There's a video making the rounds on the Internet of Sean Hannity tearing into an Occupy representative, calling him a rapist* and telling him to "pound the pavement" some more and wash dishes if he has to, but just stop living off student loans, you stupid free-loader (I might be paraphrasing). All of that, I suspect, is all Hannity probably wanted to come from the whole segment -- a man in a thousand dollar suit yelling at a kid with a goatee and telling him to get a job is ratings security to the Fox audience. It makes me wonder when the last time Hannity "pounded" anything besides his producer.
But, nonetheless, we try. Yesterday -- Monday -- I got up early and hit my digital pavement. I created profiles with two more staffing agencies (on top of the one I've already been employed by for a year, except they haven't had a placement for me since February), applied for a few more jobs in my field, then banged out about a dozen applications for various assistant and receptionist jobs I found on a couple of online job boards.
Last evening, I was elated to get an email back quickly from one of the assistant positions I applied for earlier. But, that's weird, it's like midnight... The following is the exact email I received, but the highlighting is mine:
Good Morning,
Thank you for your resume. Here is some information about our company and the job description.
ABOUT US
DB Tuning GmbH is a tuning related company. We are designing tuning parts and making style for any kind of car. DB Tuning GmbH was founded in 1999 and incorporated in 2001 under the business name DB Tuning Shop. Headquartered in the city of Basel, Switzerland. DB Tuning GmbH delivers tuning solutions to its clients in the areas of high quality design, creative, technical expertise, modern style, and so on. We do design and we are doing it very well.
JOB SUMMARY
We are expanding and opening new services. We are now seeking a highly motivated Finance/Administrative assistant to join our team. The position offers a very attractive salary . What we do? We sell tuning parts, making design and moderation for tuning parts and everything else about car tuning design. Our management department decided to accept orders from US customers. There are so much potential and actual clients along US that we cannot lose our sales now. We have many orders from them pending, so we decided to hire Administrative assistant. During all working process you will be our official representative with full rights and standards. You will be processing orders/payments/billing records/payment invoices/transactions from our US clients and customers.. Why we need you? According to our local law we cannot accept direct payments and orders from foreign company or person. In this case we have to open a local office or hire an official Administrative assistant to process all the duties in full.
SALARY
Weekly fixed salary is $1250, paid at the end of each week.
Please reply to this email if you’re interested in the job.
Thank you
The signature then included some phone number in Switzerland.
So basically, it's the employment equivalent of a Nigerian prince email. Fucking brilliant. This is the same reason I took down both my Monster and CareerBuilder profiles. All I ever got were spam emails and people calling me at all kinds of weird hours whenever I would update my page asking if I wanted to make "thousands of dollars working from home!"
And when I do break though all this bull shit, I feel like my Master's degree is keeping me from getting work (no, really). One interviewer wouldn't stop asking me if the 26k the job paid was going to be enough even though the job was exactly what I wanted to do. Another, for a receptionist position, looked me directly in the face and asked me "what are you doing here?" Oh, right, 'cause I'm the first liberal arts major in this day in age looking for underemployment. I just want to work, dammit. I just realized today that I have enough savings for about a month and a half then things are going to get hairy if I don't do SOME kind of work by then.
I wish I were making all these stories up. It even astounds me that people don't seem to want highly-qualified people. But companies now have their pick of literally hundreds of candidates for each position. They can afford to be ridiculously picky and get exactly who they want: qualified, but not too qualified, so they don't have to do this all again in a year or so when that person jumps to a higher-paying job or when we have to fire them for asking for a raise. They want the perfect cog, not someone who's going to lose motivation easily when the lack of upward mobility becomes apparent.
It's little wonder people are dropping out of the unemployment pool. The only reason the unemployment numbers seemed to improve on the last report was that so many people have just given up. If I had any choice, I might join them. But, let's just say that it's a good thing I've never bought anything that's in danger of being reposessed...
*Referring to the sexual assaults that perpetrated in Zuccotti Park by opportunists that saw a group of trusting hippies and decided to try and blend in. Some say that the NYPD steered known offenders of all kinds toward the encampment to make the protesters look bad, but that hasn't been proven by anyone yet. I think it's mostly really possible that a group of young people handing out free food and free places to sleep is inevitably going to draw some rabble, especially in New York. I'm for everything the movement talks about, but that whole camp was an incredibly naive venture.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Friday, May 4, 2012
Temporary Internet Files
I did everything I was supposed to do. I graduated high school with honors, completed college on time, and went on to earn my Master's degree in a field that I loved because I've been told my whole life that the only thing I was expected to do was follow my dreams. While I didn't have to until adulthood, I've been a part of the workforce since I was 16.
I've made it to the age of 27 having never been arrested, pregnant, or overdosed. And yet, myself and what some estimate is as much as half of people in my generation are out of work. Many of us have crippling college debt to shoulder on top of the other rising costs of living -- rewards for an investment we were promised would pay off yet so far has not. If education were any other product on the planet, millions of young people would qualify for a class-action refund. (Aside: don't get me wrong. I wouldn't trade my education for anything. Knowledge is the answer to every problem, as far as I'm concerned. But if college is no longer what's required for a career, it needs to stop being billed by educational institutions as such so that people can make the right choice for them based on what they want to achieve, not what they're made to fear they lack.)
Yet we're not asking for a handout or anything we didn't earn. No one by any means owes us work. We want to work and feel valued yet many I've heard from -- brilliant, highly-trained people that have put a lot of effort into their degrees and certificates -- can't shake the feeling that they would have been better off doing little-to-nothing for the past handful of years because at least then they'd have themselves to blame for their lack of perceived success being, well, successful. Despite working so hard at being what we were expected to be and staying out of trouble, we're now reaping the same benefits as someone who didn't try half as much. At the very least, if flipping burgers for the first few years after school until you can break into your career is the new norm, the world needs to stop looking down at flipping burgers and jobs like it.
The Occupy generation is portrayed as lazy and ungrateful when really all we want is a chance. That, and maybe just an acknowledgement that things are pretty far left of fucked up right now and that we and our peers didn't do anything to deserve it. Of my close circle of friends, I can count two that have had success in their fields. One is a pilot, a highly-trained and specific skill for which he still had to work for years teaching beginning flight students at minimum wage to earn. The other put herself through law school, followed by a graduate library program, was near starving broke the entire time and only found a position when she moved to the other side of the country -- about a thousand miles away from her family and everyone she knew.
The rest, if they even have jobs, have abandoned the fields they care about for things like cable installation technition and medical billing specialist. There's nothing wrong with those jobs, but I'm sure if they were told a decade ago that's where they'd be after attending top schools, they would have applied directly to those positions and saved themselves monthly student loan payments for the next 20 years.
Of those I know in my field from the program I completed, the ones I know that are doing well already had years of experience before deciding to get their Master's. The one-year grad program I attended cost roughly $80,000, and that's on top of what many spent moving here from all over the nation to attend.
For the past year and a half or so since I finished graduate school, I've had very little success finding any kind of full-time work. Despite countless applications and about a dozen interviews, all I've managed was a short, part-time, minimum-wage internship in my field and some administrative [making copies] temp work here and there. Don't get me wrong, I'm exceedingly grateful for the opportunities I've had, but the constant rejection when I know I'm a highly qualified canditate is more than a little too much some days.
This blog will be a chronicle of my adventures in trying to get a job and the various and sundry bullshit I've run into being an office temp. Like the endless sea of desperate applicants that washes over our good ol' amber waves of grain -- too numerous to do anything with really, yet bothersome when they stack up to a certian size -- these are the temporary internet files.
I've made it to the age of 27 having never been arrested, pregnant, or overdosed. And yet, myself and what some estimate is as much as half of people in my generation are out of work. Many of us have crippling college debt to shoulder on top of the other rising costs of living -- rewards for an investment we were promised would pay off yet so far has not. If education were any other product on the planet, millions of young people would qualify for a class-action refund. (Aside: don't get me wrong. I wouldn't trade my education for anything. Knowledge is the answer to every problem, as far as I'm concerned. But if college is no longer what's required for a career, it needs to stop being billed by educational institutions as such so that people can make the right choice for them based on what they want to achieve, not what they're made to fear they lack.)
Yet we're not asking for a handout or anything we didn't earn. No one by any means owes us work. We want to work and feel valued yet many I've heard from -- brilliant, highly-trained people that have put a lot of effort into their degrees and certificates -- can't shake the feeling that they would have been better off doing little-to-nothing for the past handful of years because at least then they'd have themselves to blame for their lack of perceived success being, well, successful. Despite working so hard at being what we were expected to be and staying out of trouble, we're now reaping the same benefits as someone who didn't try half as much. At the very least, if flipping burgers for the first few years after school until you can break into your career is the new norm, the world needs to stop looking down at flipping burgers and jobs like it.
The Occupy generation is portrayed as lazy and ungrateful when really all we want is a chance. That, and maybe just an acknowledgement that things are pretty far left of fucked up right now and that we and our peers didn't do anything to deserve it. Of my close circle of friends, I can count two that have had success in their fields. One is a pilot, a highly-trained and specific skill for which he still had to work for years teaching beginning flight students at minimum wage to earn. The other put herself through law school, followed by a graduate library program, was near starving broke the entire time and only found a position when she moved to the other side of the country -- about a thousand miles away from her family and everyone she knew.
The rest, if they even have jobs, have abandoned the fields they care about for things like cable installation technition and medical billing specialist. There's nothing wrong with those jobs, but I'm sure if they were told a decade ago that's where they'd be after attending top schools, they would have applied directly to those positions and saved themselves monthly student loan payments for the next 20 years.
Of those I know in my field from the program I completed, the ones I know that are doing well already had years of experience before deciding to get their Master's. The one-year grad program I attended cost roughly $80,000, and that's on top of what many spent moving here from all over the nation to attend.
For the past year and a half or so since I finished graduate school, I've had very little success finding any kind of full-time work. Despite countless applications and about a dozen interviews, all I've managed was a short, part-time, minimum-wage internship in my field and some administrative [making copies] temp work here and there. Don't get me wrong, I'm exceedingly grateful for the opportunities I've had, but the constant rejection when I know I'm a highly qualified canditate is more than a little too much some days.
This blog will be a chronicle of my adventures in trying to get a job and the various and sundry bullshit I've run into being an office temp. Like the endless sea of desperate applicants that washes over our good ol' amber waves of grain -- too numerous to do anything with really, yet bothersome when they stack up to a certian size -- these are the temporary internet files.
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