Chapter 2

2

 

Reminiscences of Career Paths�"Roads to Nowhere

November 2011

 

My true love didn’t give me a partridge in a pear tree on the first day in November, but a woman named Valkyrie Dustiny sent me an e-mail about a job opening. I was quite suspicious because Valkyrie Dustiny sounded like the name of a two-bit stripper at a Las Vegas burlesque house. I conducted a Google search on the company and discovered it was a scam business.

In my job hunting travails over the years, I had encountered quite a few job scams. Usually, they were easy to spot because they offered salaries that were too good to be true. For example, you won’t be paid $25 an hour for an entry-level filing position. Heck, you probably won’t be earning that much money if you have ten years of experience filing for a billionaire sugar daddy.

Another red flag for a job scam was the name of the person. Don’t ask me why, but contact people in job scams seemed to be named Larry, Jerry, Tiffany, Brad, or Mr. So-and-So.  From time to time, someone from an African country would tell that you will get “rich” if you just work for their company.

Two additional red flags for job scams were unlisted phone numbers and no physical address. Whenever I see a job scam in the classifieds ads, I have an overwhelming urge to retch. They are more disgusting than a gallon of castor oil.

 I applied for a position with the federal government on November 3. I would be responsible for conducting market research. When I performed market research in 2008, I heard enough four-letter words that would make even the most hardened drill instructor cringe. I was so stressed out dealing with so many irate people that I started shopping for a supersized straitjacket.

So why, in my right mind, did I want to take another crack at conducting surveys?

Maybe because the government needed twenty people to man the phones. Or maybe because I was masochist who likes for my ears to be verbally assaulted. Or maybe because I needed a job before I became one of those unshaven Skid Row bums. Anyway, I sent in my application, and I hoped I would be called for an interview before the end of the year.

November 8 was Election Day in Kentucky, but I was unable to vote or look for a job due to circumstances beyond my control.  I spent the entire afternoon trying to find our dog, who had escaped from our backyard. I almost caught him near a neighbor’s house. I grabbed his collar, but he squirmed away.  Forty-five minutes later when I saw him trudging across a road, I nearly caught him again.  I thought a dog biscuit would lure him into my car.  When I called his name after showing the biscuit, he fled. 

Around supper time, the Louisville animal control officers cornered the dog, and returned him back to our house. My wife was so delighted she did not complain when an officer told her she had to pay a fine for leash law violations.  I said nothing, but fantasized about putting him to sleep the next time he ran away.

The next day, I called the unemployment office to obtain a new debit card.  I had lost my old one several weeks ago. The woman on the phone explained, “You will be receiving a new one sometime next week.” Hallelujah, I will soon start receiving some bread again to pay for my daily bread.

Shortly afterward, I applied for an office position for a state recreation area located approximately 40 miles north of Louisville. It was nothing to become overjoyed about, but it did not require three years of experience.

I applied for a job at the Cash on Us bank. I have not a whit of banking experience, but the job sounded interesting. Who knows?�"I might be called for an interview and be hired. Stranger things had happened to me in my numerous quests to find a job.  I spotted an entry-level paralegal vacancy on November 11 in the classifieds.  For some time, Yahoo, Google, and career websites had lauded the paralegal field as one with numerous good-paying, entry-level jobs. But I rarely saw any paralegal positions listed in the classified sections of newspapers or on the Internet. Of the ones I did see, nearly all of them�"including short-term temp positions�"had a laundry list of qualifications plus they required many years of experience working in a law firm and/or a specific specialty, such as medical malpractice. For the ones that don’t, they were the flunky part-time, no-benefit clerk positions that paid about the same as a warehouse packer�"i.e., about $10 an hour. Some were the summer jobs held by law students and were not available to the average job seeker.

***

In desperation, I sent out my application in the middle of November to one of those for-profit colleges that advertise constantly on daytime television. I never thought I would apply there in a quadrillion years, but I wanted to get off the unemployment line.

I applied for a part-time customer position at a motor vehicle office in New Albany, Indiana.  The salary was only $14,000 a year, and I had no great desire to listen to people’s complaints, but at least it was something I can do all daylong.

The federal government was looking for twenty-six people to work on an upcoming project. And so, off went my resume, proving once again you can take the boy out of the government, but you can’t take the government out of the boy.

I spotted a job vacancy listed on a website for an archivist in Boston. I didn’t bother to e-mail my resume because not only did it require three years of experience, and a laundry list of qualifications�"it was part-time.

At one time, there was nothing I wanted more in the world than to be a professional archivist. I had worked in several archives while I was slogging through graduate school; I loved preserving documents, conducting genealogical research with “little old ladies in tennis shoes,” creating exhibits, and answering reference questions. My supervisors not only thought I was a darn good employee, but they gave me the impression I might be an archival bigwig someday.

However, I encountered just one teensy-weensy problem after I left graduate school�"the job market for archivists was more challenging than spotting the Great Pumpkin on Halloween night.

Oh, I tried and tried like the dickens for eons to land an archival job. I even worked as a volunteer in the Kentucky Derby Museum’s archives for a couple of years. But no one wanted to hire me, not even for the most menial part-time job. Eventually, I realized that my dream of becoming a professional archivist was just a dream, and I needed to find another line of work.

 I was peeved that I never got the chance to work in the National Archives, or even for a rinky-dink historical society but, as the Rolling Stones once sang, “You can’t always get what you want.”

***

As Thanksgiving neared, the caliber of jobs listed in the help-wanted ads deteriorated. For the most part, there were the same old menial positions I have encountered since my first day of unemployment.

I began spending an inordinate amount of time reading career-related articles on the Internet. I giggled and jeered while reading one article describing how temporary firms were creating more and more jobs. It tried to put a positive spin by contending that temp jobs can often lead to full-time positions.              

For some people, this may be true. In my case, I periodically worked as a temporary employee at AMECSD from 1998 to 2011. Although I was paid well, received great evaluations from my supervisors, and completed projects on time, did I obtain a permanent job? No way, Jobless Jo-ey. No high mucky muck ever told me, “Hey, you’re a great guy. Time to make you a lifetime employee.”

In fact, when I was laid off a couple of months ago, the branch office for which I had been working had been paring most of its staff for more than a year.  The vast majority people who remained were hired as permanent workers during the halcyon days of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Hence, I was living proof that a person can work as a temporary for years and never attain permanent status. If temps are the wave of the future, a great many people will join me on the slippery slide to career oblivion.

Another article that amused and outraged me was about the most unemployable college majors in the Great Recession. I have the dubious distinction of holding master’s degrees in the third (American history) and fourth (library and information science) most unemployable majors. Oh, well, at least I was smart enough not to earn degrees in clinical psychology and miscellaneous fine arts (the two most unemployable majors).

Ever since I had been downsized, my wife had been trying to convince to be more optimistic about job hunting.  She believed that, with my educational background, I could find a lucrative career in no time.

However, I had the inescapable feeling I was reliving my unemployment nightmares from two decades ago when I was searching for work in a lousy economy with two less than marketable degrees. I sent out thousands and thousands of resumes with no luck. I went on so many bad interviews I regretted not watching daytime tabloid television talk shows.  I was especially irate one time I missed a discussion about the sex lives of the presidents on Geraldo because I had to go to a mediocre interview in Rockford, Illinois. I could have learned a few things that were never, never, never taught in my history classes, rather than answering silly questions about what I want to do in the next five years (heck, I don’t know what I’ll be doing five minutes from now) and what are my strengths and weaknesses. If I truthfully list my strengths and weaknesses, I’ll be shown the door.

Eventually, I went to see the director of career planning and placement at one of the universities where I earned a master’s degree for some employment advice. I thought he might be the Moses who would lead me to the Promised Land of a good middle-class job with benefits. At the very least, he should give me some sage advice on ways to improve my job hunting skills.

I wailed for several minutes about my job hunting woes when the director said with a straight face, “Joe, have you ever seriously thought about becoming a truck driver? There are a lot of jobs in the trucking industry.”

HO-LEE S**T!

My mouth dropped to the floor harder than did Wile E. Coyote’s in the cartoon, “Hook, Line, and Stinker.” I exhaled a couple of deep breaths to keep myself from fainting or committing an unspeakable act of violence. I muttered to myself, “I have a master’s degree from this woebegone school, and this is the only job you can think of? Are you SERIOUS, Mr. Head-of-Career-Planning-and-Placement?”

 Not only did I not need a graduate, or even a mail-order college degree, to drive a big rig, but I had no desire to become “Trucker Joe” because I was a poor driver. I gained notoriety in high school when I drove on the sidewalks on my first day of driver’s education. Two months before graduation, I gained further notoriety when I accidentally drove my parents’ Oldsmobile Cutlass down a bike path. If I was this klutzy with automobiles, I could only imagine how much of a menace I would be while driving an 18-wheeler on the highways.

My job hunt experiences so embittered me I referred to myself as “Mr. Cynicism” because I expected that every job interview would be disastrous, and every resume I sent to prospective employers would be torn to shreds. I became the epitome of the stereotypical smart loser, who studied what he or she loved, instead of such “practical” subjects as business or engineering.

And now, I was out of work again with those useless master’s degrees. Jeepers, I was one f*****g fucked f****r. It would be nothing short of a miracle if I somehow managed to find a good job in this screwed-up economy.

Reviews

[AbilaKay]

I am laughing along with you! You have an engaging command of cynical humor! This 'day in the life of' tale is marvelous!