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Part 1 of 4
Last Wednesday morning I past through the doors of a Midwestern post-production company known as the Whitehouse, crisply dressed, alert and ready for whatever I might find within. This marked probably the fiftieth time in the past six months I had repeated a similar scenario - but the first time that someone was actually going to pay me for doing it. It was my first day on the job, and the work would be hard and the hours would be long, but damnit, I was thankful. Because I was a jobless man, and with being jobless comes suffering. Suffering and doubt. And lots and lots of sleep. But those things were no more, because now I was a jobless man no longer.
This series is called the Road to the Whitehouse because it was just that - a long, tiring road. A long, tiring road with suffering. And sleep. Lots of sleep. Now, be advised that being jobless is not the same thing as not making any money - I have indeed made a fair amount of money in the six months since I graduated college. I'm still nearly eighty-grand in the hole, but hey, that's the American Educational System for you. Get 'em hooked on 12 years of free school, and then jack the prices way up. On this road I have done a number of things for cash, including but not limited to: being a bouncer, working in an office, editing video for a news station, doing freelance editing and web design, tearing apart an old lady's house, sucking change out of parking meters with my lips, you name it. But sooner or later I was bound to run out of part-time things to do, so mixed in with all that assorted money-making was what every jobless person fears and loathes - the full-time job hunt.
Now job-hunting is a sad, sad game. It is no fun to play, depressing when you lose, and when you finally win, your reward is that you have to go to work. But yet I played this game, day-in and day-out, for about six months until at last the Almighty heard my prayer and permitted me to commence employment. Mind you, I have had some interesting experiences during this time of penance, and I did manage to hole up in my room for the month of October and complete both a screenplay and a musical, but the bitter winter chill of our current cold economic climate has a way of wearing through even the thickest of Columbia coats and biting the skin after a while.
I was once far more optimistic. Upon graduating, I had a fool-proof plan to quickly pay off my immediate pressing debts and free myself for a fully-financed adventure of cavorting and capering in whatever form cavorting and capering best fit. The plan was simple. I would get done with school, spend a few more weeks in Chicago winding down and purging foreign substances from my system, and then move back home to Minneapolis to begin making the obscene amounts of money promised to me by the Northwestern Admissions Handbook. I could get two jobs, since I was used to only sleeping once or twice a week anyway, and I could work off my living-at-home rent through manual labor. I was set for just about one hundred percent pure profit. I was young, enthusiastic, and had reasonably good personal hygiene. Who wouldn't hire a guy like that?
Well apparently despite its otherwise Biblical nature, the Northwestern Admissions Handbook was wrong about something. I was able to find a gig as a bouncer two nights a week at a downtown bar, but even for that job I had to beat a guy from Princeton in a cage match to the death. Nobody else had any jobs. I talked to probably half the post-production companies in Minneapolis, and those that weren't letting people go had just finished doing so. One place even cancelled an informational interview with me because the guy I was going to interview with got canned. So I started working for my dad's office and prostituting myself outside of a local Barnes and Noble, and before I knew it, it was half way through August, I had barely started on my monetary goal, and I had contracted Gonorrhea.
Finally I got a call from a local news station that needed a video editor for the 3am to noon bitch-shift, and despite my lack of news experience and ability to stay awake during those hours, they hired me. Reasonable wage, full benefits, and hey - I was working. Still, my employment was not without a sense of annoyance. Six weeks, I bitched. I couldn't believe it could take someone that long to find a job. Haha.
Seven weeks later, the news station went out of business. Or rather, they were paid by someone to go dark. There is a big difference between these two in terms of severance pay, but both involve me losing my job. Now, the fact that I was told of my imminent can-nage only two days after completing my training period caused me to at first only selfishly think of my own misfortune. But really I didn't have it anywhere near as bad as the rest of the 150 employees who'd been working there for decades and were trying to retire. I could still use my resume (hell, it was only two months old), whereas some of my co-workers hadn't written one in ten years.
But regardless, I was back on the street. For a while I rode out my fatty severance package (3 months of pay from a place I worked for 8 weeks, not bad) but after not long things stabilized into a calm routine of being rejected by the remainder of post-production houses in Minneapolis, freelance work, and sleeping in, finally culminating in my decision to try and find a job in Chicago and give up on Unemployment-opolis once and for all. But pity me not. My case is hardly a sob story, and I did have a variety of interesting experiences during this time. Or perhaps you can be the judge of that. And I learned some useful things about the world, like that severance pay rules, and that I chose a real bad time to graduate from college.
Not that I'm the only one with interesting post-collegiate unemployment stories. My friend Kristian spent nearly 5 months being unemployed before finding a job with a Chicago ad agency. But five months of doing absolutely nothing can wear on your sanity, as indicated by his string of increasingly pitiable IM Away messages which ranged from the enigmatic "If a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, will I have a job tomorrow?" to the just plain sad "Hire me. Please." My buddy Greg moved to Colorado where he changed his mind from working day jobs to training for the U.S. Olympic ski team. He had to give up his paper route in the process, but sometimes you have to sack up and make tough choices. And my former roommate Seann used his Cognitive Science and vast computer programming skills to get himself a job as a floor manager at Target. He soon was promoted and was on the fast track to mediocrity, until he finally quit in December to "stop the madness before it starts." (For more quotes from Seann, see Hugesmile's "The Book of Sketch", coming soon.)
It's tough out there right now. Our graduating class went into the world facing one of the worst job markets in recent history - with the possible exception of the class before us and the class after. The smarter ones simply avoided the whole situation through grad school or world travel. One guy, I heard has been traveling Australia, picking fruit when he needs money - which I am highly jealous of, in a Grapes of Wrath-Down Under sort of way. But the rest us are stuck foraging for jobs where we can find them, counting our pennies, and being thankful that imminent war with the Middle East will undoubtedly lead to a number of great union jobs assembling bombs and gas masks.
Right?
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Email me! paul@paulspond.com
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