My telephone rang this month, and there was a recruiter on the other end, and I said yes to something I did not understand.
It was a contract design role, she said. For the City of Edmonton. She could not tell me much more than that over the phone. Something to do with design, and would I come in for an interview.
I said yes before she finished the sentence. I have been turning the question over since, because I think there is something in it I have not fully worked out.
The version of me who had spent a few lean winters freelancing would have interrogated the offer. What is the rate. What is the scope. Who else is involved. All sensible questions. But some of that caution was never really diligence. It was fear, and I had gotten good at making it look like diligence.
Ten years in, I am starting to hear the difference between a small opportunity that needs pinning down and a large one that needs stepping into. The large ones are almost never fully explained at the door. They are vague because nobody inside them knows the shape of it yet either. If I demand certainty before I walk in, I tend to be handed only the work that has already been figured out.
So I am going in without knowing. I have a fair idea of what it might be, and I have decided not to spoil it by guessing. There is an interview to go to. I will find out what I said yes to when I sit down for it.