Sunday, November 07, 2004

Book excerpt - Blown Job: Chapter 2

Nearly three years ago, I was fired from my job; a casualty of the post-9/11 economic downturn. After 18 months of looking for work without success, I sat down to write a book, entitled, "Blown Job: an unemployment odyssey." Here's an excerpt from Chapter Two. (See "Past Posts of Note" for earlier chapters )

Chapter 2 -Now What?

When you open your eyes on the Monday morning following the Friday you’ve been canned, for a millisecond, it doesn’t occur to you that anything has changed. Your alarm clock hasn’t even gone off; yet you awake at your usual time, because that’s what your mind has been programmed to do. You’re all set to leap out of bed; to shower and dress and grab your briefcase and a breakfast bar and dash to the train, when BAM, it hits you that you have nowhere to go. No more leaping and grabbing and dashing for you. Now, the best you can do at 6:30 in the morning is to watch the Powerpuff Girls or do yoga with Kiki or learn how you can earn $1,000,000 by buying real estate. You have the sense that nothing will ever be the same again.

It’s okay to spend the early hours of Unemployment Monday feeling abjectly sorry for yourself, but you can’t let that feeling overtake you or you’re lost. So, I showered and dressed and dashed, but this time I was headed off to a career center, about which I had been tipped off by a former co-worker at what I now can refer to as my last job.

*

It turned out that going to the career center day after day saved my life. The Center helped me to focus, it provided me with computer access, it offered me educational opportunities, and it put me together with like-minded professionals. If I hadn’t gone there, ultimately I would have been found on my couch by the police, buried under stacks of Burger King wrappers, packs of Salem Light 100s, and empty pints of Rocky Road, the remote still in my hand.

*

At orientation, I was surrounded by the walking wounded. Most of them had lost their jobs due to the aftereffects of 9/11. Each face wore a hollow expression, brought on by the double whammy of the shock of the tragedy and the experience of personal downfall. Everyone had a story to tell and all of the stories sounded pretty much the same. I was not a freak here.

We learned that once we were accepted into the program, we could access computers; talk to an assigned career counselor; apply for grant money for training; and take classes on networking, interviewing, and Internet job searching. There were no assurances that we would actually find work if we did all this, but on Day 1, it sure sounded good to me.

I took advantage of everything that was offered. Once I was accepted, I showed up every day to surf the ’Net. Every day, I looked at HotJobs and Monster and Career Builder and a half-dozen specialized job sites. Every day, I wrote cover letters and printed out résumés and envelopes and mailed, e-mailed, and faxed pages to potential employers. I took the classes and applied for the grant money. I went back to school. As you know by now, none of this has paid off, but you cannot say that I didn't try.

*

There was an interesting dynamic at play in all of this. I could see that the people who showed up at the Center day after day were going through their own stages of grief. The longer that they were out of work, the more their behaviors changed.

You could tell who the newly shafted were. They came into the computer room very businesslike. They were well-dressed and moved purposefully -- laying out their newspapers, pens, legal pads and diskettes at their computer stations; clicking on site after site, job offer after job offer; making copious notes. Others who had been there for awhile were more laid back, sauntering to the computer stations, dumping their backpacks on the floor, stretching out on their chairs, turning their baseball caps backwards, and checking their e-mails. Hard-timers, who had virtually given up on looking for work at all, used their terminals for purposes that were not intended – trolling for porn, playing solitaire, bidding on eBay, and searching for mail-order brides.

*

An unspoken camaraderie developed. Someone would yell out, “I’ve got to print an envelope,” and forty people would pause, forty fingers poised over forty PRINT keys until the envelope snaked through the communal printer.

At the same time, there was a palpable amount of tension in the air. Many of these people were absolutely desperate, already having spent down their resources and now hovering on the brink of financial disaster. For them, looking for work was a deadly serious proposition. This is why little fights broke out daily over such things as mistakenly removing someone else’s page from the print tray, overstaying by two minutes the allotted two hours at a computer, and talking too loudly to one’s neighbor. I heard more than one argument like this, among jobseeking clients and the computer room proctor:

Client #1: The guy next to me is printing 100 copies of his résumé.

Proctor: I’ll have to cancel that print job.

Client #2: (to Client #1) Bitch.

Client #1: (to Client #2) Asshole.

So it wasn’t all beer and skittles. But we managed to coexist, each in our private hell, not one of us able to help another. Of course, we did offer each other advice and encouragement, but the bottom line was that no one here was able to get anyone else a job. There were no hierarchies, simply a horizontal line of unemployed, desperate people.

*

I would still be attending the Center today, if their funding had not run out and if they had not unceremoniously closed me out as a client without informing me. I cannot complain, however, because for more than a year, going there kept my life going. I accomplished a lot. My interviewing skills improved. I discovered many new things about the ’Net, just by listening to others. I met lots of other unemployed people, which kept me from feeling alone. And I was able to go to school, to learn new skills.

Now all I have to do is find a job.

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