Unemployed is my new status.

Over the past 20 years–particularly the last 10–I have watched people in my age group wrestle with their jobs and joblessness in unexpected ways. Faced with an unplanned career detour at 54, I have joined the ranks of mature, overqualified, displaced workers.

I did not quit my previous job; my job quit me. It feels like a break-up.

Doo, doo, doo down doo be do down, down
Come on come on
Down doo be do down, down
Come on come on
Down doo be do down, down
Breaking up is hard to do.,,

HA-HA! Or, for those who may not immediately recognize this song: LOL!

I suppose there is some sort of peace of mind in knowing I am not alone in my situation.

Some people I went to high school with are retiring after 25 or 30 years of service–these are people who had a plan that worked out for them. They became teachers, clerks, state employees, went into the army or civil service as a career, and have diligently completed their required amount of duty. Maybe they did not encounter change or were not as impacted by it as others. Some of these retirees are launching or considering second careers. Kudos to them!

Others I know are trying to hold on for dear life. One of my friends has had her career interrupted to deal with cancer; another was forced to take a demotion to continue working because her existing job was eliminated as a cost-saving measure, another received a pink slip after 30 years of service because she refused to leave her family to transfer to another state. We middle-aged Sisyphus rock pushers try to stay the course and remain calm as the ghost of Harry Chapin chants ominously in our heads: The rock is going to fall on us:

Everybody knows the rock leans over the town
Everybody knows that it won’t tumble to the ground
Everybody knows of those who say the end is near
Everybody knows that life goes on as usual round here

And, yes, there are a few unfortunate souls who have lost their perch entirely and are hopelessly sinking or have already sunk. One of my best friends lost his full-time job almost five years ago and though he has a college degree and plenty of work experience, he has not successfully been able to re-enter the workforce and now depends on the charity of family members and food stamps to survive. Sadly, I know a good many of these lost characters in search of a livelihood.

There but for the grace of God go I.

I am reminded how John Bradford spoke those words as a prisoner in the Tower of London when he saw criminals being led toward their execution. Watching these struggles of my peers to hold a job is like watching the evicted Okies ruined in the dust, piling their belongings on their trucks, and hitting the road to become migrant workers in John Ford’s film of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

That was a 1940’s view of the Great Depression, the time period in which my parents were born and that my grandparents were living and trying to work. They never forgot that experience.  They saved everything and wasted nothing. They raised us with the values they understood when times were hard.

It worked. Life was good, or so I’m told, and so it seems, when looking back.

People were comfortable and prosperous in the 1950’s, unsettled and ready for change in the 1960’s, apathetic and complacent in the 1970s, and excessive and materialistic in the 1980’s.

In his 1987 novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe showed us how even a “Master of the Universe,” who has managed to reach the pinnacle of success and have it all, can be one wrong turn away from experiencing total devastation and end up losing everything. It is the lesson of how one mistake or accident can bring you down.

I paid attention to that. It felt true.

Fragile and volatile. That was Wolfe’s 1980’s view of the unstable economy. We had been so worried about Inflation in the 70’s. When the crash came, it was called a Recession. And we seem to keep having these. It seems like we can’t recover even though politicians and money handlers talk about the Recovery. But Bailout seems more accurate.

They give us fish but keep closing the fishing holes where we could fish for ourselves.

We have had the 1990’s. A new millennium. We are in our second decade of the 2000’s.  It’s all a blur. We worry so much about being politically correct we are afraid to say anything. We can’t afford quality so we super-size quantity. We spend too much and everything is disposable. But it’s okay because we recycle. Go green!

What have we learned from going through all of this together? I have been living and mostly working through these times and I don’t have a good answer.  Just a resounding question:

What the hell just happened?

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

I am not supposed to be unemployed at 54.

I am supposed to be working until I am 67 and a half. Then I can retire. That’s what I was told.

Back in the beginning, when I had my choice to make, I took the career path!

I was a college student from 1977 to 1983. I spent about two years as a college level instructor as I transitioned from academia into the workforce. Since I started working in my chosen profession in 1985, I have been on one long career path in various positions related to training development and technical writing with some hops, skips, and jumps up and down the ladder. 

Along the way, I got married (in 1990) and I had two daughters, one in 1991, one in 2002.I have bought one house that I live in and purchased seven cars and am currently paying on loans for two. I have paid tuition for both of my daughters to attend private schools because I believe in quality education.

I also believe in lifelong learning. That may be why at this crossroads, I am considering going back to school. But really I need to work. I can’t think about retirement now because I’m not done getting the things we need yet.

It is hard to think positively about starting over at some new job for some obvious big picture reasons, including my age in relationship to the overall workforce and the overall state of the economy; and some more personal reasons as well, including the fact that my family depends upon me to provide income to our household and the unpleasant details surrounding how I was let go from my previous employment unjustly and without warning.

What the hell just happened (2)?

On so many levels, the rules of the game have changed for all of us older workers.

Unless you decide to embrace a belief system in which the pursuit of happiness can be ultimately valued higher than the pursuit of a career. And then, if you can be lucky enough find a reasonable way to be happy with what you have, earn enough money to address your basic needs and pay ever-rising taxes, and blissfully ignore the tidal wave of marketing and commercialism because you have the willpower to want less than others. And then, finally, you have to be willing to accept being a little (or a lot) worse off than your parents were in their lives.

I came of age in the 1970s, at a time when our middle-class working parents were in jobs that lasted longer. Parents were in professions or trades, part of a company or organization, members of a union or not,  state or municipal employees, public or civil service jobs. Some people were independent contractors or technicians, had their own businesses, but that was unusual and not the norm.

I don’t think my father ever had a resume in his life and I know my  mother didn’t. My father was a firefighter on a 24 hour shift every third day and worked part-time as an appliance repairman on his days “off” until he retired at age 55 with a pension that he received until he died suddenly at 58, which was much too soon.

My mother was a homemaker and caregiver to my disabled sister. She was never paid for this service and has never retired. At 80, she continues to run her own home and care for my sister. She and my sister both receive Social Security benefits and a small survivor pension–even with their combined incomes they fall below the currently recognized poverty line.

My mother was a product of the middle class but she would now be classified as a poor senior. Her home is paid for and she is in good health. So she is comfortable and fortunate.

I can only hope that somehow I will wind up in the same boat. But, I will have to do some strategic paddling to get there from here.

I never thought it would be an issue for me.

I was voted Most Likely To Succeed in my high school graduating class. And, I have succeeded, for the most part, at everything I have tried. But here I am suddenly without an income. It is hard not to think: After all this way I have come so far, will I fail to reach a socially acceptable finish line?

Who would have thought I could wind up “an unemployed jacket salesman.”

It’s a funny reference.

In 1976, Ann Beattie published a novel called Chilly Scenes of Winter. It was made into a film in 1979 by Joan Micklin Silver. It is about a guy named Charles (played by John Heard) who loves Laura (Mary Beth Hurt). Charles has a best friend named Sam (played by Peter Riegert). When asked what he does for a living, Sam introduces himself as “an unemployed jacket salesman.” It is a clever and funny way to immediately develop Sam’s character to an audience in a few choice words: We understand that Sam is chronically unambitious. And we come to find he is more happy maintaining his status as an unemployed jacket salesman than is unhappy Charles who goes to work each day in an office and supports Sam, allowing him to stay in a spare room in a house Charles has inherited from his grandmother and giving Sam money to buy groceries even though Sam fails at this task and instead spends the grocery money on wine because he runs into a sale when he goes out.

And so I think about all the ways, I could present my own character.

I am an unemployed paper carrier.

I began working when I was 14. I had a paper route. I was responsible to deliver the evening paper Monday through Saturday and the Sunday edition in the early morning. I worked 365 days a year. To go on vacation or have a day off, I had to find a substitute and either pay them some fee for filling in for me or participate in the common  practice of getting another paper carrier to fill in for me in exchange for filling in for them when something came up. That meant working quickly to prep both sets of papers and deliver two routes in the same time frame. All paper carriers in the city in these days were kids with bikes. Adults with cars did rural routes or served as route managers in those days. Paper carriers were independent contractors who had route managers. Paper carriers were encouraged and incented to “sell” to non-subscribers on their route but that was optional; there were no quotas or real pressure. Adding new subscribers meant earning more money from collection on a route and was part of a reward and recognition program that commended carriers for elements of customer service such as receiving letters of satisfaction and having no complaint. Paper carriers paid a monthly bill for the face value of their papers. Subscribers paid the paper carriers by the week but most collected for four weeks once a month. Paper carriers depended on the tips which ranged anywhere from the subscriber saying “keep the change” when their monthly bill was a dollar amount and odd cents or offering what was owed PLUS a dollar. At Christmastime, subscribers gave paper carriers extra tips sometimes as much as five dollars. It all added up.

I am an unemployed waitress.

I gave up my paper route to become a waitress at a department store restaurant when I was 16. I worked 30 hours a week while going to high school, 8 hours on Saturday was mandatory for the part-timers, and I worked up to 40 hours per week in the summertime and over Christmas holidays. Because the restaurant was inside a high-volume department store, it was slammed at Christmastime with what seemed like endless lines of shoppers hoping to sit for a time and take a break enjoying Shopper’s Specials. For this work, I made a small hourly rate which was less than minimum wage and counted on my tips. In addition to taking orders, submitting them to the cooks on the line, and delivering food, waitresses did the math to calculate the food bill and customers would pay what they owed and leave a tip. The tip could amount to the difference between the food bill and the next whole dollar amount, or it could be 15%, or it could be more, but that was rare. At the time, getting a $1.00 bill as a tip –which were known as “Georges” among the crew–instead of change in coins was the mark of a high achiever. And when you got those Georges, you felt like you earned them but the coins were important too. It all added up.

I was able to buy a used car, pay for its gas and insurance, and personal expenses. The part-time waitress staff of younger workers allowed a set of senior women to work a regular stable 40-hour week for the company. We filled in the blanks so that people like Marge, Pauline, Alma, Trudy, and Martha Jane could be full-time employees with benefits, and have holidays and vacations and even retire from these jobs. This part-time job allowed me to pay my way through college as a full-time (20 credit hour) commuter student living at home with my parents. College tuition at that time was approximately $305 a quarter and I could earn that as a waitress, easy. I had no loans. I had no credit cards. I paid as I went.  If I wanted something expensive or to go on a vacation to a beach, I had to save for it. That was they way you did things back then.

I am an unemployed switchboard operator.

I gave up my waitress job to become the evening and weekend switchboard operator at a local car dealership–I was the part-time fill in the blank for a position held by a senior woman named Eleanor who worked a 40 hour week with benefits including a retirement plan. I covered the additional hours required for the business. The switchboard I operated was an old style system. There were numbered holes on the flat panel board that were the extensions within the building a cords. There were holes across the bottom of the console that were outside lines. When calls came in, you plugged into the lighted line and answered the phone by speaking the company name along with a greeting “Good morning/afternoon/evening…how may I direct your call?” During the day callers had to be connected to the correct department and person in sales, service, parts. This required placing the corresponding cord pair of the live line into the proper hole on the panel board for the extension. If the hole was already lighted it meant the receiver was open and you would plug-in and listen for a few seconds to make sure the caller and receiver were talking and then you would push a button so the conversation was private. When they were finished talking, the lights would blink to show the call was disconnected and you would then unplug the cords to free up the extension and the outside line. Most callers in the evening hours between needed to speak with one of the salespeople who walked around the showroom floor or out in the lot.  When a call came in for a salesperson, I would have to turn on the PA system and announce the name of the person who needed to answer a phone call over the loudspeaker. After a specific name was announced, an extension on the board would light up showing where to plug the cord in to connect the caller with the receiver of the call. It wasn’t brain surgery but it was important and having this job allowed me to pay my own way.

I am an unemployed assembly line worker.

After I graduated from college, I decided I wanted to go to graduate school. In the summer before graduate school, I left my job as the evening switchboard operator to work as a full-time assembly line worker making vending machine sandwiches. I was able to work 40 hours a week with overtime at a higher hourly rate. I took this job to earn as much as possible before leaving to live on my own in an apartment while attending graduate school. I was added on as summer help to a crew of middle-aged and older women who did the work full-time, earning salary and benefits. The company had a contract to pack a summer lunch program for schools and parks and I was brought on to help meet the demands of this contract. Working on an assembly line was mindless work but it required speed and attention to detail. The set up was exactly the same as the famous candy factory assembly line that Lucy and Ethel work on in the classic I Love Lucy episode called job Switching. We assembled sandwiches. There was a set-up for each type of sandwich, This meant that you would work at a station on the assembly line related to the type of sandwich being assembled. At times you would be responsible for setting the base flat and straight (bottom of the bun), adding the meat or the cheese or filling, and topping it off (top of the bun), operating the automated cellophane wrapper machine, affixing the proper label to the wrapped sandwich, and packing the finished product neatly in large cardboard boxes for shipment. When the sandwich making was done, we had to assemble the boxed lunches for the contract which included packing a sandwich we had made with chips, fruit and drink into a pre-formed box and then pack the lunches into large cardboard boxes for shipping. We did this work around a table rather than on the assembly line but the dis. Each station’s individual success depended on the speed and skill of the others and the work involved meeting standards and functioning well as a team.

I am an unemployed college instructor. 

To be able to go to graduate school, I applied for programs that offered the opportunity to receive tuition and a monthly stipend for working as a teaching assistant (TA). I was accepted into the Professional Writing and Linguistics Program at Northeastern University in Boston. which was one of the few technical writing programs in the country at the time. My parents weren’t able to pay for my choice to pursue higher education. There was no “student loan” options available at that time. The only reason I could consider doing such a thing is that I could pay my own way and support myself by working for it. I had to earn it. I moved from home and my hometown on Square Root Day 1981 and began earning my graduate degree. My parents helped me with living expenses by sending me a care package every quarter that included some extra cash. I remember spending $20 a week at the grocery store. I ate a lot of soup, macaroni and cheese, peanut butter sandwiches, and Ramen noodles. I left my car in Ohio and used public transportation the entire time I lived in Boston. I got rides from friends with cars when I needed to go somewhere I couldn’t navigate to by walking or using the MBTA. I found places to drink that offered free peel and eat shrimp during happy hour and there were a lot of arts and activities around Boston that were essentially free. And I took advantage and made the most of my opportunity to experience life in that amazing city. I had dreams of becoming a famous writer then. I even had a short story published in a literary journal. I completed my degree in Professional Writing and I have found employment as a professional writer in some capacity since then so the “writer” part came true, even if I did not become famous, I felt successful.

So, I could also tell you…I am an unemployed writer. I am an unemployed editor. I am an unemployed training developer. I am an unemployed data base specialist. I am an unemployed documentation manager. I am an unemployed project manager. I am an unemployed independent consultant. I am an unemployed scoring director. I am an unemployed technical writer. I am an unemployed wife. I am an unemployed mother. I am an unemployed caregiver. 

But does that really make me sound any less unambitious than being just another “unemployed jacket salesman?”

Or as Dr. Seuss so wisely put it:

I Am Sam. Sam I am.

So, I am unemployed in search of a job.  Maybe I will find one.

One last interesting detail about Neil Sedaka and his song Breaking Up Is Hard To Do. He recorded it twice. He had a #1 hit with the song in the 1960’s in his heyday. He recorded it again in the 1970’s. It was slower version the second time around. But it made the charts. He made his comeback: Sedaka’s Back.

Maybe I will have my comeback, too!

But I will always be a writer in search of a reader. Maybe this blog will find one.

If so, sing along with me:

Doo, doo, doo down doo be do down, down
Come on come on
Down doo be do down, down
Come on come on
Down doo be do down, down
Breaking up is hard to do.

Don’t take your love away from me
Don’t you leave my heart in misery.
If you go then I’ll be blue
’cause breaking up is hard to do.

Remember when you held me tight
And you kissed me all through the night
Think of all that we’ve been through
’cause breaking up is hard to do.

They say that breaking up is hard to do.
Now I know I know that it’s true
Don’t say that this is the end.
Instead of breaking up
I wish that we are making up again.

I beg of you don’t say goodbye.
Can’t we give our love another try.
Come on baby let’s start a new
’cause breaking up is hard to do.

They say that breaking up is hard to do.
Now I know I know that it’s true
Don’t say that this is the end.
Instead of breaking up
I wish that we are making up again.

I beg of you don’t say goodbye.
Can’t we give our love another try.
Come on baby let’s start a new
’cause breaking up is hard to do.

Doo, doo, doo down doo be do down, down
Come on come on
Down doo be do down, down
Come on come on
Down doo be do down, down
Breaking up is hard to do.

-Neil Sedaka