Man, April 2022 was a total blur, mostly because I was just dragging myself through my days. I was stuck in this awful mid-level position, right? Pay was decent, but the work was soul-crushing. Every Monday felt like a funeral. I remember sitting there one Tuesday, probably trying to look busy but actually just doom-scrolling, when I stumbled onto one of those trashy online horoscope sites.
I’m a Virgo, which means I usually hate this kind of woo-woo stuff. But I was desperate. I clicked the career section for April 2022. The headline was something ridiculously vague, like “Major shifts are coming, prepare for expansion.” I almost closed the tab right there. But then the text underneath got specific—it mentioned a “sudden, unexpected opportunity tied to an old professional contact” and that I needed to be ready to jump on a chance that looked “too big to handle.”
I rolled my eyes. Too big to handle? My biggest challenge that week was remembering to submit my expense reports. I dismissed the prediction, shut down the laptop, and went back to pretending to optimize some useless database queries.
The Unexpected Call That Kickstarted Everything
This is where the practice part of the record starts, because about 48 hours later, my phone rang. I usually ignore unknown numbers, but this one looked familiar. I answered it begrudgingly. It was Marcus.
Marcus was my old manager from about seven years prior. We hadn’t talked in maybe four years, not since he left the industry entirely to travel. I hadn’t even realized he was back in the game, let alone working for a massive, global tech company—one of those firms whose name everybody recognizes, the ones that seem impossible to get into.
He opened the conversation immediately, skipping the small talk, saying he was building out a new division and needed someone who understood the gritty, messy backend of our old system. He didn’t ask if I was looking; he just announced: “I’ve got a role for you. It’s Director level, fully remote, double your current salary, and frankly, you’re the only person I trust who can build this thing from scratch.”
My jaw seriously dropped. I was still thinking about the stupid Virgo prediction I had read just two days before. Too big to handle? Unexpected contact? Holy crap.
Scrambling to Prove I Wasn’t Lying
The prediction gave me a strange, almost nervous energy. I felt like I had been warned. I couldn’t just rely on Marcus’s recommendation; I had to nail the technical interviews, and this new job was layers above anything I had managed before. I knew my resume looked thin compared to Director-level candidates at a firm this size.
So I went into immediate preparation mode. This wasn’t a gentle process; it was brutal:
- I pulled out every single presentation and project summary I had archived over the last five years.
- I spent the entire first weekend of April locked down, refreshing every complex topic I had barely touched since college—network architecture, advanced cloud migration strategies, the whole nine yards.
- I re-wrote my resume three times, forcing myself to use impact statements and quantifiable results instead of just listing responsibilities.
- I pre-emptively drafted answers for the inevitable “tell me about a time you failed” questions, making sure I had solid, reflective examples.
The interviewing process itself lasted three weeks, which felt like three years. I talked to six different people, including the VP of Engineering. The questions were intense. I definitely stumbled hard on one of the behavioral rounds—I literally froze trying to remember a project name—but I managed to recover by just being honest about the complexity and drilling into the technical details.
The Prediction Paid Off (And How Much)
When the final email came in toward the end of April, I had almost forgotten about the horoscope. I opened the PDF offer letter, and when I saw the compensation package, I actually stood up from my chair and had to walk around the room. It wasn’t just double; with the bonuses and stock options, it was closer to 2.5 times my old pay.
I immediately accepted the offer, obviously. But the weirdest part was the timing. If I hadn’t read that silly horoscope that Tuesday, I probably would have answered Marcus’s call with my usual cynical attitude, maybe sounded distracted, or assumed it was just some mid-level offer. But the prediction had primed me—it made me treat that call like it was genuinely a life-changing event, even before I knew the specifics.
I started the new gig in May 2022. It was overwhelming, exactly like the horoscope warned, but I had been mentally prepared for the magnitude. I had to quickly hire and manage a team of ten engineers and architects globally, which was a huge shift from my tiny team of three at the old job. The learning curve was vertical, and those late-night study sessions I did in April saved my butt more than once during the first six months.
Look, I still don’t believe in astrology or magic or whatever, but I’ve got the receipts. That ridiculous career horoscope I clicked on a whim in April 2022 somehow foretold the exact mechanism—the old contact, the huge role—that yanked me out of my career rut. Sometimes, you just gotta follow the weird breadcrumbs the internet throws at you, even if they smell faintly of incense and monthly predictions.
