Back to working for the Man

A few days after I wrote my last entry, I spotted a newspaper ad for a bilingual therapist position in Park City at Valley Mental Health. I had heard good things about VMH by one of the therapists at Sandy Counseling, and so I went ahead and put my application in that night online. I got a call two days later and went in for an interview, and short story short, I'm starting on February 2!

So is this a good move? I guess we'll see. I probably won't be working with as many couples and families as I do now. I'll have a boss. I can't go do whatever I want when I don't have a client. But! I'm cautiously optimistic. There are a lot of good aspects to the job: Spanish-speaking clients, whom I've always thought I was supposed to be helping but didn't know how to make it pay; close to home (15-20 minutes depending on the weather); casual dress; relaxed, youngish colleagues; good benefits (even a pension plan!); and an online, streamlined paperwork process. There's even a psychiatrist and nurse practitioner on site in case I want to get someone some pharmacological help to go with the talk therapy.

And $$? Julie sent me to the interview with a dollar amount that would make sense for us, and I put it out there during the interview (Hard for me!! Hate to negotiate! Not confident about self-worth!) and hey-they're going to give it to me! Turns out that their "salary formula" just happened to work out for us. Don't get me wrong--it's not going to get us rich-it's not what people told me I'd end up making in private practice. BUT it's a regular paycheck-yay!. I hated filling out complicated insurance or medicaid-inspired paperwork knowing I wasn't getting paid for the time. And I hated not knowing when insurance companies were going to get around to paying me. I'm just basically tired of worrying about money all the time. Hate to use the cliche, but "in this economy," I should be happy to have a job, period, right?

I'm keeping the teaching job for this semester, and I'll keep the private practice office in town for the occasional after-hours client. And Julie'll be keeping her job at least long enough to pay off all of our wonderful subsidizers/investors(thanks again!!!). Or whatever. She'll do what she wants.

In the meantime, the consequences of leaving one job for another is that all my procrastinated paperwork comes due in the next two weeks. Ugh. For the new job, I'm going to be working closely with Julie to keep up a system/mind frame that keeps me up to date on paperwork without having to stay at work all night. I'm told that the computerized paperwork system at the new job minimizes the procrastination thing because they have strict deadlines. They have to, because lots of different people/caregivers in the system need to get information on clients I'll be working with. Hopefully, they've streamlined the paperwork A LOT for us poor people-oriented people. They wouldn't want to burn out their therapists, right? Gosh, I hope they're not used to working with type A personality, superorganized, overachieving paper-pushing therapists. Freaks.