So something you can know about me is that I'm coping with unemployment at the moment, and I'm coping pretty well, thank you. It's never fun to find your position is being cut, but I am fortunate to be in a very stable position where losing my part-time job doesn't threaten any of that. However, I'm the kind of person who needs to keep in touch with the adult world and feel useful, so I'm poking around.
This is my first experience with the whole unemployment thing, and one of the requirements is that you either make some kind of contacts for jobs or you take a class with our local unemployment agency. As a former journalist, I was all, "Hey, I'll immerse myself in the whole experience and write about it or something," so I signed up for a class called "Job Talk." This class was billed as being led by job-seekers and 90 minutes long (they lied, it was two full hours). But it was a way better option for me than the one about learning how to turn a computer on, so, boom, I signed up.
The first thing I noticed is that I was, by about a decade or so, the youngest person there. And I am no spring chicken. I was also (probably) the second-most educated person there, with a bachelor's degree. This became apparent at the end of an exercise that took me -- and most people, I imagine -- about five minutes, of imagining job-seeking goals.
But I'll get back to that.
First, you come in and sign up with the two people from two different agencies who are, I guess, overseeing or facilitating the meeting, but both those words sound far too strong and involved for what happened (job seekers really did do the teaching!). Then you go around the room and say what training you're getting (almost everyone else was in some other program that made this a mandatory class -- I was not and freaked out that I had barged in where I wasn't supposed to be). One woman said she was looking to work in food service and was shooed out to attend a Denny's hiring event going on that very minute.
"Anyone else who wants to go can leave now," the one facilitator who talked said. I briefly considered getting out, but that would A) be contrary to the spirit of the project, B) I don't want to work at Denny's and C) I'd go to the hiring event out of the implacable and unslaked guilt I would feel had I not gone, and I really didn't want to do that.
Then one of the guys in the class who had been assigned a topic to teach stood up and we took turns reading from a piece on non-verbal communication he printed out "off the internet." This seemed as good a way to tackle that assignment as any. Between paragraphs he'd ask if we all had any questions or comments. No, because we are adults and at this point we've already learned as much about non-verbal communication as we'll ever be able to and some of the information was kind of condescending anyway.
The job seeker facilitator congratulated the presenter and said, "I can tell by your arms (he was holding them out asking if anyone had anything to say or ask) that you are open to any communication!" She was really working this facilitation thing hard. I liked the effort and energy she brought.
Then we all had to break into small groups to talk about job goals and come up with a short paragraph that identified those goals. There was a sample paragraph on a handout they gave us, so anyone with half a brain can just copy it with their own stuff there in five minutes. We were given a full hour.
I was at a table with a woman who was looking for a receptionist job and a guy who had been in industrial labor jobs his whole life but, thanks to his training job as a customer service rep and the pain in his back, wanted to do that sort of thing. The other guy at the table was a former school superintendent, a bit older than the other people there, and he seemed unsure of what his talents and skills were that he wanted to use. So I did what I always have done, as a journo and as a communications person, ask him what he did, what he liked.
This guy had a lot going on. As a superintendent in the Alaska bush, he got a CDL so he could cart students around and had used it for trucking after moving down to Washington, where he had an accident that made trucking impossible after. He started as a music teacher, and had taught woodwinds for many years, and had taught college-level classes on education but was a course away from his doctorate. I told him he should look into tutoring at the college, and that there were no woodwind teachers here, that that could be something he could look into.
"Well," he said, "I don't really play music anymore. I don't really have anything to do with music anymore."
He then pulled a picture of a young girl in a pink shirt out of his wallet. That was his daughter, he said. He met her when she was a third grader in a small Native village, where after school she would walk around the village until very late, often in the dark and freezing winter. He talked to her parents. "You take her, we don't want her," he said they told him. He told the school board what was happening. But their hands were tied. So, he said, he took this girl in and, with a lot of difficulty from the agencies in charge of adopting but none from the parents (or his own wife, who had and has health issues), made her part of his family.
When he adopted her, he said, she couldn't read or do math. But in high school she was a star student. He was so proud of her, and was so glad she was his daughter.
Then one night they were playing music together very late, having a great time. He told her around midnight that it was time to go to bed, saw her go to her room, and went to sleep. The next morning, he was not too concerned that she didn't get up early, but by the time ten a.m. rolled around he thought he'd better wake her up.
But she was beyond waking up, dead from her own hand. He framed it as part of a legacy of her family -- several siblings and her mother had also killed themselves.
I have had a lot of experience repressing my reactions to what people are telling me, and at being clinical about other people's strong emotions. Still, seeing an old man's grief is about the one thing that has always had the power to undo me, and he had lived through one of my greatest fears. He was just shattered from the experience, you could tell. And I had been the unwitting but still unhelpful troll who had encouraged him to lay out this private history in front of our group.
He didn't want a job that would remind him of her, but what would that be when his whole career was teaching and music and he had shared those skills and passions with her?
He didn't have a paragraph to read at the end of the session. "I'm still figuring out what I want to do," he said.
Then it was my turn. "I want a job in communications as a public relations specialist, writer, or community relations specialist. It should be in a large employment setting, within 20 minutes driving distance of home, and I must be able to get off at five. I expect to earn at least $20 an hour, and I will find this job by Jan. 1."
You could have heard a pin drop.
"Employers will pay that much around here?" the woman next to me asked.
If you have a college degree and the skills, my inner jerk said. "Yes," I answered.
Then the other people in the room took their turns talking about how they hoped to find jobs as laborers, receptionists, "anything," customer service representatives or in food service, for minimum wage or as much as $12 an hour, within a 30-minute bus ride. The expectations were so different, and for many jobs that the new economy has left behind completely.
It was as if to say, "not only is your privilege showing, but your being here is not helping things. Maybe you shouldn't write about it like you're so smart." But I don't know what else to do. Shutting up has never been an option with me.
Before we broke up the class, the facilitators who were not teaching got a call.
"You remember Nancy, who went to the hiring event? She just got a job as a line cook at Denny's! So remember that! There's still hope!"
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