Trying to Join the Workforce

Susie has been back in residence with me since Memorial Day.  She has been devoting many of her hours to writing, and just as many (if not more) to trying to find work.  She has done this both the 21st-century way (by going to Monster.com and the Websites of different businesses here in Columbus), and the old-fashioned way, by seeing HELP WANTED signs in business windows, and walking in to apply.

I have been forthright with her–looking for work is neither easy nor fun.  She is also aware, both from my telling her about it and now from experience, that just because you have applied somewhere, and conscientiously dotted every i and crossed every t when completing the information does not mean you will get called for an interview.  One major change is that at least she gets an acknowledgement email, even if it automated.  In my work-hunting days, pre-Internet, many employers would take the application and that would be the last contact you would have.

Susie did have a job for 1½ days about two weeks ago.  She was hired at a fast-food cheesesteak restaurant on N. High St., near the OSU campus, and she described the hiring situation as being a “minimum wage Hunger Games.”  They hired her and another person, and would watch them work for about a week, and then hire whoever did the better job.  Human resources meets the Colosseum, I suppose.

After Susie, because of her lack of experience and the tendency to become easily frustrated (which I admit she inherited from me), caused a logjam during the lunchtime rush, so the manager told her she was fired and gave her her wages for her brief illustrious career–about $50–in cash.

She took it in stride.  I am thinking the situation would have been even more intense had this been when OSU was in session.  (Summer school began Monday, but there are nowhere near as many students as there are the rest of the year.)

I wish I knew if Susie would consider this a last resort job or a first choice.

Susie picked herself up, dusted herself off, and started all over again.  This afternoon, she interviewed for a sales job at Macy’s out at Easton Town Center.  It’s a long bus ride, but Susie took the initiative to make a “dry run” yesterday to familiarize himself with the place, so she would not be late because of being lost.  (I have never shopped at Macy’s.  Indeed, I have never understood people who shop for recreation.  I do remember Macy’s in its previous incarnations in Cincinnati.  At one time or another when I lived there it was Shillito Rike’s, then Lazarus, and then Macy’s.)

And she has another interview for a desk clerk job at the Renaissance Hotel downtown tomorrow morning.  She had applied for a different job there, but she was not eligible for this job because it involved handling liquor.  But, they’re hiring desk clerks, so her interviewer passed the word along.

The only place I have expressly forbidden Susie to apply is at a convenience store.  (Since they sell alcohol and cigarettes, I am not sure she could work at one until she turns 21, but it seems like every time I turn on the news I hear that one has been robbed.  In Cincinnati, we called them “stop and robs,” since too many people seemed to think they turned into ATMs after dark.)

I also hope she can bypass temporary agencies altogether.  I bounced around several of them in Boston, Cincinnati, and Columbus, and my experiences were not good ones.  Last year, I posted on City-Data.com to ask if the temp agency experience had improved in the 20+ years since I last worked at one, and the answer was no.  If anything, it seems to have worsened.

The worst experience I had with a temp agency was in Columbus in 1986.  I was close to broke, and barely able to afford a tiny room at the YMCA, so I needed work desperately.  I had no phone in my room (this was at least a decade pre-cell phone), and called the agency every morning asking if they had an assignment for me.  As someone with typesetting and proofreading experience, along with a typing speed above 70 words per minute, I thought they would beat a path to my door.

I answered ads in The Columbus Dispatch which promised “hired today, work tomorrow,” and that the sky was the limit for earning power.  On one day, when I made my daily call, the woman told me they had a job for me, they were waiting to hear back from the employer.  Could I call later?

Three phone calls later, they still had not heard from the potential employer.  Could I try again later in the day?  The woman on the phone became very angry when I began singing, “It seems to me I’ve heard that song before.”

My job placement counselor was a woman whose existence I still question, other than on a business card.  Every time I called, she was either on another line, out of the office, at lunch, taking a vacation day, or in a meeting.

Susie peppered Easton Town Center businesses with applications. Instead of applying at each business individually, one can apply for jobs at all its businesses at one site.  I am pleasantly surprised they would have the foresight to streamline the process like that.

I don’t know how long her hiatus from education will last.  I have told her (as has Steph) that I would rather she forego college altogether than take out loans.  College loans are the modern equivalent of the sword of Damocles.

As of November 1994, I have been employed without any gaps, which means that I have mostly missed the wonderful world of searching for work online.  I have read mixed reviews about sites like Monster.com, and I have heard that Craigslist ads are very seldom legitimate.  I usually sat down with the classified section of my local newspaper, pen in hand, ready to circle anything that struck my fancy or for which I felt I was qualified.  Then I would mail out a résumé or call the number, and wait.  And wait.  I can remember when the Sunday classified page was one or two very thick sections of the newspaper, and now it rarely takes up more a column or two.

This time is Susie’s entrance into the working world.  I know that, except for some small under-the-table jobs in Marietta the year after I graduated from high school, work was hard to find in 1981.  Ohio was 49th in employment (second to Michigan) at that time.  I did not work until I ended up in Boston in the fall of 1982.  Within a week, I was washing dishes at a deli in Coolidge Corner, the hub of Brookline, in the shadow of the S.S. Pierce Building and the birthplace of JFK.  (That job lasted about 10 days, when I was hired as a typesetter for The Harvard Crimson.)

I am trying to keep a line from Gibran’s The Prophet in mind: “Work is love made visible.”

Bachelor Dad Today

I’m at the Whetstone Library with Susie, since she’s going to the "Passport to Egypt" show that’s starting at 2 p.m.  I’m doing the bachelor father thing today since Steph is in Cleveland–for the first time since she was discharged from the Cleveland Clinic last summer.  (It’s not for anything medical.  She teaches in the Relgious Education program at First UU, and there’s a conference of R.E. folks at one of the churches in Cleveland, so she’s overcome her squeamishness about Cleveland and headed up there.  I was still in bed when her ride picked her up at 7 a.m.)

I’ve already got dinner started (Steph cooked a chicken yesterday; before Susie and I left the house, I put it in the Crock-Pot and turned it on LOW), and did two loads of laundry.  While the first load was going, I looked at the Job Notifications that Monster.com sent me, none of which were anything I could do, in a practical sense.

Sometimes I feel as if I shouldn’t even be pursuing part-time work.  The endless "At least you still have a job" refrain plays in my mind over and over, and I wonder if I’m gobbling too many of the goodies in the bowl if I take on a second job.  My job isn’t endangered, although I don’t relish the possibility of 10 unpaid days per year over the next three years (which will happen if the union contract currently on the table passes), but at least the State of Ohio is not doing massive layoffs, nor has the possibility even been spoken aloud.

It’s like the mixed feelings I had about a friend’s independently wealthy co-worker.  She inherited a comfortable sum of money when she turned 21–not in the Bill Gates or Donald Trump category, but enough to live reasonably well for life.  Yet, she still pursued a regular 40-hour-per-week job.  Part of me admires her for being conscientious enough to feel she had to work for a living, but another part of me wondered if she was taking a job away from someone who truly needed it from a financial and survival standpoint.

A Word of Thanks…

…to Ladypoetess, who was kind enough to E-mail me instructions on how to fix the font sizing problem I had with last night’s entry.  Thanks to her, the body type in my last entry is all one size.  I wish I had the wherewithal to create a “before” and “after” display.

There hasn’t been more than a drizzle of rain today, but I wouldn’t have believed it when I took my break at 3 o’clock.  I glanced out the window of my break room, and it was so dark outside that some of the street lights had switched on, especially in the parking garages up and down Front St.  I was bracing myself for a cloudburst to commence when I left work for the day at 3:45, but it never materializes.  There was just enough to wet my hair, but I didn’t miss an umbrella.

I transcribed like mad most of the day.  When my ears were crying for rest, I typed an ex parte order or two and published the orders that had been signed.

During Watergate, my family and I sneered endlessly when the transcripts of some of Nixon’s White House tapes were released.  The transcripts were so riddled with notations such as “(inaudible)”, “(unintelligible)”, and “(expletive deleted).”  (I did see a bumper sticker that said EXECUTIVE DELETED, which I thought was funny.)

I don’t laugh so much about that as I used to.  The people who transcribed Nixon’s tapes were working from equipment nowhere near as sophisticated as what I use every day at the Industrial Commission.  I have heard bits from Nixon’s tapes at the National Archives, and they are of such poor quality that I was glad they included a transcript along with the recordings.  I at least have the advantage of using word processing (as Amish as the State’s computer system is, it still has its advantages), whereas they had to retype entire pages if they misheard or omitted something.  I wonder how medical transcriptionists managed in the pre-computer days.

I’m taking both the 11th and the 14th off, for the Old-Time Radio and Nostalgia Convention in Cincinnati and Steph’s TEE (transesophageal echocardiogram) at Riverside Hospital, respectively.  I’m just dreading what I’ll be greeted with when I arrive at work on the 15th.  (Nothing to do with taxes; our refund has already come, and it’s nothing but a pleasant memory.)  I’m worried that the backlog will be as bad as it was last fall.  The dictation load is feast or famine, and I need to brace myself for both.

Whenever there’s nothing in the dictation queue (now there’s a word I never heard or used before the advent of computers in the home and office!), I type Statements of Fact and ex parte orders, as well as lump sum advancements, etc.  That’s when I pull out the headphones and put a music compact disk into the computer’s CD-ROM.  I need to keep the volume to where only I can hear it, but I have a modest stack of CDs to listen to while I type.  I have two brick-sized external speakers, so I’m usually able to hear while I work.  (Sometimes I work up such a head of steam when typing the computer has to catch up to me.  In the hot type days, that was the earmark of a good Linotyper.)  Depending on my mood, I’m either listening to the Moody Blues (Days of Future Passed or Every Good Boy Deserves Favour) or Neil Young (Live Rust) or Meat Loaf’s immortal Bat Out of Hell.

One thing I realized during one of my many playings of Days of Future Passed is that it was a crime when “Nights in White Satin” and “Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)”, a.k.a. “Tuesday Afternoon” became so popular on FM radio.  They’re beautiful songs, but having them stand alone just doesn’t do them justice.  To truly appreciate, you need to hear the entire disk, preferably with good headphones and barring as much external stimuli as you can.

I felt the same way about “Dogs,” which is the best cut on Pink Floyd’s Animals.  In my junior high days, my FM dial was locked in at 95.1, WXIL from Parkersburg.  Their graveyard shift D.J. was “the Electric Warrior,” Cosmic Gerry Stone.  He often played about a third of “Dogs,” and it was the part that included the “dragged down by the stone” and its aftermath.  That part of it is memorable, but when I heard the entire cut and the rest of the album, I fully appreciated it.  (As a Star Trek fan, I loved it when Stone would identify himself and the station,  and add, “…and we are metamorphisizing on Stardate 7702.27.”  That converted to February 27, 1977 by the Julian calendar.  I had a weird habit in junior high and high school of dating letters that way.)

I have headphones on and I’m listening to Gerry Rafferty’s City to City.  Forget the British Invasion–Scotland gave us many good rock artists: the Bay City Rollers, Gerry Rafferty, and Al Stewart head the list.

MLK RIP