died in the wedding month. So that morning, by the look of my inbox, I opened a free account with the software company at 13:40 and sent her the Word file at 13:44. Two hours and eleven minutes from her email to my attachment. "Thanks, I will pass this on." I don't know if she did. Nothing came back in that month.
The same day I signed up for another freelance marketplace. The profile went live the next afternoon and was approved two days after that. Like the seller account from February, I can't find a single job I applied for on it.
Going back to the people who rejected me
Here's the other story.
In February the national federation of the sport I'd played since I was a teenager met me, let me commit with my wife's blessing, and then picked other people to coach the national team. I never replied. I said in an earlier chapter that silence isn't dignity.
Midway through the holiday an email came from the same federation, in the local language, to me and twenty other people: congratulations on joining the instructors' course. Every Friday from 8:30 until two in the afternoon, through the end of the summer, at the national sports college. Bring a notebook. Bring a medical certificate. The fee was 1,400.
I'd signed up. There's no email showing me doing it, and no receipt. But my name is on that list, and the people running it were the people who had told me no.
The night before the first session, at 10:43, I posted to the mailing list of the village we'd just moved away from, in my second language: is anyone driving to the city tomorrow morning, before seven, with room for one? It's the only trace I have of how I meant to get there. A man from the village replied the next morning, "Hope you have transitioned well."
I don't have proof I went. I do know what it means to be twenty-three, without a car, on a Thursday night, asking a list of near-strangers for a 6:45 lift to sit in a classroom run by the people who turned you down.
The team that "never happened" started practising
Last month I wrote that my sixty-thousand plan "never happened". I want to correct that a little.
The plan never happened. The team, it turns out, did.
On the last Sunday of the month I posted a two-line notice to my new town's mailing list: "The football team is recruiting players and coaches to join us for summer training and the upcoming season!" It bounced. I wasn't subscribed.
Somehow the word got out anyway. That afternoon a mother wrote: "I have a 10 year old and 14 year old who might be interested." Forty-four minutes later I wrote back like someone who'd done this for years:
"The football team is primarily a highschool tackle team for boys ages 14-18. There will also be an instructional division for boys under 14, who would practice with the team until they are old enough to play. So it would be great for your 14 year old but maybe a little to early for the 10 year old.
We practice every tuesday at 5 and saturday night at 9:15 and they are both more than welcome to come try it out.
This week there wont be a practice on tuesday as it is a national holiday."
Read the middle of that again. We practice. Every Tuesday at five and every Saturday night at a quarter past nine. A month earlier that was a line in a budget I had no right to write. Now there was a schedule, and a week off for a national holiday, and a programme for the younger boys exactly like the one I'd made up for the chairman in March.
My email is the only record. There's no attendance sheet, no photo, nobody else's email confirming a single session. So I won't tell you how many came. I'll tell you I was answering parents as though the practices were real, in a month when my sent folder was otherwise four job applications in one night.
There was no money in it. The guitar account doesn't show one payment that month.
One more email belongs here. Five and a half months after the wedding, my mother had been waiting since March for us to choose the design for the thank-you cards. On the Sunday of the four applications, at 4:27 in the afternoon, I finally answered her. Four words: "We want number 3."
What I took from that month
Speed isn't strategy. Four applications in an hour on a Sunday night is the same as none. The garage was the only one decent enough to say no.
Send the sample that fits the job. I sent an essay about death to a sports desk. It was a good essay, for the wrong reader.
When someone calls you, the clock starts. The only live lead I had that month came by phone, and the only real question was how fast I could get her a file she could forward. Know what format your work needs to be in before anyone asks.
Go back into the room. The people who turned me down for the top job were the same people running the course that taught the job. Being rejected by a federation doesn't stop you learning from it. Sometimes it's the only place to learn.
And a plan that "never happened" can still be practising twice a week. Sixty thousand of budget and thirty-five players never showed up. A Tuesday at five did. Count that.