Some People

1

I am attending an evening class designed to teach advanced job-hunting skills in those of us who are soon to be unemployed or are already unemployed. That is the nature of the times. More businesses close, get bought out or hunker down to weather the coming storm. In any event the number of jobs decreases as the number of people looking for work climbs.2

Our instructor is a tall loose-limbed middle-aged man. He has the easy manner of a surfer, “no sweat man, hang loose.” He tells us he used the method he is teaching to obtain a job raising money for the local university with few qualifications other than his method and his charm. Now after five years he is in fact quitting this job for no other reason than his perceived need for a fresh work environment. 3

In the course of the evening he reveals that he has several degrees including a teaching certificate. When he was younger he would work for a year as a rafting guide or a rock climbing instructor and then would quit and go traveling or go back to school for a while. He advises the use of an experiential resume in these cases, no suspicious gaps in employment history to be explained that way. Not that resumes really matter anyway.4

The heart of this class is that you get hired because the guy doing the hiring knows you and is confident that you are not a nut. The rest of the class is about how to make your self known to as many potential employers as possible. It is a process of building a network. Just like the old boys network that is used to fill the halls of power around the world.5

“We have a position to fill.”6

“Well call Bunny or Biff or Whitaker, I hear he is at loose ends.”7

“But what of qualifications?”8

“What of qualifications indeed! Biff knows his scotch and Bunny plays a reasonably game of golf and Whitaker, well Whitaker is all right. Any one of them will be able to pick it up soon enough.”9

I come from a working class family. My father was a welder in a shipyard. He was a union man and a bit of a socialist. My father thought of work as a form of slavery. My Mother was less politically motivated. She had been raised on the farm and with the practicality that such an upbringing imparts just wanted to get food on the table and enough money for the rent. My mother worked as a waitress and latter became a bookkeeper. The difference in attitude between my mother and father were a constant source of tension. It seemed like any time we would start to get ahead financially my father would go out on strike or quit his job all together. 10

As an adult I have been shaped by these long ago struggles. I have been branded by these long ago fears. I have never been out of work for more than several weeks. I don’t think I have ever willingly quit a job unless I had another job already lined up. I got fired once and remember it as a nightmarish time. I spent all night and most of the day calculating how long I could go without a paycheck before we would no longer be able to pay the rent. Unemployment for me has been something to be feared, something that you dream about when you have eaten too much and drunk too much. When you jerk awake from such a dream you are in a sweat and it takes a long while to get back to sleep.11

At the end of the class we all say goodbye. Somebody asks the instructor how he can afford to leave a job like he has. He smiles and says, “I married well.” His wife is a lawyer it turns out.12

On my way home I see the instructor walking to his car. He has no fear the world is for him a warm and welcoming place. There will always be a suitable job to be had should he want to take it. There will always be warm place for him to sleep. As I get to my apartment I pass a guy setting up to sleep out on the street. He is getting his stuff organized. It is cold.13