Unemployed Watercooler Fridge Buzz Commiseration, Alienation and Mental Anti-Stagnation Society (DNRIYHM)

but most especially

not a single potential employer has responded. i've been looking for two months.

and

fuck it, i'm using part of my last $20 to buy another bottle of booze.

on the plus side, i finally did find something a couple weeks back. so keep hope alive etc etc.

:\

i have a feeling even shitty places like target won't hire me because they do these disgusting and invasive credit checks and i have no credit — if i had good credit i wouldn't have to apply to fucking target would i??!!!

and yeah jesse i have resorted to applying to soul crushing retail, are you happy?

Best of luck clouds, you'll find something.

yr good enough, smart enough and goddammit people like u

imo

Quite happy that you've deigned to consider gainful employment after voluntarily leaving the same without a fall-back plan, not for the first time, yes.

do music/record stores still exist? they can usually use someone who knows classical music, although it's not a good time of year for it

ime retail often had a trenches bonhomie that comfortable office jobs lack, and ppl sometimes at least felt sorry for you, nobody feels sorry for the office guy, so tbh the real soukcrusher is the desk effort

there are a few record stores around here at which i'd love to work, but ppl tend to hang onto those jobs for dear life afaik

darragh otm — ppl think that b/c office jobs pay higher than min wage then the ppl suffering in them don't deserve sympathy. it's impossible gauge someone else's pain against yr own.

honestly i've never minded retail. there's just no way to make anything like a decent living at it.

i also got no calls from any of the retail jobs i applied to during my unemployment desperation.

it was the hours that got me, or i'd have done the mgmt courses and be earning half again what i do now

hey are we allowed mansplain in this thread now btw

(stifled lol)

my last retail gig was selling high-end men's clothing which for anyone who knows me is an endless lol.

i've only got a low-end, i had to get that shit tailored

anyway hope s/thing comes up clouds, getting cash in has to take precedence over the fulfilling lifedream stuff most of the time ime, but i hope yr e works out at a balance you can live with in the longer term

"by your affirmative keystroke you authorize an investigative report concerning past employment, mode-of-living and general reputation"

fucking hell

you have a lovely reputation, screw them: PUSH THE BUTTON AND LOOK THEM DEAD IN THE EYE

'them'

'eye'

my last retail gig was selling high-end men's clothing which for anyone who knows me is an endless lol.

― packt like phoebe cates's dad in a chimney (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Thursday, December 27, 2012 6:39 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my job of 8 years is with a company that makes cooking tools, which for anyone who knows me is too lol to even be funny.

crossing my fingers for u clouds. want u to be able to buy albums and talk to me about them.

i don't know if there's a 2013 unemployed thread so i'm just gonna bump this one to propose the following:

so say you have a guy who's pushing 60 and has many years of experience as a computer programmer under his belt. and say his current company is letting him go because they're moving the office to another state and the guy doesn't want to move (and even if he did want to, he'd have to quit and then re-apply for the job he currently has). and say this guy doesn't really have enough to live off of for retirement to support both himself and his wife (who doesn't work), and that he has a whole host of health issues and a mortgage and other debts and bills to pay off on top of that.

in the year of our lord 2013, is this guy pretty much screwed?

sounds like

computer programming isn't the most age-friendly career, it's true, but it may also depend on what technologies he's familiar with. does sound like a bad situation though, good luck to him

(suspect someone more US-based would be better placed to provide specific advice, sorry)

my dad was recently in this situation and he wound up getting a contract job with a cemetery. there are jobs out there, it's just a question of looking in perhaps unconventional places.

yeah, the guy is my dad, also

there's at least some time before all this happens (his current job ends next year and he'll have a pretty decent severance package). and today he underwent some significant surgery that i'm optimistic will do wonders for him, so he'll be in better shape by the time he has to seriously start dealing with this

still, hell of a spot to be in :/

It's rough, but having computer skills is one of the few ways "make money from home, ask me how" can work out for people.

ugh, i just had one of my worst interviews ever.

pro (novice) tip: if you are doing a phone interview with a group in a conference room on the other end, they will not talk on the other end.

they will just sit there and let you yak until someone says 'we have to go on to the next question' and 'we're almost out of time'.

WCC painfully OTM upthread.

Latest WTF experience while trying to apply for work: I am told that the employer is only looking for people who live in certified HUBZone neighborhoods. Excuse me for not being a gentrifying opportunist.

I was once turned down for a 9-to-5 office job on the basis that I didn't own a car and the nearest bus stop was *gasp* a mile away. Like they really thought it impossible that someone could walk that far. I pointed out that as a child I'd walked a mile to school every day, but they were set in their views.

Well, I guess I'm back here is where I'm at.

I can talk to myself without feeling like my presence is stopping other people from talking to themselves. I can bitch about headhunters and their dumb ways to my heart's content. I can post pictures of dirty dronerock boys without feeling like I'm imposing on other people.

I have a limit on how much headhuntry I can deal with in a day. There comes a point where I don't want to be bright! and chirpy! and personable! and employable! any more. I am sick of explaining how an overinflated salary is not a compensation for treating your employees like they aren't human beings, or for having to deal with cnuts. I am sick of explaining that no, really, *insert random town in Hampshire* is not a reasonable commute from South London. I am really sick of having to take SQL tests administered by people who know zip about SQL.

Here is a hott boy, though he is neither dirty, nor particularly dronerock, either, but he has some pretty christmas tree lights.

https://31.media.tumblr.com/77e9416010e71a4aded50b65d3111b39/tumblr_n3er0xWF8Q1qgze9ho3_1280.png

Is working from home an option for you (both personally, and is an option in your line of work)? Just curious - and feel free to tell me to STFU.

I've been working from home for 3.5 now and so I am curious about other people's opinions about it. I thought maybe the solitude would do my head in but in fact this hasn't been the case at all. I think going back to sharing an office *would* do my head in tho. Think I'd need my own office if I did.

*3.5 years*

No, it's not a bad question to ask at all!

i did discuss working from home at my last job (my boss and the other programmer both worked from home, and it worked really well for them) - but, in discussion, one of the things they both agreed was that working from home works really well *when* you have a partner/family life. If you work in your study for 8 hours, and then your partner and/or kids come home, and you have reasonable social interactions with them (and especially if you have a regular social life outside the home) then it's apparently fine! Also, you have to be really comfortable with being on the phone a lot, which I really am not. I have an upper limit for the amount of phone time I can face. (This was a big problem, with having an off-site boss at the last job.)

I live by myself, and I know from (6 months of unemployment or whatever at this point) that being by myself for prolonged periods of time like this, is very, very bad for my mental health. One of the things I most need from going back to work, is a regular social interaction environment, where I'm expected to turn up regularly, and perform basic small talk or whatever. I have an incredible ability to survive prolonged periods of aloneness (I currently can go 4 or 5 days at a stretch without speaking to another human being face to face) but I am also aware that it is very, very *not good for me*.

(Sometimes things like ILX can help with this. But whatever gives also takes away. There are stretches where ILX is super not-good for me.)

But, it seems there are lot of people, especially IT folk, for whom working from home is a great option! I'm just not one of them.

The thing about recruiters is something to which there is no easy solution - there will be always be those who put their commission before any satisfaction of doing a job properly and enhancing people's lives by matching the right employee to the employer. I was fortunate enough to find the diamond in the rough, but I did so via LinkedIn, which I know a lot of people don't like. It did mean, however, that I was able to observe his posts on there, see that he knew and cared about the industry (as he didn't only post job stuff) and so *probably* was a decent guy before I approached him about the job I was interested in. My instincts were, fortunately, correct and he ended up being one of the very few people I endorsed publicly via the LinkedIn site.

Yeah, I recognise it's a major setback, not using LinkedIn, but I do not feel comfortable giving out so much personal and identifying information to a company that have already shown they aren't great with data issues.

Have been speaking to my old boss about references stuff, and aawww, he is so great. I do actually miss my former boss. Don't miss the rest of the company at all, but I do miss my immediate boss.

Phoner interview went OK. I hate phone interviews (especially on speakerphone, because it's so hard to hear!) but it's nice to be able to do an interview on your bed, in your pyjamas. The guys who interviewed me seemed OK but it's impossible to tell without physically meeting people and seeing what the environment is like. Straight White Dudes will always describe an all-male environment as "totally relaxed, totally friendly" but it takes walking in there with breasts to find out whether it really is. When he was talking about the team, he initially said "guys" then realised I was a woman and corrected to "people" and immediately apologised for it, and we had a bit of a laugh over that, so it seemed like he's not a jerk. I don't really like the industry, but it's an industry I'm familiar with so that counts in favour, I guess. Hmmm. So much would depend on the environment. Also, formal clothes, ugh. I don't think I even have formal work clothes any more; at least not ones that fit. I suppose I can just pretend I'm cosplaying Daniel Kessler if I have to wear a suit every damned day.

P.S. Headhunters: do not EVER call me by the diminutive of my name, not in an email, not over the phone, just not EVER. What the living fuck. Very tempted to shoot back an email saying "Thanks, Bobbie" (the headhunter's name is not Robert, but this is the kind of thing) and see how he likes it. Ugh.

surely an interviewer should use what ever name you've used in your email, CV and covering letter? Otherwise they would be just *guessing* the diminutive of your name (given that there's at least four possibilities I can think of?).

Formal clothes is a bit :-O nowadays unless the job is client-facing (which mine is, sometimes).

Yeah, the job is occasionally client facing, and though I suggested the concept of "The Office Tie" which we employed at my old job, that got laughs, but they said sometimes more than one of you had to meet a client at once?

Diminutives are just... it's not even which spelling variant they would use, but the fact that he feels entitled to even use one in the first place? NO. Use the name I have on my CV, my covering letter, my email. It's pretty clear what I consider my name to be.

Exactly.

Does someone called James get routinely called Jim?

I am sure that people called James routinely get shortened to Jim or Daniel to Dan, without their consent, and usually if it matters to them, they have a way to say politely but firmly "actually, it's James" or something like that. But you know, if you had "Mark" on your CV your email your cover letter, and someone in a business setting just started calling you "Marky" - you'd give the side-eye a bit to that.

Anyway, I am back for the next round next week. I don't know how I feel about this. I will know better once I get in there and lookit the place.

Anyway, it's just the headhunter doing that, and not the actual employer, so it doesn't matter.

The very first phone interview I ever had was scheduled for Thursday, August 14th 2003. I got home, waiting by the phone for them to call and they never did. I tried to call them eventually - no response. Turned out that a power outage had blacked out most of the eastern US! When I got a job as an editor of an oil and energy journal the following year, the first issue I edited was about this incident and why it took so long for the power to come back on (there's no National Grid in the US so they couldn't transfer power from elsewhere. There's an Eastern grid, a Western grid and a Texas grid).

Well, the phone interview was re-scheduled....I had two further in person interviews in the UK after that - it was down to me and one another person and were struggling to make up their minds and eventually chose the other person. Maybe I had a lucky escape as it was quite a bizarre job - editing a textbook which I'd used myself at uni (new editions come out every few years) and liaising between the various authors all of whom were quite eminent names in cell biology. They always held their meetings in a big Georgian house round the corner from Abbey Road studios, and when the interviewer showed me the previous edition of the book it had a picture of them all on the back cover dressed up as the Beatles as they appeared on the cover of Sgt Pepper.

Although I got fed up by the time I was 5 of people saying "but what is your 1st name?" (I still get that btw) I at least haven't ever had to worry about people shortening my name.

Haha, that's hilarious. (The Abbey Road thing, to GG.) That kind of thing could either mean that it would be a fun place to work or an absolutely awful place to work in a ~hilarious japes~ (oh god kill me now) kinda sense. But yeah, when you don't get a job, sometimes you discover ages later things that, really, you find out you're kinda relieved that they chose the other person. That power outage thing is kinda bizarre, but yeah, at least it wasn't you!

I wish I could be happier and more confident about this place. Part of it is: well, the other job that I was discussing on Monday sounded *so* amazing, and I really wanted to work there. But it would be going back to the medical world (yay!) but the whole thing is, because it's back in that world, if they knew about my previous employer and the whole scandal there (oh I still can't even bring myself to type out anything about what happened there - it was based around something that happened years before I even worked there. I was unaware of it when I was hired, and I worked my fingers to the bone to try to sort out the aftermath of it when it broke, before I resigned in protest over their disgusting and disgraceful handling of it) but all they would have to see is the name of that company, and I'd be tainted by association and I'm terrified that's what has happened. Argh, paranoia.

So I'm kinda torn between "don't really know if I want *this* job" and "had a lead on a really great job that seems to have vanished" and wish I could be feeling less ambivalent about the whole thing.

Oh. Headhunter 2 says that ~better job~ won't actually shortlist candidates until Monday. I wish I could go back and erase the panicked post I made above. :-/

Learn to keep your mouth shut, Branwell Bell.

Good luck with that.