Before we were married, my husband and I did a brief stint out in Vegas. My brother and sister-in-law had moved out there for business, and I had recently become unemployed. We decided we should make the move and it would be a great opportunity – after all, it’s Vegas! Little did we know how much we were going to dislike Las Vegas.
My brother and sister-in-law were well established in their marriage and had recently had a baby. Until you have a baby of your own, you don’t quite realize how different life is from when you were a childless couple. My husband and I didn’t quite grasp that they weren’t going to be able to hang out all the time, nor did we really expect them to just because we moved there. It took me a while to find a job that I really wanted to do (visual merchandising) and when I finally found one, I did not mesh at all with the people.
I was miserable. My husband wasn’t in love with his job either, but was making decent money. As the perpetual optimist, he was not nearly as miserable as I. I cried at least three times per week. I missed my friends back home, I had no idea where I was, I felt unsafe and I was just a walking trainwreck. I applied vehemently for jobs back home, to no avail. I finally couldn’t stand the people at my store any longer, so I asked for a transfer. I was transferred to a much better store, and loved the people there. But by this time, I had hated Vegas for so long, and applied for so many jobs, that I literally had one foot out of the state. Neither one of us had made any friends, nor did we want to at this point. We had been there for six months and nothing to show for it. In the midst of all of this, our six month lease for our apartment was ending. Since I hadn’t heard anything from any of the jobs I applied for back in Cleveland, we decided to stay on month-to-month.
I was finally called for a phone interview, and then invited for a face-to-face interview. I made my appointments (three interviews back-to-back in one day because I was out of state), booked my flight (in and out in two days) and was ready to go. While I waited to hear back from my potential employer, my husband and I started to look at apartments in the suburb in which we were both working at the time. It was a nice area and we both felt much more at home there. After looking at a few and debating when we should move, I got the call.
I was offered the job. We needed a few days to discuss the options between my then-boyfriend and myself.
I was ecstatic, of course, because I was offered a real job. A visual merchandiser in the corporate office. It’s what I had always wanted. We discussed it and decided we should move back to Cleveland.
So after nine short, miserable and depressing months, we packed up, shipped out, and never looked back.
And that, my friends, is the Vegas Effect… in a nutshell.
