My husband was a CST IV, basically a civil engineer, for over 25 years. He was the main provider for our family while I stayed home to take care of our children. At first the change happened very slowly: lower the benefits, lower the Christmas bonuses, remove the Christmas bonuses, shorten the work week, cut down to part time, let go half the staff until it was two others, and then let go of my husband. Shortly after Jakobi was born, I knew we wanted for me to stay home, so I started looking around for options to work from home. I found an online course and began schooling to be a medical transcriptionist.
Around “shorten the work week”, I had just finished up my medical transcription schooling and was able to start the job search for a company that would hire a graduate fresh out of school to work from home. It was really not all that hard if you were willing to work for peanuts, which I was. I searched the MT (medical transcriptionsist) boards like MTStars and started applying to every one. I must have taken over 50 tests until I finally found gainful employment, part-time, working in my own time at my own relative pace.
After a few months of me working for peanuts, my husband still was unable to find a job. The industry where we live was dead. Our county was ranked #5 in unemployment in the nation. President Obama even came to speak to our county to lift up our spirits. We decided to try our hand at actually opening a medical transcription business; After all, great things come from trying times. My husband jumped on the bandwagon and was thrilled to be contributing in a meaningful way (to him, I always thought he was helpful, but you know how guys are). He had called EVERY doctors office, practice, and individual doctor in a 10 county radius. That is over 2000 phone calls! Honestly, that is way more than I ever would have done.
Guess what? We landed a client and right in my own town. Too bad we could not find another, and the dream of being a MT family was squashed (But I got a really cool website out of it..Makobi Scribe!!). The one client I had was double the money of my previous job so I did both for a while, and Noah hung out with the kids. He is not good at the role reversal, and I only made 1/4 of the money he did. So, he started to look for anything that could help support us. No one was hiring! McDonalds had a line of 500 people wrapping the building because they were hiring 6 new team members. With no alternate education under his belt, he began to look at the basic jobs people do like pizza delivery and garbage pick up. Thank goodness! That is when his willingness to work out of his area of expertise really opened up a whole new area of opportunity–Truck Driving.
He searched online for schools, found one, and just finished in January. He now has a job with Werner as an over-the-road trucker hauling as drivers choice (he can come home when he wants within reason–every two weeks as opposed to monthly). Right now, he is still “on probation” so he can’t come home for four weeks for the first three months, but he has a job, we have food, and we did not lose our house like many people in our county. I am so proud of him for making the sacrifice of being away from his family to provide for us. Our long-term plan is for him to get his year’s experience in so he can drive local and be home every night!
This leaves me with TONS of free time during nap and after kids bedtime to get stuck in my head missing my husband; however, I said NOPE NOT ME! I had turned Makobi Scribe transcription services into Makobi Scribe Product Reviews messing around with my sister last year when it had failed. Now, Makobi Scribe became my distraction while soon becoming my passion, and I think my hard work on my site is really paying off. What do you think?
The moral of this story is that sometimes good things do happen to good people, it just takes a lot of work, persistence, and willingness to think outside of the box.
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