A Day Off from the Job of Looking for a Job

I did a cursory scroll through jobs yesterday before I took off to meet up with my lunch date. My buddy was a work colleague, now a friend, who lives across the bay in a little town in Marin County for which she is a councilwoman. 

We meet up once a month or so. She used to come over to my side of the bay but her chiropractor is no longer available. Or something. Can't remember the details. So I most often to her place, from which we launch off to a late breakfast or lunch.

She decided that we'd motor a half hour westward to Point Reyes Station,not to be confused with the so-named lighthouse.

Once land of the Coast Miwok Indians, Point Reyes Station gets its name from the nearby Point Reyes Peninsula (a major peninsula sticking out into the Pacific Ocean) and its status as a terminus stop on the North Pacific Coast Railroad connecting Cazadero to the Sausalito ferry. (Wikipedia)

Point Reyes is a cute little town having somewhere around 800 residents. It is a tourist place, mostly, as evidenced to us by how many of the little organic, artisan, locally-grown and made product shops were closed on Wenesday, and only open for three- or four-day weekend business. Including, unfortunately, the Station House Cafe, at which we intended to dine. Back to mainstream Marin County, where my friend says no one really works. Except her, until recently. She left the department we worked for before I did, as or more disgusted and fed up with the toxic environment as I was when I left, and just retired from the San Francisco Bay air pollution control district.

As we drove around, we caught up on each others' lives, checked in on what juicy tidbits about our former workplace either of us had heard, and talked about finding work. She's one of the smartest, most capable people I know. 

She set herself us as a limited liability corporation to act as a technical and policy consultant for environmental issues, both toxic site cleanup property redevelopment and air quality. Key people in the latter regulatory world want her to take on a major northern California project but, as we concluded, lawyers suck. The insurance and indemnification requirements for sole proprietor consultants are unattainable. 

I learned about all of the impossible insurance requirements after another former co-worker of mine set up a "meet and greet" with her planning agency's communications and hiring officers. The former had just put out a Request for Proposal for $75,000 of work that was right up my alley. I would need to indemnify and hold harmless the agency, defend against any claims or suits for injury or death, hold $1 million both per employee and per accident for worker's compensation, hold $1 million in general liability insurance and in umbrella insurance, and so on. Not going to happen.In fact, my lunch buddy tried to get some of said insurance for her LLC only to find that no one writes policies for her kind of business. 

As it happens, we'd both met up with other contacts in the consulting world and both have some hope of acting as subcontractors for fully insured consulting agencies. Time will tell, I suppose.

I awoke this morning from a dream in which I'd been hired to be a part-time receptionist for an adult community. I was fine with that dream.