Envy, and Night of the Living Headhunters

Okay, so.

I’ve been working on a very large job for one of my clients, a huge retail chain that’s in the process of taking all their design and advertising in-house. They’re also in the process of upgrading their existing workstations, and they’re going with Power Macs and Apple Xserves rather than Wintel boxen.

So for the past four days, I’ve been setting up a bevy of dual-processor G5 systems. My client has twelve shiny new G5 boxen (each with 3.5 gigabytes of RAM and a brand-new 23″ Cinema Display), two new Xserve servers (each with a three-terabyte Xserve RAID array), and the desktops are all getting loaded with the entire Adobe creative suite and the entire Linotype font collection.

I’ve been drooling all over myself all week.

Want want want want shiny happy G5 system want want want.

This particular client is also putting a lot of pressure on me to come to work for them, overseeing their new in-house advertising and design group in Atlanta. Problem is, they don’t want to make me an offer; they want me to research the median salary in Atlanta for that job, and put together a proposal for them.

If we’re doing our research right, it looks like the median salary for something reasonably close to what they want is somewhere between $102K and $153K a year. Which is significantly more than I made from my business last year, and is even more than I was kinda sorta but not really offered to move to Boston earlier this year. If they go for it. If it all pans out.

Trouble is, I have another thing cooking with another of my clients down here that might end up worth a great deal more, if it pans out. Which is a big “if”–that client nominally has funding, but it’s tied up in an overseas bank right now for reasons far too complicated to go into.

And, of course, it’s possible that both of these opportunities will go exactly nowhere, though with the scond client that seems unlikely–they’re getting their funding, it’s just taking a while.

And when it comes right down to it, I odn’t really want to live in Atlanta. I’d much rather live in…oh, I dunno, Boston or summin like that, but we won’t go there.

Grr. So frustrating. I have absolutely no idea what to do right now.

Still want a G5.