On May 6, 2003, John received an offer he could not afford to refuse.
Some prior history must precede the story of his acceptance.
The United States Congress split the part of DOE that John works for off into a new bureaucracy called the National Nuclear Security Adminstration (NNSA). The idea was for the management of the new organization to be somewhat more responsive than it could be while under the tighter control of DOE. After several false starts, NNSA announced its "for real" organization in December of 2002. This reorganization transferred John's job to Albuquerque (ABQ), New Mexico . After much hair pulling, etc., NNSA announced that the people that had been to this point only "virtually" in ABQ would be physically moved there.
First, the reorganization placed John's organization ((See "Office of Environment, Safety, and Health (ES&H) Operations Support" in About Associate Administrator for Facilities and Operations and in the Organization Charts) and ) at the very bottom of the bureaucratic food chain. Now, John had no real "mission" other than to sit in his office and wait for an email or phone call asking him to perform some odd job. The real unfortunate part was that all the odd jobs that John might be requested to do were jobs that were peripheral to the overall mission of NNSA. Not a good position to be in during tight budget times.
Second, since ABQ has a lower rate of "locality" pay, John would actually receive a pay cut to move to ABQ! And, since the position he was moving into was a dead end position, there would be little or no chance of promotion or pay increases to get that pay cut back. More likely, John would get laid off in some near-future year when NNSA's budget got cut.
Third, when John was doing a task from this particular place in the overall organization, assuming anyone ever asked for him to do a task, he would get very little respect or support. This is because he would be an "outsider" supporting the NNSA Site Offices, who naturally prefer using people on the inside that they have more control over.
John (and most of his coworkers) began seriously looking for jobs elsewhere. John volunteered for a detail to the Department of Homeland Security to see if he could burrow in there. No luck. Their personnel system is just getting started, and they won't be formally hiring until later this year. John has been valiantly trying to break into the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but missed getting the one job that fit. The short story is that John is caught in a "velvet mouse trap." He is highly paid for doing a very specialized job that there is very little call for outside NNSA. He would need to take a deep demotion to get into another career path. So John also applied for a position at Los Alamos Site Office (LASO), doing a subset of his previous work, on the Safety Authorization Basis Team (SABT). Part of this was Eleni's intense desire to move to Los Alamos. She fell in love with the place while accompanying John on a couple of business trips. John's office-mate was hired by the Kirtland Site Office. Some other people escaped to other organizations inside NNSA/HQ. The rest received their orders to move last month. Two of John's closest coworkers declined, and will be laid off.
Lo and behold, John was offered the job at LASO. The first offer would have resulted in no pay increase, but at least the possibility for future pay increases. After negotiating a reasonable pay increase for the increased duties, pressures, and cost-of-living, he accepted. Too bad Eleni had decided she loved her job so much she did not want to leave. She seems to be coming anyway.
There's a funny thing about the cost of living out there. All of New Mexico is considered to be a lower cost-of-living area than the D. C. area. The current NNSA guidelines for transferring people to the field, where there is a different pay system, requires that the employee's pay get translated to the local pay rates without any "change." This would mean initially a pay CUT for John. However, LASO has a hard time competing for warm bodies, so they offer a retention allowance for experienced technical people like John. With this allowance, the pay would have been more or less the same. The funny part is that real estate in Los Alamos is MORE expensive than the Washington area! True! There is almost NO land available for housing because it all belongs to the government or the Native Americans. An equivalent dwelling in LA, with about a quarter acre of land would cost about $600,000. With any land, it's over a million.
So, with a reasonable pay increase, and knowledge that the head of the SABT sticks up for his hard-working employees, and confidence in John's abilities, we have some hope for a successful tenure in LA. If this job sucks after all, we must stay at least a year.If we stay until John retires, that would be at least 9 years. There is the obivous possibility that we will LOVE it out there and decide to stay. But we sold our house in Derwood, so we are here for a while. Here is a shortcut link to our new life here.