I still hadn’t received official permission to stay, which meant I couldn’t legally work. I had assumed it would be easy enough to find a few under-the-table gigs to keep us afloat, but Switzerland plays by a different set of rules than the U.S. The work culture here is more formal, more regulated, and what few odd jobs I did find fizzled out quickly. So the pressure shifted to Nicole. She needed to find a job, and fast. Not just for our everyday expenses, but to help us carve out some kind of stability before everything changed again with the arrival of our son.

In Switzerland, entering the job market as a foreigner (or we soon found out even a returning swiss native), can feel like getting inside of a boulder.  No matter which angle you try from, its a fucking boulder.  

She grew up here, went to school here, speaks fluent Swiss German, but after spending 14 years abroad, it was like none of that mattered.  She’d even been employed remotely for a Swiss company for seven years, doing solid work, but without a formal reference letter from them, her applications went nowhere.  She sent out CV after CV, often for jobs well below her skill level, and still was met with silence or a string of polite rejections.  In the Swiss job market, if you don’t have recent Swiss experience or a local reference, you’re basically invisible.  When she finally did get that letter, everything flipped. Literally the next day, she got 5 calls before noon asking for an interview.  That’s how much weight that one piece of paper held.  In Switzerland, credentials from abroad, even with glowing qualifications and years of experience, often carry less weight than a fart.  I remember watching the news, where they were interviewing a refugee from somewhere who had been an ER doctor for over thirty years, yet here, in the schweiz, she had to go back to school or get her leg chopped off before seeing an emergency room again.  You could have a guy whose delivered over a million babies, but they would rather take a fresh graduate who hasn't even sniffed a real vagina.  This mismatch between ability and recognition is a frustrating and demoralizing barrier to integration and i couldn't wait until I, an Americaner to the gills, who spoke barley any german let alone swiss german, with no education or work experience in the schweiz, would get a crack at finding a job.

Nicole ended up taking a job at one of Switzerland’s major banks, PostFinance, through a temporary staffing agency. The role was fairly straightforward—customer service, but strictly through email. No phones, no face-to-face complaints—just a digital inbox full of confused, irritated, and occasionally hilarious queries from customers.

Her job was to sift through these emails, determine whether the person was eligible for a refund, and issue it—or not. But what made it even more interesting (and at times, borderline ridiculous) was the linguistic roulette wheel that came with working in central Switzerland. The country has four national languages, so on any given day, she’d be flipping between English, German, French, and Italian. Sometimes all in the same hour. With the help of her own language skills—and when those ran out, the assistance of online translators—she became a one-woman multilingual customer service department.

Over dinner, she’d share the day’s funniest messages: customers politely demanding refunds for minor charges they absolutely agreed to, others writing in caps-lock outrage about monthly fees they’d apparently never heard of, or sending one-liner masterpieces like, “Refund. Now.” Some people clearly thought a subscription meant “a gift,” while others seemed convinced PostFinance was part of a vast banking conspiracy.

In reality, Nicole’s job was a mix of diplomacy, detective work, and digital babysitting. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was steady. And at a time when money was tight and the pressure was mounting, it was exactly what we needed.

As the end date of my tourist visa crept closer, the uncertainty hung over us like a storm cloud. We still had no official word.  Just silence.  And with each passing day, that silence grew heavier.  We had done everything we could, crossed every ‘t’, submitted every form, answered every question.  But the truth was, it was exhausting.  It felt like the universe was testing our patience, our stamina, and our belief that things would work out, forcing us to sign a lease before knowing if i could even stay and planning the arrival of our son something labeled TBD.

It came right down to the wire.

With exactly one week left on my visa, just seven days before I would legally have to leave the country, we finally received the letter. I had been granted permission to stay.  Not a single day had been wasted in the process; if we had hesitated or delayed even slightly, I would’ve had to pack up and go.