So it worked.

I finally got a job.

I am the new co-director of a currently non-existent strategic consulting division at a major Vietnamese finance firm. I have a desk, my own phone extension, a new bank account with Military Bank, an extended work visa, and one week to finish a presentation of my initial financial and strategic analysis of 3 publicly traded Vietnamese companies and a plan for how to build this new department.

I got the position thanks to the help of two friends I have here (in addition to taking the time to send the company my resume, put on my suit, and come in to meet the boss). So I got it through networking, although not really the kind I was writing about. Rather it seems to have come about totally independently of most of this running around I’ve been doing. More so just the normal kind of networking where you naturally hang out with people similar to you.

It seems like luck. I happened to meet two American guys my age, with similar tastes, preferences, and tendency towards furious nerdy argument, that live about two blocks from me,  and were just put in charge of hiring some fresh meat for special projects at their finance firm. But I guess getting lucky sooner or later was the plan all along.

So now the three of us are building a plan to create a division that has to overcome a lot of challenges. First and foremost it would have to be able to offer genuine, insightful, useful, and practical advice to Vietnamese corporations. This means that we will have to have better insight into the markets, competitive dynamics, competencies, and potential for these firms than the people running them do. Then the real hard part is going to be convincing the firms to pay us to do it.

It would also have to be accepted within the complexities of interdepartmental firm politics; not taking business or power away from anyone else.

Our only tools are PowerPoint, Google, a Bloomberg terminal, our education, and our wits.

We present our analysis and our plan on Monday. If we succeed the new department we create will be our jobs. We’re bargaining to get our own office space upstairs and we might even bring in our own interns.

For me it’s really the perfect job. It will be my duty to spend all day thinking really hard about strategies I think businesses should peruse, and then to design and present them. It’s like making a cat the chief officer of finding sunny places to nap.

There’s a sad irony to all of this though. This should be triumphant success of my experiment in entrepreneurial travel which I’ve chronicled in this blog.  All this time I’ve been worrying about my suit, my business cards, my resume, and my contacts, running around, trying to find an opportunity like this. Finally I do, and after just two days of working (8 to 6 today) I feel as though everything is already changing.

I feel like my weekdays, amounting to five sevenths of my life, will simply disappear to another universe; a surreal looping indoor universe of wake, commute, work, food, sleep, repeat, occasionally interrupted by menial errands.

I worry that I won’t have the free time or extra energy to devote to my writing, my photography, or my health. I’m really scared that I might not be able to put in all the time I have been into keeping up my relationships with my family, my friends, and my girlfriend. Maybe those were all just the temporary luxuries of unemployment.

I feel like such a baby. Wah wah, I have a job. I can’t keep sleeping until noon, exploring temples all day, and playing on my laptop all night like I have been for months. Poor me. On the one hand I got exactly what I wanted. On the other I feel like I’ve fallen right into the life that I came out here to escape. (the third hand is holding a duck)

I guess it’s all relative. I’m incredibly lucky and thankful to have the opportunities that I’ve had, and it’s certainly not an appropriate time to complain about having a job, especially in finance. And maybe the simple sadness of growing older is seeing your life turn from an imagined spectrum of possibilities to one single path.

I could write more about it but I have to go to sleep. I’m tired and I have work in the morning.