Response

I thank all who have commented or emailed about this vicious turn of events. After learning the news I did what I always do when incredibly sad...lay in bed for a few hours, silent tears getting soaked up by my pillow. I won't bore you with my woe is me-ness too much. Well, I might. Right now I thought I'd post my response to the email giving me the bad news. Why? Well, because I don't have anything to lose and it lays out, pretty well, my current circumstances and a little bit of my suppressed rage (I don't really get angry much). I have done a few edits that were not in the initial email mainly putting things into bold.

Hi [dude],

I'm sorry to hear that the magazine has suspended itself and that your offer to me is withdrawn. I was extremely excited to finally have an opportunity to learn about an industry I actually had interest in, especially in such an amazing location. Since you have never met me, and I never actually worked for you, I understand that my plight would be at the very bottom of your concerns but, well, I'd like to take a moment to clarify my definition of inconvenience. Inconvenience would be your executive editor contacting me with a job offer (and assuring me that I would not be left hanging in the wind this totally happened in November), my taking action by giving my current employer two weeks' notice, my beginning to look for someone to take over my lease in an exceptionally wonderful and hard to find apartment and then having you contact me with news that it wasn't going to happen just a few days later. That would fit my concept of what the word 'inconvenient' means.

It is more than inconvenient to have given notice at your (perhaps not all that inspiring but still paying) job and even help in the training of your replacement. It is incredibly more than inconvenient to have given up your apartment, put all your remaining belongings into a $80 a month storage unit (having rid yourself of pieces of furniture and other household items that you would not otherwise have parted with) and then spend what was supposed to be one week but will now be who-knows-how-long in your parents' small town with absolutely no job prospects. The fact that as early as three days ago your executive editor was replying to my questions about dress code makes it seem that she had no idea of the impending closure of the magazine but I have a hard time believing that you, as the publisher and owner, were not aware of what was about to happen. I believe I kept in contact with both of you often enough (I sent them weekly emails detailing my packing up etc), and kept you aware of all my aforementioned plans, that for you not to-at any point-mention that there was a possibility that this was going to fall apart, well, that I find a bit disrespectful.

I know I would have been on the lowest rung of the Key West Magazine ladder but I was geared up and ready--I was researching possible story pitches, obsessively looking at maps of the island and, heck, I even started reading obituaries to get a feel for the community down there. If you had, at any point, let me know your doubts then maybe I wouldn't be where I now am: unemployed with no home to go back to at one of the worst times in the year for job hunting (this, I'm not sure is actually true). That, I'm sorry to say, is far more than inconvenient.