LONG STORY SHORT By Kristine McGowan This is probably the question we get most often. As mentioned in our Saving Up post, we originally intended to quit our jobs before hitting the road. Jason loved being a page designer for the LA Times, but we knew that kind of work came with an expiration date; he may as well leave on his own terms. As for me, I was an FAQ writer for a consumer electronics company. A good job, but not exactly my life’s passion. Part of me couldn’t wait to leave. Little did I know that would happen sooner than expected. No, I wasn’t fired. But I was bored. My impatient, meandering brain couldn’t handle staying in the same job until the Big Trip came around. It needed something more substantial than FAQs to chew on until I could satiate its wanderlust. That’s how I began my search for a new job—a search that would lead me from consumer electronics to Mars rovers. Quite literally. After my job interview at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, an HR rep took me to see the Mars 2020 rover, now named Perseverance, being built in the high bay. Quite a leap from the tech I was used to. A few weeks later, in February 2020, I started working as a technical writer and editor for the lab. Suddenly, words like spacecraft, rover, orbiter, planetary, and holy-shit-this-is-rad joined my daily lexicon. Our plans shifted dramatically then. We decided to move out of our cheap apartment in Long Beach—praise the Lord—and buy a condo closer to the lab. We’d put off the Big Trip for a year, if we ended up doing it at all. Now that we both had jobs we liked, it wasn’t so easy to picture us leaving anymore. Then the pandemic hit. You know how the story goes. Everything—the world, our plans, my sanity—came to a halt. We stayed in our tiny, roach-infested apartment in Long Beach (damn it), working from home and spending more time together than we had since college. Meanwhile, our savings continued to grow, aided by my increased income and abrupt lack of commute. Our plans halted—but they didn’t change. We still intended to move when the world opened up again. We intended to put some sort of roots down near LA. Then the aftermath of the pandemic hit. Inflation boomed. Gas prices soared (thanks, Putin). And, most impactful to us, housing prices skyrocketed. Our savings couldn’t keep up. We couldn’t afford an apartment closer to the lab, let alone a condo. Anything we could afford was somehow worse than our current place. (If you read our Saving Up post, you know that’s quite an achievement.) Jason was still working from home full-time. My job was the only reason we were still considering settling down in the area. JPL wanted employees back on-site. Either I would continue commuting 1.5–2 hours multiple days a week—and believe me, with my road rage, that puts more than my mental health on the line—or I would quit. It wasn’t an easy decision. I shed tears over it more than a few times. But ultimately, it came down to two questions:
I decided to quit. We decided to go. By Jason Clark I loved my job. I loved the work, the hours, the variety. I loved being able to say I worked at the Los Angeles Times. And I still love the people I worked with.
But as much as I enjoyed building the paper I grew up reading, designing front pages featuring the teams I rooted for, and watching games come down to the wire as deadline approached, I knew it was never going to last as long as I needed it to. When I joined the LA Times, it was coming off the worst decade in its history. Like just about every newspaper in the country, it was suffering from a perfect shitstorm of bad preparation and bad luck. Layoffs and buyouts had become common. I knew eventually I would either leave or be asked to leave. Fortunately, I didn’t have to make that decision for nine years. Unionization and new ownership brought some much-needed stability, and I got to keep enjoying the job I loved without fear of losing it overnight. Still, Kristine and I decided that by July 2023, our savings would be healthy enough to take this trip we had dreamed of and planned for. I did consider switching to a part-time role, or taking a leave of absence. But when the LA Times announced a brutal round of layoffs a month before we were set to head out, those options were no longer on the table. And despite my department not being directly hit by the layoffs, the ripple effect would change things significantly going forward. It was a heartbreaking sign that it was time to move on while the decision was still mine to make.
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