Ok, Houston, you won. After two years of fruitless endeavors and disseminating something like 3000 resumes (which collectively netted precisely 3 interviews), I give up (and that's a major concession being the obstinate, hard-headed Irish-German that I am). Friday's job interview was the straw that broke the camel's back. After 6 hours of in-person, round-table, firing-squad interviews, I was told that I just wasn't what the employer was looking for. Ok, fair enough. Frankly, neither the potential employer (a local University that thinks way more of itself than it should) nor the position were what I was looking for, but at least I was willing to make allowances. The position itself represented a major step backwards (if not a complete reversal) on the trajectory of career progression. The pay was positively anemic. The organization was the antithesis of "organized" (what kind of well-managed, self-respecting IT department takes TEN YEARS to complete an email migration project???) and the benefits were, as far as I could tell lacking an electron microscope as I was, non-existent (btw, you know its a bad sign when the HR rep hands you a sheaf of benefits-related papers and tells you to just read them later). So all in all, I'm rather relieved that I didn't get the job since it saved me from the awkwardness of telling them to go find another sucker who is willing to work pro bono. Still, enough is enough. So this evening I told my wife of 19 years that while I love her, living as we are on a single income we are embarked on the financial equivalent of the RMS Titanic after it became the largest ice-cube maker in history and as a consequence I'm moving back to DC where at least there's a chance of someone with my credentials, education (degrees in Information Systems, Finance and Accounting) and experience (20+ years in IT) actually finding gainful employment. Now that I've "Crossed the Rubicon" as it were, I'm totally elated and counting the hours (22 days, 7 hours, 14 minutes by my estimate). As wretched as it is, and as far as cultural, intellectual, social and career wastelands go, I suppose Houston isn't the complete rectum of all human existence. Conceivably, Dante's 7th Circle in Hell is worse, but I suspect by a margin so negligible as to be practically imperceivable to the naked eye. I have it on good authority that President Basher Al Asad's National Security Directorate's interrogation facilities in Damascus are positively medieval. Comparatively speaking, with that stationary carnival of gruesomeness as the litmus test, Houston is positively Arcadian....well, no, it's still pretty shitty, but still.....At any rate, take heed all you job seekers in the Houston area: there is NO hope of finding gainful employment if you are an educated, white-collar professional. Of course, if you want to mow lawns, work in the energy fields or hang sheet-rock, yeah, I've heard rumors to the effect that there are jobs out there. But if you're a mid- to upper-level career professional, forget it. You've got about as much chance of finding work down here as you do being elected Pope by the next convocation of the College of Cardinals AND being selected as Mission Commander by NASA for the next manned space mission. So my advice is this: follow my lead. Get out of that steaming, sweltering, pestilential cesspool of nepotism, ignorance and provincial backwardness while you can and seek a meaningful existence elsewhere. Fallujah, Kandahar, Bagdad and even Tehran come to mind as viable alternatives that offer infinitely more career opportunities than Houston as well as a considerably better social/cultural life.