The Non-Move

For those of you "in the know," (I couldn't think of a better phrase, sorry!), Jamie and I have decided to stay here in Columbia. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, here is a little story about how we almost decided to move to Charleston this week :-)

Jamie and I had been talking semi-seriously for about a year now concerning possibly relocating to another city. A couple of weeks ago, the FedEx station in North Charleston advertised for five full time routes. Jamie has always wanted to move to Charleston, so he put in a bid for one of the routes. FedEx does their hiring strictly based on seniority, and on the morning of the last day to bid, Jamie sat at #5, which meant he would be offered a route.

Well, by the time he got back to the station that night, he had been outbid by a guy who only worked for FedEx two months longer than Jamie, so he was pushed to #6. Disappointed, but not discouraged, we started putting feelers out for life in Charleston, in case someone turned down a route (because really, what are the chances that 5 out of 5 would take it?).

Lo and behold, exactly one week later, Jamie got a call from his manager saying that he had been offered one of the routes in Charleston. That was last Friday. For the next four days we went over every aspect of the move that you could possibly think of! On Saturday, we even went down to Charleston to check out the station and look around at the housing market.

On Monday, Jamie actually found out the information about the route. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite what he expected. Without getting into a lot of FedEx lingo, the route was something called a "split shift," which essentially means the worker comes in early in the morning for a couple of hours, helps anyone that needs help, then goes home for a couple of hours until it's time to start their pickup route. There are two reasons Jamie wasn't pleased with this route setup: that route structure is a step backward, and the schedule would be worse than the one he has now with a paycut. One of the reasons we wanted to go to Charleston was so Jamie could start working on building a furniture business. Working a split shift wouldn't give him the time to be able to do that.

Ultimately, with all things considered, we just didn't think we were in the situation right now to move. The route wasn't what we thought; the cost of living in Charleston is a bit high for us; I would have to start all over in my job search; and we would have so many things in Columbia to take care of (our house, our rentals, etc).

So for now, Charleston is not in the cards.... but who knows what the future will bring?  :-)