Job Hunt

Okay. I'm getting to wonder about my chances of finding gainful employment. I've put in about 20 applications in the past 3 weeks, not to mention the countless inquiries, visits, revisits of the past year. Nothing. Not one call back. At first, I was being upfront with my salary requirements. I'd tell them just what I needed to consider the job. The unemployment office actually called me in to a class of others who had done the same. Why? We were all "red flagged" for looking for difficult to find work and asking for too much money. They warned us to stop looking for positions in our old fields. Turns out this class was for people who had "weird" qualifications, like "artist." Or "electrical engineer." Or anything that wasn't "office/clerical". You see, in Jeb Bush Florida, the unemployment service is not comfortable assisting people who insist on being educated in such esoterica. We needed to just settle down and accept that we were beggars in this new world and we had to buck up and take less money no matter how much our fancy education cost or how hard we had worked to get it. Can't type? Of course you can! Sit down out here and learn on our new state-of-the-art typing programs. What, you don't want to be a data entry girl? Why not? Low pay? Well, little lady, you're hardly in a position to demand better than $6.50 an hour!

It seemed to me that this department of unemployment was much more intent on producing good-looking numbers for the governor. If you plug all these misfits into good old secretary jobs with starting pay that would make a teenager take a pass, then your unemployment numbers would go down. Can't get them into those jobs? Well, all you have to do is wait 7 months. If you haven't managed to convince them they can live on minimum wage by then, no problem. You cut off their unemployment benefits. Now, they're officially off of the record. They don't exist as unemployed anymore! The numbers look better and better!

Well, my 7 months was up last October. I've been looking into just about every kind of job imaginable. I even stopped asking for a living wage on my apps. Now I put a dainty "negotiable" in the little wage blank. Hasn't mattered. The only job I've managed to land was as a pizza maker/deliverer for a small pizzaria. $6.40 an hour plus tips which averaged 10 bucks a day. 10-12 hour days, seven days a week. Plus I got a t shirt to wear and a great hat. Yeah, I only lasted a month, but for that brief, shining moment, I was exactly the kind of worker bee that Jeb had intended.