And, Just Like That, It Ends (unemployment)

Hey, I'll work for sex, too. Feet, not really but thanks.

Hey, I’ll work for sex, too. Feet, not really but thanks.

I haven’t posted much in the last few weeks, and the reason behind that is (as well as my usual procrastination issues, but beyond that) that I’ve started working. That’s right, working, on a regular basis. Like in permanent, reliable part-time, something I’ve not seen in my economic life for the last four years.

I wanted to document it as part of the posts on the blog regarding my unemployment experience, or my underemployment experience.

It’s odd, it ended as simply as it started. How did it start? A phone call to meet a boss (who is now dead, btw, not that it’s pertinent to this part of the story. But. She is. Dead.) at a coffee shop near the airport, a mere 20 0r so miles from where I was living at the time, for a meeting to discuss, well, exactly what? So it was a ruse, the only agenda for this meeting was to fire four people in our tiny communications department (so they just axed the entire department and outsourced the function – sound familiar?).

If it sounds like I’m resentful it’s because I still don’t understand why this simply could not be done with an easy phone call or an email (or even a text – do people get fired by text now? They must). No, instead, we’re going to make you suffer on the L.A. freeways, on a Friday, pointlessly, to do this horrible thing. Grrrr.

Anyway.

What happened was I’d been posting semi-regular reminders on Facebook, of all places, that I was looking for a seasonal or part-time position and one of them actually came through. Shocker, right?

So I’ll try not to say anything bad about Facebook for a few minutes. What am I doing, work-wise? Well, part-time, working 3 days a week, doing some selling, some blogsite maintenance, some communications, right here in L.A. Don’t want to be more specific than that, but indeed it looks like it could be as permanent as I’d like it to be.

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Some final thoughts (for now) on the past four years of unemployment, underemployment, self-employment:

  • It really is all about networking. All of the good freelance gigs I’ve gotten as well as this permanent job came through friends or work contacts – nobody posted a wanted ad for any of these. So what everyone says, including all the advice gurus, is true.
  • I believe the world of work and of looking for work has fundamentally changed. We have not recovered much at all from the crash of 2008. I still cannot believe how hard it’s been to find a job, any kind of job, really, with 40+ years in the work force and a pretty decent resume. Kind of unbelievable, but that’s what it is.
  • Not everybody needs to have a job anymore. We can now produce everything we need with minimum workers, so many of us don’t have to actually work. We, as a society, have to figure out the economics of that. Productivity gains have all gone to the top, and are not shared with the workers. In the future, eventually, this will change, one way or the other to a more equitable footing.
  • It could all happen – the crash – again, tomorrow. I hold no illusions that things will ever go back to the way they used to be. It’s good to be resilient, and I’m glad I’m pretty good at frugality.

That’s it for now. I’m sure I’ll think of more and add to the list.

 

Photo copyright by beep beep.

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