NewsFlash! - VF

Well, we have some exciting news to report.....
Jamie has a new job! We are quite excited by this prospect as it is a better deal all around.... more holidays (yay!!!), more $$$ and very, very cool people to work with. It is about an hour and 20 min north of here, in central Michigan in a town called Saginaw. Here is a map of Michigan and (if you are not sure where Michigan is, here is a map of the USA. Michigan is the light blue one at the top towards the right side, surrounded by the Great Lakes and is in the shape of a mitten!). This will eventually mean moving house, although we are not quite sure when or where to at this point. We spent 6-8 hours driving around with the Exectutive Director of the new group that Jamie will be working for, looking at various houses and suburbs which was quite fascinating. We even looked right up on the edge of Lake Huron. That was very nice, but it probably a little too isolated for me and although it is 22 minutes drive to work , why drive 22 min when you can drive only 10 by living closer? Bay City is only 10 min away from the main hospitals (yes, as in 'The Bay City Rollers' band of the '70s) and there were some nice townhouses (condos) on the river that are also an option. Of course there are also plenty of the big mega-houses (5000-9000 sq feet mansions) but we might wait a few years until there are more of us to fill the house with for that. Everything seems 30-50% cheaper than here in Detroit so that will be a bonus when the time comes for house-buying.
Anyway, the group is called "Advanced Diagnostic Imaging" (ADI) and they have a web-site that even has the radiologists schedules so you know who is working and where! it also has 'physician profiles' so you can see about all the other docs and their backgrounds. Although the Saginaw web-site says that the town is about 60,000 people with another 80-100,000 in the surrounding areas, the practice serves about 420,000 people as it is the main health-care hub of central Michigan. They do neuro-surgery, cardiac surgery, plastics and everything in between. The radiologists go to about 5 different hospitals, as well as outpatient clinics, MRI centres etc all around the area. There is one facility up in the north (they call it 'The Thumb' as if you look at the mitten shape of Michigan it is up there!) and one called Tawas on the east side of Lake Huron (about where the 23 and 75 roads meet if you are looking at the map of Michigan that I linked in the above paragraph). If you work up there the group has a condominium overlooking the Lake where you stay for the week. Apparently everyone requests to work there in the Summer!
All this came about as Jamie has a friend called George who has been working there for about 3-4 years. He has been trying to recruit Jamie for quite some time as he says the group is so cool and they need more cool people to work with them. We had quite a talk with him as he was at the conference we went to in New Orleans back in October and he kept telling up to come up and visit and check the place out. In the meantime, another friend of Jamie's (these three used to work together at Garden City Hospital, one of the places Jamie works at now), Brien; has started work with ADI as well as is just loving it. So, amidst some gentle urging from his wife, Jamie phoned George just before our two weeks off to go to Australia (actually, around 8pm on a Friday night - New Years Eve!) and said that we would come up for a drive on Monday 3rd Jan. On Sunday 2nd at 4pm, George called and said 'come up tonight, we'll put you up in a hotel and you can check out some of the hospitals and maybe meet a few people'. So within 2 hours, we were on the road..... The next day dawned bright and chilly and in no time we were zipped around 5 different facilities. They took up out to lunch and about 8 of the partners turned up! They also took up out to dinner and more partners showed up! They all chatted on in an animated fashion about what a great place this is to live/ work/ bring up a family and you so must come! We found this all quite amazing seeing as the partners in the current group Jamie works for can hardly give you the time of day, even at the Christmas parties. We met most of the people that were working that day and they were all so nice (no malignant personalities as Jamie says!). It turns out that this tiki-tour/meet and greet journey was the job interview! Seeing as we had less than 24 hours notice, there was no time for stressing! The greatest thing about all this (even more than the "you get 12 weeks holiday a year and can buy more if you want but you are not allowed to take more than 24 weeks" comment) , is that it is only 1 year until you become a partner. And this is practically 99% guaranteed as you can only work there if they think that you are 'partner material' to start with. This is in stark contrast to the current situation where it is a 4 year partnership track with 0% guarantee (and several people they have told at the 3 years, 9-month point 'sorry, you are not partner material for our group, here's your 90-days notice). The ADI people seem very democratic (several people said when Jamie asked in his 'what are the good/bad things about working here questions', that the worst thing is that they can be "too democratic so decision making can sometimes take a long time" and everything seems quite transparent and fair. They even put out the holiday roster (vacation schedule) a year in advance! So that will give us plenty of time for planning our life!!! So we had Sunday evening and the Monday night up in Saginaw and drove back to Berkley on Tuesday 4th, just in time to do the washing and throw it in our suitcases and get back on the road to Toronto and then on to Sydney! We had messages from ADI whilst we were in Sydney and so on our return went back again so that Jamie could meet the president of the group and go through the contract with someone from the recruiment committee. It was quite a crazy thing to do, but amazingly we were not tired in the least..... 14 hours flying Sydney-LA, 2 hours break, 5 hours flying to Toronto, a flat battery in the 4WD that needed attention and then immediately it was going, 5 hours driving from Toronto to Saginaw! Needless to say,we slept well and then Jamie had his meeting whilst I was driven around looking at houses. The next day we had another drive-by of places to live from 9am-3pm and then finally, we went home! Even though we only had 5 days in Sydney, it was 2 weeks since we last slept in our own bed! But it was all good! So last Monday, we wrote the resignation letter and once the ADI contract came, we e-mailed it off and in 90 days, Jamie will be an ex-employee of the current group he works for. Actually it will be less time as he has negotiated a finishing date of 1 April because the guy that does the scheduling couldn't be bothered writing him in for only part of the month. Then..... who knows the specifics of where we will be staying and what will be our day-to-day activities..... Watch this space!!!!