Without being too specific... I am losing my job due to layoffs next month. I have been at this employer for two years, and this is my third year out of college. I will continue to receive a paycheck through August, so I'm not in a scary place yet, but in my industry, 90% of jobs start in August (100% of them with a one year contract), so if I don't have a job by then, I'll likely have to get an interim job and explain the gap in my employment.

That said, I have been offered a job. It is a particularly undesirable job, four hours away from my wife (she'll have one more semester in school, so it's really only four months apart), comparable overall pay to my current position (lower salary but much better benefits), certainly with some potential for success, but very little potential for growth in the direction I had hoped to move in my career. I don't like the community (the small rural town itself is two hours away from anything else), and call tell that the boss is either a) remarkably supportive or b) a micro manager. He seems to be involved in everything- don't know if that's just a consequence of the small staff, though.

The killer is this: I never applied for this job. They dug up my application from two years ago when I got my current job... I still don't know how they discovered I was looking. I did see the job posting this year and decided to ignore it due to its unsavory location. The boss called me while I was away from my job search materials and I naturally assumed that if they had my application, I must have deemed it worthy, so I agreed to interview. The boss tells me that he has no problem hiring my wife as well when she graduates (although she is graduating with the same degree and specialization I have, and this job only has one position, which would be mine- no conceivable opportunity to expand that to two). He even says he wouldn't mind placing her in the company for her internship (again, though, she'd have to intern with me, which is strictly prohibited). Thus, I am also concerned about my wife finding a job the following August, since there are so few opportunities so far away from everything...

So what should I do? Take the guaranteed but unwanted job and hope everything else works out, or keep looking for the right job and face the risk of unemployment in August?