July 2009 Archives

It’s the end of the second extremely productive week in a row for me, and I am starting to feel better about the possibility of finding a job before I hit retirement age.  In fact, I may even be able to land one before I hit my 40’s—that would be really neat.

As I was typing that last paragraph, I received a rejection letter via e-mail.  Why do those always come at the most ironic times?!

Aside from my employment situation, I am still in limbo on a number of things that are making me nervous: hospital bills, extending my student loan deferment, and whether or not I am going to qualify for extended unemployment benefits (the regular-type ones are up this month). I am worried that I’m going to get stuck with a hospital bill of like $3000 and that I won’t be able to pay it, but I am equally worried that I am going to get stuck with a bill for $300, which I still won’t be able to pay: I have visions of myself scrubbing bedpans to make ends meet.

And don’t even get me started on the student loans.  I am more than happy to pay them when I feel like it was worth it for me to have taken them out in the first place, but a great education is 100% meaningless if you’re looking for quarters on the street so you can do laundry.  So I’ve applied to extend my deferment due to unemployment through the end of the year, and am keeping my fingers crossed that it will work.  If not, THEY will have to apply for a deferment from me.  THEY WILL HAVE TO DEFER MY RAGE.

It seems the bad thing about this increase in my productivity—not that I was totally unproductive before—is that I have increased expectations for everyone else.  When I go into manic phases of cover letter writing, researching, bookmarking, taking notes, making databases, and calculating statistics, I tend to think that the people I’m corresponding with (or the people with whom I would like to be corresponding, i.e., people who will hire me) will be similarly manic.  This leads to me checking my email every four minutes and going “What the hell?  Why hasn’t anyone hired me yet?”  I mean, just because I start writing four times as many cover letters doesn’t mean the people I’m sending them to are going to care four times as much.  It just means I’m going to be four times as likely to find someone who is less than indifferent to my professional existence.  I need to remember that.

I also need to remember to do laundry.  I don’t think I’ve washed these pants since April.

In addition to feverishly applying for jobs last week, I also spent a fair amount of time compiling all of the information from my job hunt into a database so that I can share all of my ridiculous statistics with you.  I had planned on keeping these statistics private until I actually received and accepted a job offer, but given that today is the exact six-month anniversary of me being unemployed, I think it would be appropriate to share some mid-year statistics.

Since January 6, 2009, I have applied for 89 jobs.  That is an average of about 3.5 jobs per week; to keep my unemployment benefits coming in the state requires that I apply for 3 jobs weekly, so it looks like I am ahead of the curve.  Of these jobs, only 78% even confirmed that they received my resume.  Although no one has hired me yet, I have only gotten 21 actual rejections—less than a quarter of the jobs I applied for bothered with formal rejections.  I can only assume I am still in the running for the other 76%.  I have received rejection letters and phone calls on every day of the week, definitively, including Saturdays and Sundays—including one memorable Sunday morning phone call.  As of this weekend I have also received a rejection email on a national holiday.

Of the 89 jobs I have applied for, I only spoke or corresponded with an actual person in 5 cases.  My rate of return  (positions interviewed for over positions applied for) is just under 7%. I have had 9 interviews since the beginning of the year, most of which have been very successful (qualitatively speaking).  These 9 interviews were for 7 positions, one of which I applied for in December of 2008 so it doesn’t even count toward these statistics.

Ah, statistics.  The terrible, dispassionate, empirical proof of my indigence.

As I was compiling these statistics, I relieved some of my best and worst moments of the job hunt so far.  My worst interview moment, by far, was during a phone interview with a University in Chicago.  After an already rocky interview, where I totally bungled a question about what I knew about the department I was interviewing for, the HR Representative asked me, “What were you making at your last job?”

“What was I making at my last job?” I asked.  There was an awkward pause.  “Oh,” I said.  “You mean salary.  Not like, was I sculpting something when they laid me off.”  This is the only interview I have had where I did not receive a rejection letter or follow-up phone call.

Yes, I do believe that moment trumped the interview that I gave while on Percocet, with dried vomit on my slacks.  At least I thought those people liked me.

…Anyway.

So it’s been a half a year that I’ve been living on unemployment payments and looking for work.  Where do I go from here?  Recent news clippings indicate that the economy has bottomed out, and maybe even that things could start getting better by the end of this year (who knows?).  If I keep going at this rate, it seems unlikely that I will get a job offer by the end of the year—though it seems unlikely that I would get one at any rate because I do not even really have a skill set that is unique to my species of primates.  A thousand monkeys with a thousand laptops could easily do anything I can—and probably for less pay.

The cold, hard truth is that I am going to have to change my strategy if I want to be successful at finding a job.  Heretofore, my strategy has been: find a job to apply for, freak out about applying for it, agonize over a cover letter, send it in, wait in front of my computer for them to email me back, and then obsess over said job until they reject me.  In the past couple of weeks this strategy has been modified to remove the freaking out and obsessing, and it seems to have been working better (although I still haven’t gotten any interviews, it’s been working better for me emotionally).  But I think even if I up the rate at which I apply for jobs and try my best not to freak out, I may still be in a pickle when my Unemploymentversary comes around next January.

The only thing is, I haven’t quite figured out what I should do to fix my job hunt strategy beyond simply applying for jobs more frequently.  So far my best idea has been to scrap the job hunt and start an online t-shirt business: I have two funny ideas for t-shirts so far, and Wendy said she would help me put together fancy things like “Feasibility Studies” and “Business Models.”  The only problem with this, aside from the fact that it is just another one of my hare-brained schemes, is that I don’t have any money to start a business.  It’s probably better this way: the market for t-shirts with vaguely humorous slogans and 80’s throwbacks seems to be saturated already.  And getting “99% Diva” silkscreened across the chest of a XXXL baby doll tee is just not a good business model anymore.  Life’s just not fair.

According to a graph I just saw in the New York Times, the unemployment rate, although its acceleration has slowed, has peaked at 9.5%.  That’s incredible—almost a tenth of the population is looking for work right now.  And, according to the same statistics, the number of discouraged workers (those who are no longer looking for work because they believe no work is available for them, and who aren’t counted in the unemployment figure above) is almost 800,000.  It’s clear why it’s been a little tough for me to find work.  Obviously.

My last entry was a little woe-is-me, which I think is natural when you’re in a situation like mine, but I have to stress that despite the fact that I am more fucked than ever before, I have also been doing a lot to make sure I don’t stay like this for long.  I have applied for so many jobs this week, it’s crazy.  Yes, I have also already started getting my rejection letters for said jobs.  But the point is: there are jobs open and out there and I know that if I keep at it, eventually I am going to get a great one.  At this point, I would probably just settle for a mediocre one.  Possibly even a terrible one, provided it paid me enough to cover my ridiculous student loan payments (oh WHY did I have to go to a good school?!?!).  And my hospital bills.  And my credit card debt.  And…I’m going to stop there before I poop my pants: I can’t afford the laundry at the moment.

I say all that to say: don’t cry for me, Argentina.  Don’t cry for me until I have to pawn my iPhone for rent money.