Well folks, I am in a hole. Still no job — if the crowds at any place I apply to are any indication, half the city is out of work — and my spare funds have finally been depleted. Here’s the plan: I need to stay in this apartment at least until my lease ends. That will be at the end of April. Hopefully by then I’ll have some kind of employment, because otherwise I won’t be able to move. I plan to move to much cheaper digs — I moved here only because it was convenient to the last job I had — but I’ll need at least part of my security back. If I get tossed I won’t get any of it back and I’ll be in the hole for lease breakage and legal fees.
So anyway, if everyone who reads my site donated a dollar, I could… I don’t know, buy lunch. But every little bit helps.
On the up side, I am getting job offers, of a sort — mostly come-ons for sales positions. In other words, they aren’t job offers. In any case, I refuse to do sales, because I can’t sell; the thought of selling anything to anyone makes me physically nauseous. I can’t seem to even sell myself (when I went to write up my resume and came to the part where I have to write down all the things I can do my mind went blank, as usual). Besides, it’s easy to promise someone a sales position, because you can base their pay on their sales and dump them if they don’t make any, and commission is taxed up the yin yang (I have worked with salespeople so I know the score), and I’d rather dig ditches. It’s steadier work.
Oh yeah — and then there are the emails that lead you to a website that is nothing but a come-on for various “universities” of the sort that used to be advertised on the back of matchbooks (you know, the ones where you could get “degrees at home in your spare time” in things like locksmithing). Yeah, that really made me feel great.
Anyway, I went to yet another placement agency yesterday, where there was a huge crowd of people. I felt slightly reassured by the fact that I was the only one there wearing business casual instead of one-grade-up-from-hobo-wear. I mean, you’re applying for a job and you can’t even bother to comb your hair and put on a pair of slacks? It was baggy jeans city. And there was a woman in jeans shorts. On the other hand, this was a placement agency, not the actual place where you would get interviewed by the actual employer. Yeah, this is how they do things now: you turn in your paperwork, fill out some forms, and they’ll “go through the paperwork” and “call you in a few days.” I’ve been waiting for calls for five months.
But this brings me to the sad fact that Western Civilization is dead. How do I know that? It’s not that men are pigs — that would indicate a level of self-awareness not to mention knowledge of a recognized rule of civilized behavior that was being broken. No, men aren’t pigs anymore, they are simply unaware of the fact that when a woman walks into the room and there are no chairs, then the first young, strong, able male that sees her should stand up and offer her his chair. But there they sat, like piles of washing (which is what those baggy clothes make everyone look like), while I just stood there feeling like an idiot. And then it happened. Another young, baggy-clothes-wearing man came in. (If I’d been sitting down I’d have offered him my chair. I am polite.) Then suddenly the strains of a song burst into the room: “I like big butts and I cannot lie…”
That sound you hear isn’t just a cell phone ringtone, it’s the theme song of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.