Now I Have to Make a Decision

So I got an e-mail saying that Oak Ridge has sent me a FedEx. I am glad to get it, except for the fact that I will now need to make an actual decision.

I've continued trying to push my suitor from Los Alamos away, by asking him questions. This time I asked him if there were any women in the division and if so, if I might get into contact with one of them. He responded graciously, telling me that


In fact CCN Division is one of the Divisions at LANL that is very high in minority representation.
In CCN-8 we recently had 6 women staff members. Two of them just retired when their husbands retired.
Another one was part of a CCN-8 team that is now the core of the newly-formed group CCN-9.


and providing me with the names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers of the remaining three, and cc'ing them on the message. One of them e-mailed me soon after, offering to give me a call sometime this week. I replied to her and plan on setting something up with her.

I hate this, because I'm having to decide something difficult. If I eat brand X or brand Y cereal for breakfast, the consequence is that I am full either way. Maybe one tastes better going down, but the end result is the same. That's how I get through making that decision.

Really, this decision boils down to the same thing, in that if I choose Lab A or Lab B I work and get paid, and A might taste better than B in some ways, while B tastes better than A in other ways. But it seems so much more serious than that. Also, I know that some of my current indecision has to do with the fact that people are telling me not to do something I see no harm in doing, and I'm feeling rebellious about it. Continuing the cereal analogy, when I was a kid, my mom wouldn't buy us Rice Krispies because they were mostly air. Today, I regularly eat Rice Krispies, precisely for that reason. You get 50% more spoonfuls of cereal for the same count of calories if you have a low-density cereal like that. So there are legitimate reasons for going with the Rice Krispies. That man from Los Alamos is offering me boatloads of money. It is hard to say no to that! If nothing else, it is a good starting point from which to look for other jobs. It would take me a decade of very generous raises at Oak Ridge to reach this starting salary at Los Alamos.