A little bit of movement on the workfront...
I had reached out to a coworker from the VA who had switched to fee basis a few years back and had been languishing in the furlough twilight along with me. She had contacted me back in Juneish or so and asked if I had heard anything about return to work at the VA. She had originally put me in touch with VES back in 2016 and helped facilitate my working there at the time. Once I made the switch to fee basis, I didn’t see a good reason to keep a schedule at VES because I had all the work and income that I desired.
After we texted in June I asked her to let me know when she went back to work for VES since she had several exams already on deck. I hadn’t heard from her and I knew the VA was supposed to be back at 100% capacity as of October 6th, so I sent her a text saying “Que Paso?” I had also reached out to a recruiter that emailed me in April but never responded to my follow up. This time around, after three days, he replied, saying there was no work in my area. She had also responded and said they were hurting for examiners right now and were paying bonuses. I told her what the recruiter said and she didn’t think it sounded right.
She went through her recruiter (she’s working overseas) and he forwarded my info to the supervisor of domestic recruiting. Lo and behold, the recruiter who told me there was nothing now needed my information. It was a generic email that didn’t acknowledge our exchange from one week prior. I’ve found these recruiters (at least some of them) are similar to some of the folks in HR and credentials. They appear to perform the minimum requirements, but don’t expect much and you won’t be disappointed.
I decided not to mention the now ancient history email and just responded as if it was the first I had received. A few hours later I heard from someone in their admin section, requesting training certification before they could schedule me. That was Friday morning and I responded within two hours. I’m now waiting to hear back, but at least this is finally progress. I haven’t heard anything about details - where they need exams, how many, how often, etc. I’m hoping I can get something similar to what I did in 2016 - about four hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The weekend is irrelevant to us since we don’t work or do anything else specific on any given day, and traffic is generally much more bearable.
I’m not holding my breath, though. I won’t be shocked if it’s something like - we have Austin and Houston, but nothing in Dallas right now. Which doesn’t seem likely given that C&P face-to-face exams were shutdown nationally for several months, but I’m trying to keep my expectations low. If I can get that two days a week schedule, I think it’s reasonable to assume I could earn around $2K per weekend, which is about what I would expect on a single workday as fee basis. That would be roughly $8K a month, $5500 after taxes. Not as good as I made with fee basis, but more than enough to keep us comfortable. That said, just 20-30 DBQs a month ($2-3K) should be enough to keep us comfortably in the black for the monthly ledger. We’re trying to maintain that positive cashflow, but there are always unplanned expenditures that just marginally dip the budget into the red.
The hope is that I can get this part time work from VES to hold us over until operations resume for fee basis with the VA. I have to acknowledge that day may never come again, or at least not in the way it used to be. I’ve decided this time around to maintain at least a minimal working schedule with VES so that I always have options in case something like this happens again. Hopefully things are slowly looking up. The pandemic hasn’t gone anywhere and there are still significant numbers of uninfected. At least now procedures have been updated in most healthcare and other public facilities so we can return to some semblance of normal operation.