I'm beginning this blog as I'm sitting down to eat a (free) lunch at my mom's house in Wauwatosa, WI (an urban suburb about three miles from downtown Milwaukee). My current address is in the Logan square neighborhood of Chicago. This is my first Tuesday being re-unemployed. I was laid off from my first job, a miscellaneous, IT tele-slave position that was located near Millenium Park in Chicago, in March of 2012. I was laid off again from my job as an editor's assistant (though it was technically an internship) last week, the first week in April. At the end of a full day working on the project I'd been assigned, an email popped up on my screen saying that there was no more work for me to do for the season, adios muchacho. Since I was an intern, I guess my boss didn't needed neither an in lieu-of notice (a two week heads up that you'll be laid off "in lieu" of a severance package) nor a, you guessed it, severance package.
The first time I was laid off, it was a surreal, "out of a movie" experience (though I loathe to use that expression for it's troubling, post-modernist, "my life is a simulation" undertones). It was a place called Total Attorneys, it had a somewhat untenable business model, they needed to change it so my position ("consumer advocate" cum tele-slave) was extinguished. This company was big though, it still exists but is much smaller than when I was hired on, and I was laid off with about a dozen or so of my coworkers, maybe more. I arrived at my desk, found all the passwords changed to log into the system and then was called into a dimly lit conference room where a rheumy-eyed higher-up (his spot in the company I'm not really sure of, but it isn't important) told us we had no job left. They took their layoff seriously, we were all given boxes and instructed to clear out our "desks" (actually small, particle board cubicles, mine stuffed into an office the size of maybe a full-bathroom in your average house with four other people.)
I got my box, filled it. To my dismay, all of our key-cards had been deactivated which meant I couldn't get into the toilet. I'll always remember the day as cast under the dark cloud of a terrible urge to shit. That and the feeling of riding the El home at 11:00 am with a box of office junk on my lap. Heavy. I got home and played video games the rest of the day, and went for a run.
I was optimistic after the first layoff, I had found a job within about two weeks of moving to Chicago and now I had some full-time experience, albeit a very fake sounding position at a very fake sounding company. I was so wrong it's laughable. A friend of mine said that applying to jobs is like "screaming into the void," which is the best way I've heard the feeling described. It's nightmarish. I surfed the web, hoofed hard copy resumes to restaurants and cafes, clothing stores, did the follow up calls, emailed family friends (though I have few in the city) to beg for leads, literally anything. Every business on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago probably has a resume of mine somewhere. I scanned Craigslist, all the "Monster" type sites and even started a LinkedIn (which is some low, low shit.) I got nothing, in six months from March until mid July, I didn't even get an interview. I was receiving unemployment, about $200 a week, which, don't believe the hype, the notion of anyone living off of that almost anywhere by choice is completely ridiculous. It was enough money to staunch the bleed out of my savings (about $3,000 or so at the end of my employment) but no more than that. It allowed me to continue searching for work for six months rather than four.
Unemployment has a way of eating away at your ego. I have no problem making it to work on time, I go to bed at midnight, get up at 7:30, go to work, no problem. But when you're going on four months of unemployment, there develops this weight that sits on your chest when you try to heave yourself out of bed in the morning. The weight says "you have nowhere to be today, if you didn't leave your room, no one would notice, you have no responsibilities," and man, that weight gets heavy.
When I did finally get another job, the one I was just recently, again, laid off from, I found it through a temporary roommate (I haven't mentioned that I live in a house with six other twenty-somethings in order to make living affordable in the city). He was passing through Chicago on his way to L.A. and had landed a job as an editor's assistant working on children's text books for the summer. He left in late July and all I had to do, after six months of void screaming, was basically show up at the editor's office and I had the job. That was it. I'm not sure what that says about the labor market right now. I guess something like, I was qualified to do the job and was qualified to do most of the jobs I applied to, but who cares? The diffidence I was hired with was puzzling, the more I think about it the stranger it seems. Getting a job seemed so impossible and then to have one with hardly any questions asked; maybe an analogy could be when the president pardons a prisoner from execution, to the president, whether or not the prisoner dies makes no difference, to the prisoner it's quite the opposite.
So I was given a stay of execution, so to speak. I was only making $12 an hour, which is again, not a lot and I had some friends I had to pay back and a security deposit to buy which soaked up a good deal of my cash when I first got hired. But I stabilized a little, started to try to save again and rather liked my job. I did a lot of fact checking, which is basically just going through the manuscript of these supplementary books my boss edited and making sure, sentence by sentence, that every fact, was in fact, a fact. Through the course of the job I amassed a great deal of Jeopardy style knowledge like odds-and-ends facts about countries and the internet and whatever else. But like I mentioned earlier that job, less ceremoniously than the first, has come to an end.
Which brings me to today, right now. My mom has just returned home from her job and is asking me what I want for dinner and I'm feeling disturbingly like my 17-year-old self again.
No comments:
Post a Comment