Update on my job situation

As some of you may know, I have been strongly debating leaving my current job.  It was difficult but I have finally made my decision.  I'll elaborate on the entire situation first.

I joined my current company in June of last year under the impression that I would be able to have a stable income and a stable position here in Cincinnati.  I work in IT consulting, so the position often requires travel, but I was told many times during recruiting, interviews, and in the initial training program that travel would never be required as long as I was flexible in technology and my line of industry.  But basically as soon as that training program was over, I'm thrown into the one section of the company where none of that applies.  We simply get trained on whatever they want to put us on with no choice on our side, and if they want to decide to move us across the country tomorrow, we either say yes, or say no and eventually get fired.

I hate travel.  I hate moving.  I really just want a stable place to live where I never have to leave my apartment and can do whatever I like in my free time.  So when I find out that my location is not stable at all, I was really scared that a situation like this would happen eventually.  And now that there is finally a project for me that requires travel, I strongly considered just turning it down and leaving the company for lack of having a valid reason to turn it down.  I was told that the position for me in Louisville was confirmed (again with no choice on my part) on Thursday of last week, and I responded by just leaving the office after hearing the news, and not coming into work on Friday either.

As an aside, the management here is terrible, in that you are either given no advance notice on things, or you're given so much advance notice that you worry about something that never ends up coming through.  There's almost no communication.  On top of that, we have a technical lead who literally does not do any work, and our team has felt that his job has been in jeopardy for the past several months.  I even found a job opening on Linkedin for his exact position in our department, which confirmed the fast that they're trying to get rid of him.

So Monday came, and right before lunch one of my managers calls me in for a private meeting, where he basically tells me that I will be taking over the responsibilities of our technical lead, meaning they're passively getting rid of him very soon.  They see my potential in the company even though there's rarely room for vertical growth, and they could see that I had felt down recently over other projects falling through (I was taken off of a local project for the one in Louisville, but also cause they're grooming me to become technical lead).

So whatever happened in that meeting, it gave me a little more hope, and I was able to tell him some reasons why I was hesitant to accept the Louisville project, but I never told him that I had intentions to quit.  He said that he would try to work with me, but at that point I had basically fallen into the trap because of my positive attitude.  I wouldn't be able to quit at this point even if I wanted to, when I was 99% sure I was quitting the day before.  All that was left was to wait for news to come in on the project.

The way projects work at our company is complicated.  If the project requires you to travel and it's a long-term project (6+ months), you will have to relocate.  Relocating would make me have to find a new place to live in Louisville, but it would give me the same freedom that I currently have once the move is complete.  I really don't care about my location as long as I'm in a stable location in my own house/apartment.  I just need strong stable internet to be able to stream and keep up with my lifestyle without the weights on my back of having to travel constantly back home.

Short-term projects, however, are a completely different story.  The company will pay all of your expenses to stay in a hotel for up to 6 months.  Most people prefer this kind of business travel to relocation because you don't have anything to worry about, and everything is paid for.  But for me it's the complete opposite.  Since Louisville is only an hour and a half away, this leaves 2 options.  The first option would be to completely live out of the hotel (which I'm not even sure if my company would cover the 3 extra nights as opposed to commuting home on weekends), taking everything I need to survive and getting a proper streaming setup, but having to do it out of a hotel and not my own personal area.

The second option would be commuting home every weekend, and being completely stuck in a hotel for 4 nights a week without the ability to do anything I want to do.  But I would be able to come home on weekends and stream and do my usual sort of thing.  I could also bring my desktop every week and set it up in the hotel room, and get the same streaming setup as above, but having to set up and dismantle everything twice a week in addition to transportation would be a major hassle.  I don't particularly like either option, so I hoped the project would just be long-term instead.

Today I had another meeting where I actually found out the information on the project timeline and scope.  And this is where it all finally fell in on me.  The project ended up being long-term, but because the client wants to get a feel for how me and my teammate will work, they're starting the first 2 months as business travel.  And from the way it sounds, I'll have to travel there every week and come home on weekends, which is absolutely the worst possible situation I could have landed into.  And like I said, at this point I couldn't have turned it down.  The client loves me too, so it would be a complete slap in the face to everyone involved.

But just a few days ago, I really felt like slapping everyone in the face.  I wanted to see how screwed over my company would be when I left, and I wanted to be able to laugh at that.  So what changed?

I think the main thing that influenced my decision was the inability to find other jobs that I was qualified for in the area.  The small number I found were from companies with similarly bad reviews, and I didn't really want to get myself stuck in the same situation again.  Combine that with the unlikely opportunity for growth here, and the surprising amount of job security in my department, and I realized it was in my best interest to stay.  But I really don't like the idea of having to sacrifice my free time.  I'm not a typical person.  I don't have friends.  I don't go out and do fun things.  I literally stay to myself after hours and do the same things over and over again, but those things are fun to me.  I don't have any desire to change that.

But my new position will definitely have to make me change, or at least make it very hard to stay the same.  The amount of effort it's going to require to keep up with streaming and all of my friends I care about is going to be absurd.  But I'm just going to have to fight through it.  I have no idea how I'm going to continue doing what I love doing for the near future.  Even worse, I know I'll be stressed out and probably will be in bad moods that make me not want to do anything.  But I'm going to have to get through it even though I hate it.

Someone save me please...  :c