I was laid off at my then-local paper in August 2014, which I'd known was coming because I was only hired knowing the copy desk was being centralized later that year. There was no plan to come down here.
I got unemployment, but a third of newspaper wages only goes so far.
After several months of attempting to find work locally, I reached out to the director in Texas who'd offered to immediately hire me when centralization hit but offered an insulting pay cut.
By April, I was worn down enough to reach out again. He was willing to negotiate only an 18% pay cut, but that's still a lot better than zero dollars, and the household wasn't functioning.
My ex and I bonded over being equally manipulative back in 2009, so I get the U-Haul and announce I'm moving to Texas.
It worked.
Simply saying I was going to wouldn't have. She had the only vehicle at the time, so "moving in what?" would have been a valid initial question.
But this was not my goal. She'd already said in August that Texas was not an option. And so I stayed in rural Oregon, interviewing for media-adjacent jobs ... school PIO, tech at a TV station ... but the UI benefits run out at a certain point, and if you have one "can you start tomorrow?" up your sleeve, that's the only remaining option.
In terms of manipulative things I've done in life, this likely ranks as a 7/10 short-term, 10/10 long term. But I saw the options as being homeless (again) or an unpleasant move -- I'd explicitly forbidden Texas my entire career (I may have been able to start my career a few months earlier had I been willing to move to San Angelo in 2001), so this was practical, not a goal.
She has to have known at some level that it was a farce. Not the job, but the U-Haul. I'd packed nothing up, and there was no discussion of division of particle board. In no universe am I getting out of there in a day.
However, this brings her to the table with a sharper sense of reality in about an hour. I think that whole charade ran me $30 all-in.
And later that day, I call the director and say I need to push my start date back by a couple of weeks. Then we start planning the move properly.
Perhaps not as properly as hoped. I arrived here by train on Memorial Day 2015, and flooding meant I had to get off the train at an ungodly hour without sleep to get on a bus for the final leg.
Not that the trip was any easier for her. She lost her stuffed animal in a hotel and nearly got arrested in Nevada for her wedding collar (it's apparently a deadly weapon).