Posts from — November 2008

They said unemployment would be a respite.

They said that while the stress of not drawing a paycheck might wear down my fragile psyche, it would be worth the short-term financial burden. For not having to clock in each morning would afford me the time to reflect, to meditate, to discern the true nature of one’s self.

They said I would have time to write. They said I would have time to read. They said I would have more time with Baby.

Of course, they lied.

"They" being friends, family, career counselors, headhunters. To a person, they all said that while getting the axe sucks ass, at least I’ll have the time to catch up with life.

Apparently, all of these people are employed.

In the 21st Century, looking for a job takes far more time than actually working at one. It is more time-consuming than the pursuit of sex, reading Tolstoy in Russian, or trying to find the perfect pasta lifter. Looking for a job is not something you can do in one’s spare time, like, say, blogging or relieving oneself.

Add the fact that jobs are about as plentiful as Mormons in favor of gay marriage, and I am an extremely unhappy fellow.

They also say that a project expands to the amount of time allotted to it, and for this, they are correct. The ironic thing about searching for work in this Internet-dominated, 24-7 environment, is that what makes finding job leads so easy makes actually getting a job so difficult. 

Take job hunting in the Dark Ages, when I was 22 and a freshly minted college graduate, in the late 1980s. One interviewed with companies who sent recruiters to campus. You found a few companies you liked, and sent your resume off and waited. If you were a loser, you scoured the newspaper’s help wanted section.

The Dark Ages

Or, in my case, I sent out my resume and writing samples to several newspaper editors, one of which apparently laughed at my clips so hard he suffered a seizure and inadvertently hired me.

These days, it’s not so simple. Looking for a job is like starting a relationship. You are completely paranoid about every single aspect of the search. You obsess about the things you said, and worry about the things you didn’t say.

Did I apply to the right job? Should I update my resume on Monster.com? How many contacts can I add to LinkedIn? What additional research should I do on Company X, in addition to the 18 volumes I’ve already downloaded?

Even as I write these words, I think of e-mail to write and answer, Web searches to do, resumes to upload. And that doesn’t even count the calls I need to make and the meetings I’ve been trying to schedule.

Is there an echo chamber in here?

Now, I know everybody here wants to know what I think of Roberto Bolano’s 2666, the death of the literary best-seller, and the sorry state of short fiction. You want to know about what I think of our nation electing an African-American president (holy fuck! It actually happened!), the long-term prospects for the Democrats, my learned opinion on Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

It’s not that I don’t have opinions, or that about 9,334,222,798 other blogs have written more and better words on these topics than I could ever hope to do. It’s that I haven’t had the time. I mean, literally. Anybody reading this who has a blog and who I haven’t visited or commented — that would be all of you — I don’t apologize, but rather say, give me a job, please.

Not because I simply need the money (I do). It’s because I need a life.

This is less a blog entry than an exercise in that thing called writing, which I’ve done precious little of in the past three weeks.

Fun times in Bookfraud-land:

• Trapped in a conference room with a nice, perky lady, a moribund old guy wearing a hearing aid, and a librarian who gives "cliched" new meaning.
• A poor schlub yakking for ten minutes about a computer patch management system.
• Half the room clearing out after lunch.
• The worst computer tutorial in the history of the world.
• Suicidal thoughts.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, this was my introduction to "outplacement services," or a three-month tour of duty that’s supposed to help me find a new job. My previous employer paid for this service, though I would have preferred that they had given me the cash outright.

I arrive early one morning, find a seat in a crowded conference room, and think about ways I can leave gracefully. Enter the perky lady, once an airline employee (no, not a flight attendant), who will be our instructor for the morning.

Our instructor introduces us to the office managing partner, an older fellow who reeks of wisdom and Fixodent, for a pep talk. He tells us that he knows what it’s like to be unemployed, for he’s had to change jobs four times in his life, but there’s positions out there, if you know how to look. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack, he says. Though with this economy, "the haystack is twice as big," a comment that effectively reverses the happy caffeinating effects of my Starbucks in a millisecond. I look around the room for a samurai sword to impale myself upon, with no luck.

Then, all the enthusiasm sucked out of the room, we go to work.

The morning features a couple of highlights. First, as a matter of "defining" our skills, the patch-management dude talks about a work-related "challenge," and how he overcame it. How any of this will help anybody find a job I don’t know, and the homunculus residing in my left temple starts tossing pain-tinged darts at my brain.

Not before or after: instead of

Later, everybody has to write a two- or three-sentence explanation of who you are and what you want to do. Stupidly, I volunteer to read mine. 

As I should have expected, it’s ritual humiliation. Double for me, as I’m supposed to be an expert in the art of communication. It’s not punchy enough. It’s got too much information. It just sucks.

We break for lunch, when I wander around the lobby for 45 minutes in a catatonic state of Faulknerian realization that my job is gone left for parts unknown for budgetcuttingpinheads lopping off the department, the interstices of brain and soul and bodyspirit, the accursed soil, bookfraud without direction is bookfraud without faith without hope without…

After a security guard slaps me, I find a sandwich shop and whomp down a lunch of indeterminate matter (carbo, protein, sliced vegetables) and a Diet Coke, then return to a classroom now one-half full, the rest of our former classmates apparently going to job interviews, finishing that novel, or having sex with tranny prostitutes. Then, the fun begins.

The outplacement agency has a members-only Web site to which we will have access. An older, bespectacled woman who looks as if she stumbled out of the dictionary’s entry for "librarian" addresses us, which is appropriate, since she’s the company librarian. Her hair is curled in a helmet, her pantsuit is bright and generous, her shoes are, of course, sensible. The librarian is wearing a pin in the form of a jack-o-lantern, which I somehow feel is a bad sign.

And it is. The librarian gives a presentation on how to use the Web site. Apparently, the presentation has been geared towards first-graders. The librarian tells us how to sign up. How to choose a password. That you have to fill the fields with asterisks and if you want to see another part of the Web site, click on its link. Now in an extremely ungrateful (and unfair) mood, all I can think of is, "How come this idiot has a job and I’m unemployed?"

They’re not lining up to vote

After our computer savant is done, we are released from purgatory. I’m about as fired up as a Frenchman, Jew, or a person with a college degree contemplating a Sarah Palin presidency.  It’s grim.

Things will get better. Two days later, I meet my counselor, not the perky not-a-former-stewardess lady. This person is calm, empathetic, smart, and has several excellent ideas. I actually have some hope here that I might find a decent-paying position.

Then, as I ride the elevator downstairs, it occurs to me. I know what I’m going to do. I envision a job in which I have to work hard, hustle, be creative, but make gargantuan amounts of money. It’s completely legal, and I don’t need to get anyone’s permission or even get hired to do it.

I’m going to become Baby’s talent manager! He’s cute, he’s got a fabulous smile, and has an excellent vocabulary for an 18-month old, including "cheese," "yellow," "boat," "bear," and says "clock" and "flag" without the "l"s. As they say on "American Idol," we’re going to Hollywood!

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