Thailand Shuffle
an excerpt

Unsettled - Round One

“I quit!”

Danielle Townsend had uttered this phase every morning at 6:15 a.m. for the last six weeks. She was hoping that one of these times it would stick. Usually, she hit the snooze, half-dozed for about eight minutes and then hauled herself out of bed to get ready for work. She had been with the Centers for Disease Control for nearly a year. When she took the job, it had sounded like a secure gig. She was thrilled that she would now be making money and paying off student loan debt accrued over the last six and a-half years. Probably the thing she looked most forward to was finally being able to help people. Although she had been an integral part of several research projects at both Harvard and Johns Hopkins, she had yet to make her own significant contributions to the medical field. Unfortunately, about two months ago she realized, to late—of course—that she was just a cog in the bureaucratic machine of the CDC. Her status as a recent graduate got her relegated to report filing and picking up after cranky old men.

She’d been looking in the paper, on the internet, and asking old classmates with whom she still spoke about jobs in their companies and areas, all to no avail. When she spoke to her father about it, he told her that she could come back home to Boston and take as much time as she needed to find something else. He also suggested she call the alumni association or a former professor—in case it took awhile to find something, she could at least do a little research assisting. Laying in bed quitting her job every morning only to get up and trudge through her day wasn’t getting her anywhere. Today, she called in.