Collection

The Re-employment Chronicles

So here I am on the job at my new job. A thousand miles from the home, the wife and the family. A thousand miles from everything I really care about except for making a living so I can help take care of everyone I really care about. And that’s why I’m here and they’re there. 

We’ve been fortunate over the last ten years. By almost sheer serendipity we put ourselves into a pretty nice community. An A-market town at the edge of the Dallas MetroPlex, a little sleepy, big enough to draw the hipper shops and restaurants and small enough to not draw the crime. In fact, our state-of-the-art police force has done a spectacular job. Not a Barney Fife among them, they are really quite serious. L.A. adept at swarming and capturing the marauding bands of toilet paper tossers, mailbox smashers and hood ornament thieves. We sleep safe in the knowledge that our trees are unmolested, our windows unsoaped, our front doors unburning-pooped. Secure in that knowledge . . . we sleep safe. 

And then came the call . . . the one you hope will never come but just know somehow will come one day — if you’re away enough days. It’s the one that goes . . . just calling to let you know Jack found a hobo sleeping on the front porch today. 

A what? A hobo? On my front porch. Do we suddenly live in the Mission District. And where are all the peace officers? Running a DWT (driving while teen) sting over by the high school no doubt. 

You know it’s that sort of call that really just makes you want to go home and check things out, look under the beds, in the closets, behind the shower curtain and here I am 1000 miles from home alone and trying to take care of everything for everyone I really care about just like I’m supposed to. . . just like I was taught. And yet I can’t take care of a sleepy hobo. I can’t because I’m here and they’re there and I just think that sucks.

A hobo. . . on my front porch. What the hell.

The Re-employment Chronicles.

Due to the necessity of a move for career I find myself living in a city 1,000 miles from the one my wife and family live in, 16 hours by car from the home we are working to sell. Needing to sell before we can buy, I found myself essentially homeless in a new and very chilly city.

Now in my experience I’ve encountered at least two distinct types of real estate agent. The first is happy to show and sell you houses all day long, that’s what they do . . . and that’s all they do. But the other type, they listen to your situation and offer solutions . . . sometimes ordinary — where to get a decent haircut or find a clean, safe laundromat — and sometimes extraordinary. . . 

And so there’s Lori, my Realtor extraordinaire. She will certainly one day sell us our new house but in the meantime what to do with me? Her solution… park me in a vacant listing. I cover utilities, keep it tidy and bug out for showings, in lieu of rent. Now that’s pretty Extraordinary.

And that’s how I became what I am today . . . a Squatter. 

So as I write today I sit in a vacant house, a $400,000 vacant house — gourmet kitchen, Jacuzzi tub, deer wandering in the backyard, ooh la la and la di dah. Big, empty, quiet . . . very quiet but nice enough all the same. Some might even say it’s a Squatter’s Paradise. 

I sure hope I don’t have to do this for much longer.

The Re-employment Chronicles

So . . . I took a new job in a city far from where I live and so am in the midst of a transition that will eventually move my family and I about a 1000 miles from where we are to an entirely new place we’ve essentially never been. It rates mention that my wife and I are not overly adventurous or impetuous in fact risk averse would describe me pretty adequately and my wife, my Shari . . . well she has given up much to be with me. 

We spend years carefully and diligently climbing the stairs as is my way, we stop . . . look around if just for a moment . . . and then . . . plunge down the waterslide. So its not entirely out of character that about once every ten years or so we take that dive and do it whether we need to or not. Of course this time we kind of needed to, that or face the specter of unemployment fueled hunger, pestilence and eventually I imagine . . . death. So anyway here I am a couple of weeks out of every three camping in a hotel, working, eating, drinking, sleeping and traveling. Pretty much life as it is on the road. Not nearly my first time yet different than most of my adventures. I’m mostly alone. I’m the only out-of-towner at the office, the only one in the hotel, the only one going out for dinner every night. My trips are missing the camaraderie and commiseration of the group. That pack of middle-aged guys alone and away from home but together and trying to make the best of it in seedy sports bars, threadbare hotel lobbies and crappy 24 hour breakfast joints. A pack of really very different guys that wouldn’t find each other in ever but for the business trip, the sales meeting, the trade show and because of that like a blooded army platoon, they are then, now and forever Friends. I miss that. 

But I digress. 

The story of the transition is a story unfinished that will find its way here some time sooner or later. Some time maybe after I’ve found the perspective to find it funny. No this story is not that story. This story is the story of the laundromat. 

What with the extended stays away from home and the ridiculous nickel and dime-ing pricing policies of the major airlines (you know who you are) I in my infinite wisdom and generous nature suggested that to avoid excessive baggage fees I would pack out two weeks worth of stuff fly it out once then simply wash clothes at the end of the trip, repack and leave my bags of spring fresh clothing in my office for next time. Great idea. Saves the company a minimum of $60 a leg in baggage fees, I’m not humping 50lb. suitcases all over hell and gone, and it seriously reduces the likelihood of me losing every stitch of clothing I own to the baggage blackhole. Great idea! 

And so we finally arrive at the point of the story. The Laundromat. 

I actually grew up in a laundromat so I am pretty familiar with the concept. And when I say I grew up in one I very nearly did . . . my best friend’s family owned one and he and I grew up making large forts out of cartons of tiny soaps, drinking warm bottles of pop from wooden crates, picking through boxes of gumball machine prizes and sneaking candy machine candy bars. My first 15 years are full of the smell of laundry soap, the whirr and clink of the dollar changer and the physical hum of the great machines. This was my best friend and we literally spent everyday together from age 3 to age 20 and most of those days included time at the laundromat. It was a given. So like I said I’m no stranger to the concept of a laundromat. A large, extremely clean and well lit building filled with fully operational if not new high capacity, high speed washers and dryers, a good snack selection, comfortable seating and a 24 hour on duty attendant to assist with unusual change requests or out of order machines. That’s a laundromat.

Well apparently not.

I found the place on Yelp! Close enough to the office that I could conceivably finish over an extended lunch hour. I loaded the address into Tom Tom and headed out. I thought ole Tom was having me on when it turned me down the alley. No. The alley gave way to a small rectangular cinder block structure. A storm shelter? No, too cracked and leaning. A maintenance shed for some long gone utility? No, not nearly fancy enough. No this, I came to find, is a laundromat. Worse yet apparently a pretty typical one. For shame. 

I go in. Not because I want to but because I have two weeks of dirty clothes and two hours to get them clean. No time to go anywhere else. No time to go down to the campus district and find a Duds and Suds or Dirty Dungarees so I can get a pitcher or two while I launder. No time. A shame.

The inside did not disappoint. Linoleum. . . cracked, peeling and completely skinned in some spots. Banks of badly maintained washers and dryers that had me wondering if my clothes might go in cleaner than they’d come out. As a marketer I’d expect the ideal message a laundromat would hope to portray to its prospective clientele would be of cleanliness but this wasn’t that. It wasn’t that at all. And amidst it all were a handful of people, like me, there to wash some clothes. And while I’ll admit they were by all appearances perhaps a little more down on their luck than I they were still just people wanting clean clothes. And wanting them enough to brave this little hell of commercial depravity for the opportunity.

Word to the wise you business owners out there . . . just because you think you have crappy, careless, dirty customers doesn’t mean you need to run your business that way. No one wants to go to a crappy, careless, dirty business no matter what service is provided and given the chance all of those crappy, careless, dirty customers will go and spend all their dirty dollars somewhere else. 

I did.

The Unemployment Chronicles

So . . . as I stated in the last part of this story when my expiration date came due and they pulled me off the shelf of the gainfully employed I went through all the early stages . . . the “I won’t give you the pleasure” cold defiance, the walk of shame to the parking lot with that pitiful box of career crap that wouldn’t amount to tankful of gas at the pawn shop, the numbness, the undeserved and unquestioning support of my wife, family and a fine group of friends, chronic but fleeting acceptance and then a well deserved week off. 

And I used that week well. First I caught up on my Judge Judy, then I watched every bad day-play movie on Showtime, HBO, The Movie Channel and Cinemax and as many bad action & horror movie marathons on SYFY, FX as they could air. And so on and so on. 

Then suddenly it was all over, the week was gone, vacation was done and I was just the unemployed guy again. That’s when the frenzy began.

It’s funny looking back on it all now from a distance of several months, 1000 miles and a solid, regular paycheck. I hadn’t actively looked for work in something like 17 years. The last two jobs I had accounted for 14 of those years and were jobs that came to me through headhunters and networking. The last time I’d actually looked for work you still knocked on doors and filled out applications in dim lobbies with employed people wandering by looking at you with the “as if” face. And always, always you bought the Sunday and Monday papers for the job listings. 

Enter the electronic age and Monster.com, Hotjobs, Indeed.com, LinkedIn, blah, blah, and blah.com. Sign up, sign in. Hurry so you can receive your job alerts, quietly ignoring the odds as you post your resume. Quietly and but increasingly ignoring the come-ons for professional resume writing, career counseling and paid access to the premium jobs. Enter the ATS and keyword tracking, the age where a computer decides whether a human will even see your resume . . .and you thought your grammar teacher was tough. Enter every bit of data about yourself into Monster and the rest just so you can re-enter everything everytime, over and over again because every employer wants you to use their website. Enter recruiters that won’t return calls or emails. And worse, prospective employers that leave a message to call back for an interview and never return your return call. Or companies that call to set up an interview and end up trying to sell you their employment marketing services. Employers that ask you to do some “sample” work and you do even though you know you shouldn’t and you never hear from them again. Interviewers that ask if you think Hitler was a good leader. And so on. And so on. And you do it all. You hang out hope on each resume submitted, on each call, email or voice mail. And you wait. You shower, shave and dress every day. You cry out . . . I’m good, I’m strong, I’m valid. You cry out until you just don’t anymore and you don’t shower and shave and dress as much. And you don’t leave the house so much. And you don’t do so much at all except cling to the laptop . . . checking email, Monster.com, Indeed, LinkedIn, blah, blah, and blah.com. Still hoping, still trying, still clinging, still valid, still valid . . . still valid . . . . . . still valid . . . . . . . . . still . . . oh screw it. 

And so ends the second week of unemployment.

The Unemployment Chronicles

So . . . I’ll admit I’m no scholar, no athlete, genius or even particularly talented at any one thing. That said I’ve always been fortunate to find myself in the top half of most things I try. So just imagine my surprise when I found myself in that unfortunate 10% of Americans that are involuntarily unemployed. Now when I write “imagine my surprise” its. . . well . . . not entirely accurate. I wasn’t really surprised at all. In truth, they didn’t work too hard to hide the axe and I was packed when they came down the hall with it. Had been for awhile. After all I’d been around a long time, probably too long. I’d seen a lot of brush get cleared and I learned to recognize when they were sharpening the axe. 

So when the day came I was ready for them. I knew the day, the time and the manner, the signs were there. Just like tea leaves or Tarot the office can be read if you know how to read and like I said they didn’t really hide the hammer. So when they came, my two comrades, I was ready. And they came and then they killed me. But it’s okay, it’s only business, and that’s all I’ll say about that.

It was a Friday in late February well after five and I was putting the accumulated crap of ten pretty miserable years in my trunk. I was numb as I pulled out of the lot and called Shari. . . “they finally got me” I said. And then she said to me. . . she said it’s okay, come home, it’s the best thing that ever could’ve happened to us. That’s my wife, Shari, my heart . . . my reason and she was right.

But I’ll admit it was a hard sell that Friday night. I’d been employed, uninterrupted, for 20 years — 10 at the place that just decided I was obsolete. My income wasn’t all the eggs in one basket but it was certainly most of the eggs in the basket. And suddenly there wouldn’t be any new eggs coming from me. No new eggs at all. Scary. 

So that first night I gave myself one simple and achievable goal. . . to drink. . . a lot. And with that simple win I moved on.

On day two I made contact with friends many previously pruned branches from the same bush. They had to know that I was not the sole survivor. So by email and Facebook, text and phone I told the story and was embraced into the club, a club of the once disenfranchised and obsoleted, unemployed and recovered. My friends — real survivors all. 

On day three, glowing from the well wishes and friendly concern and no longer hung over, I decided to set a new course. A new direction. A fresh start. And so I got on with my life and took the next week off.

And so it went. The shears cut and they cut clean, the only pain coming from the knowledge of who wielded them. But now these months later I realize where I am today sucks so much less than where I was then . . . and for that I could almost say thank you. Almost.

Stay tuned.