A couple months ago, the Friday before Super Bowl LIX, my ears pricked up at a familiar piece of regional accent in a video call I was participating in.

Given I possess a particular interest in regional accents (for reasons that should be fairly obvious by this point), I filed it away in the back of my brain, but it didn’t stay there long. As our scheduled 30-minute conversation was approaching minute 70 without signs of slowing down, it came flying of my mouth.

“I have to ask: did you happen to grow up in or around Philadelphia?”

My counterpart on the other end of Zoom seemed a little surprised before responding in the affirmative; that she had in fact lived in Philly as a child. “How did you manage to guess that?”

I told her that, while we were discussing something earlier, she’d referred to the fabric as “wooder-proof.” Now that pronunciation of water is incredibly familiar to me, someone who knows approximately 400 Philadelphians, as a part of speech most commonly found in the City of Brotherly Love.

I’m not the type to pat myself on the back too hard, but she said she was impressed by my attention to detail. Within mere seconds we had progressed to discussing the Eagles’ appearance in the Super Bowl that very weekend, and what we’d each be doing for the game. Somewhat absurdly but also completely appropriately, we gave each other an enthusiastic “Go Birds!” before eventually ending the call that ran more than twice its scheduled length.

I say “completely appropriately” because Go Birds is terrific fun to say to someone from Philly. I say “somewhat absurdly” because I had just said a hearty sports chant, for a team whose city I’m not from and where I’ve never lived, to sign off from maybe the most important job interview I had ever had to that point.

Even more absurdly? It worked. I said “Go Birds” and got the job.

A lot has been said about the insane job market we saw in 2021 and 2022, where millions of white-collar professionals left their jobs due to stagnant wages and inflexible workplaces, a phenomenon they dubbed The Great Resignation. No, really.

I was one of the aforementioned white-collar professionals, as I mentioned in this piece from 2022, in an attempt to snag whatever arbitrary annual salary I felt was the magic number to help us afford to return to Colorado from Cincinnati. Ultimately we had to move back to Denver before I was able to land the new role, but it helped relieve the economic pressures as well as got me back to doing creative, thoughtful work again.

But whatever Garden of Eden the 2022 job market was for candidates, 2024/25 has been entirely the opposite. I don’t purport to be a Business Expert by any means, but it became pretty clear that once one tech company decided to purge the ranks and commit mass layoffs, every company decided it was a great way to save a buck and followed suit.

Working at a small company as the only person handling a particular lane of work, I felt about as safe as one can in their job in 2020s America. I wouldn’t go so far as to say “indispensable” by any means, but I had had plenty of direct and indirect reassurance that my job was mine to lose.

Despite this, more than a decade in journalism taught me that layoffs are always lurking around the corner. My company let a few people go for seemingly budgetary reasons and, not wanting to be left twisting in the wind with a family to support, I kept a firm eye on relevant job listings and threw my hat in the ring for things I felt I could succeed at.

During the 2021/22 search, I never had any problems getting into the interview process with multiple companies at once, and juggling my calendar to arrange phone screens and video calls and unpaid assignments around my actual 40-hour job was a standard fixture for months. This time around though, it was extremely slim pickings. External recruiters disappeared as soon as they emerged, cold calls for horribly unsuitable roles and terrible compensation arrived daily while legitimate opportunities were few and far between.

The processes I did manage to get myself into the thick of were dead ends, too. Only twice did I make it far enough to be asked to put together a project or work assessment, which is generally a late-stages request in these types of roles, and both times I was bumped from the running shortly after presenting them. In the meantime I’d started bartending again, which helped to relieve some of the financial strain that this alleged “new role” might able to alleviate on a greater scale, so my urge to shake up my employment status quo was lessened somewhat.

Last October I was approached by an external recruiter trying to fill a 6-month contract role at a company I’ve wanted to work at for years. Better still, the role was based in Denver and had an in-office component downtown. The position description lined up with some of my previous work at Finish Line so I enthusiastically submitted my materials and waited to hear about next steps, but they never came and I wrote it off like so many others.

Strangely, though, a couple months later the same position title appeared in a LinkedIn email digest, albeit the role had been moved to full-time direct hire rather than through a recruitment agency. I tossed an application into the ring, thought little more about it, and moved on. To my utter surprise, 10 days later I received an email from a familiar name asking about my interview availability for the role.

I quickly responded, making sure to note that she and I had worked together on a role in 2022 that I thought was The One That Would Facilitate the Denver Return, and it flamed out at the final step. I was gutted at the time, but the recruiter’s name had stuck in my memory as someone who did great work with candidates. We lined up a phone screen, caught up and discussed my fit for the role, and a couple weeks later I was scheduled to chat with the hiring manager.

And that’s how I found myself “Go Birds”ing my eventual new boss.

After that discussion I went through three sessions of 2-on-1 panels with peers from around the organization, and apart from a couple parenting-related mid-Zoom mishaps I thought everything went pretty smoothly. By the end of February, it appeared I’d run out of folks to talk to and that I’d reached the end of the loop. Big companies have a lot of boxes to check and more moving parts than…I dunno, some kind of very intricate factory, so I knew a decision might not be immediate.

To her absolute credit, the recruiter was quick to respond every time I followed up to “check in for updates,” and at the early March and early April check-ins she gave me as much information as she had, which amounted to “you’re in the top 2, and when they figure it out here, I’ll let you know.”

I spent a lot of time thinking about the interviews I’d had and how they went, and aside from the usual awkward silences or whatever I couldn’t identify anything that had shot me in the foot. All I could do was accept that I’d done as good a job as I could possibly do, be patient, and wait for the final result.

The patience was the hard part, but I tempered it by forcing myself to only check the candidate portal once per day. I didn’t expect to see flashing lights talking about “YOU’RE OUR GUY” but I figured at the least I’d see my application for the role moved from the Active to Inactive tabs. Incredibly, across the span of a month and a half, it kept its little green “In Progress” tag the whole time.

It’s still displaying it now, as I look back at the candidate portal for the 500th time in the past two days, as if I’m waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under me. The recruiter called yesterday just before noon, catching me completely by surprise at least two weeks before I expected to hear from her. I answered the phone very cautiously, trying not to sound terrified or dejected in advance, but the moment I heard the tone of her voice and the words “good news to share,” I knew I had it in the bag.

When she read the offer down the phone to me, I’m not being dramatic by even a single word when I said I fell to my knees in the basement living room. It took the wind out of me in the best way and I stammered over my words of thanks and acceptance. When we hung up, with a promise to receive an official offer letter later that afternoon, I shouted in absolute glee. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. I still can’t.

The job has an in-office requirement a few days a week, which means for the first time since the Denver Post left Colfax Avenue in early 2018 I’ll be commuting downtown to work in an office building again. I have a few weeks to prepare myself mentally and physically for that, after five years working almost entirely remotely. But I’m excited about the renewed energy of an in-person role and the opportunities I’m about to dig into.

I feel comfortable putting these words down tonight because it’s now official — I signed and submitted the offer this afternoon and gave notice at my current workplace. It doesn’t seem real that after spending more than two years growing my skills at a small brand that nobody in my personal life had ever heard of, I’m changing industries again and joining a global organization whose name is a household one. Am I cool enough for this? I dunno. But it looks like they believe I’ve got the ability for it.

And that’s how one “Go Birds” their way into a new job.