Thursday, March 3, 2011

Well Whaddya Know!

After days and days of checking emails and not getting that email, after days and days of stressing and worrying, Keith finally got the final job offer from BNSF yesterday afternoon. And then we couldn't get the final offer letter to come up in the email so we had to call the help line and go into Internet Explorer to be able to read the letter. Internet Explorer? Who uses Internet Explorer these days? It's kind of like still being on My Space instead of Facebook.

But, anyway, he starts on March 28th, so at least he's got 3 weeks to give his notice and get himself together. The way BNSF works is you fill out all your paperwork online so he sat there for about 2 hours last night going through all the forms and dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's. He has to be down in Redlands near San Bernardino on Monday the 28th at 7:30 am. I'm assuming they will keep the training class down there for the first week and then something about going to Kansas for 2 weeks and then on from there. The training is rigorous with lots of testing and if you don't pass something you are given a second chance and if you don't pass again, it's back home you go. Kind of like American Idol. Then when you are all done training you still might not actually work, you have to kind of bid on your jobs and can be bumped by someone with more seniority at any time.

He's excited and also a little sick to his stomach.

Since it's a union job, the pay is $5.00 an hour more than what he's making now, the medical package costs $200.00 a month, right now we are paying about $260.00, so a little savings there. You don't have to pay social security taxes since the railroad has it's own retirement fund and we figured out that the percentage taken out for that will be about the same as what's coming out now between social security and his 401K. Hopefully he will be working out of Bakersfield so we'll save about $40.00 a week in gas costs, but who knows with that. Scary thing starting all over again.

I did find some pants over at the Goodwill yesterday, two pairs of capris for $2.50 each and one pair of jeans for $2.75. I looked around at some of the other clothes but most of what they had was pretty worn and pretty ugly, but at least I've got some pants that hopefully won't annoy me like my jeans from yesterday that are now in the trash can.

2 comments:

Jennifer said...

YEAH!!! I guess his deafness isn't a problem to them?

Jim and Heather on Meerkat said...

Congrats to Keith!