The Bankrupt and the Squirrel

With all of the economic turmoil going on nowadays, it's become commonplace in the media to make references to the Great Depression. We are constantly hearing predictions that, within a year, there will be apple sellers on Broadway and people throwing themsleves out of window. No doubt bank night at the movies will make a comeback, too.

Of all the things I have seen or read about the Depression, perhaps my favorite is a cartoon I once saw about the bank failures so common in those days. It shows a probably unemployed and certainly dispirited man sitting on a park bench, talking to a squirrel. If memory

serves, the squirrel is labeled "economist". The squirrel asks the man why he didn't save some of his earnings and put it in the bank when times were good.

The man replies curtly that he did.

I've always thought this cartoon was not just about the victims of Depression-era bank failures but about misfortune in general. The past few years, I have been "privileged" to learn the hard way that there is nothing like misfortune to bring out other people's moralism. There is something about encountering the unfortunate that makes some people respond not with compassion or kind words but an almost instinctive need to find some explanation as to why this unfortunate soul deserves his misfortune.

One of the worst aspects of being out of work, or of being stuck in the wrong kind of work, is having to endure such people. I recall a woman I met in Hillel telling me that, having failed to find a job for nine months out of college, my failure must be due to having been "super picky" about what I wanted in a job. Never mind that, in the recession of 2003, thousands of other recent graduates were meeting the same fate.

But even this pales in comparison to what I like to call proponents of the One Big Flaw. When you are out of work, people seem to love searching for the One Big Flaw that is preventing you from being a success. Your One Big Flaw is then revealed to you--always in a tone of voice that suggests the speaker wants to be helpful and has no idea that his assessment of your One Big Flaw is actually an insult.

Here is a brief list of One Big Flaw theories I have encountered, or have heard from other people that they have encountered. All of them are things I really ought to say to the squirrels in my life who want to find some explanation for why I am where I am right now:

1) "You interview poorly." Because failure in job interviews can never be attributed to the unprofessionalism and sometimes outright duplicity of people who conduct job interviews. I had this said to me once by a good friend who had gotten reports back from people he had sent me to for informational interviews. It could not have been more off the mark. I had actually had more than one person who didn't hire me make a point of contacting me to say how well I interviewed.

2) "You haven't figured out who you really are and what you really want." I really don't understand what it is that makes some people unable to tell the difference between a job hunt and a spiritual quest. One of the better career-related sites I've stumbled on recently makes wonderful hash of the idea that if you just "do what you love", the money will follow. Doing what you love, this veteran career counselor notes, often leads to volunteer work. For goodness sakes, people, stop giving the unemployed advice on how to have a career when what they need is a job--you know, one of those things you rely on to provide money for such non-essential items as food, clothing, and shelter.

3) "You're not putting enough time into it." It's a cliche of job hunting that, when you're out of work, you should treat your job hunt as a full time job. I have yet to meet anyone actually capable of doing this, and the one report I have heard of someone who actually did turned out to be a single mother of three facing eviction. There are not enough hours in the day to do all the things people tell you you absolutely must do if you want to find a job.

4) "You aren't networking enough." Networking is not the be-all and end-all of job hunting, and I've learned, over the past few years, that I'm not especially good at it. Many people aren't. More to the point, many people flat-out don't have much of a network to rely on. We don't all belong to three country clubs. Even more to the point, I have had an awful lot of my time wasted over the years trying to network with people who seemed to have no idea what I was trying to do--no idea that I was looking for referrals to colleagues in their fields who might have a job or know of someone who did. I recall in particular one Madison Avenue lawyer who took me to lunch, forced me to listen to his entire career trajectory since his days running a lemonade stand as a kid, and then said to me, "Well, I won't give you any contacts, because I'm sure you have enough of those." Umm...no. That's kind of why I'm here.

5) "You're not going on enough interviews." Always said with an implication that the job seeker can just magically pull interviews out of his or her you-know-where, this is probably the most condescending piece of advice you will get. And the one that shows the person in question hasn't the faintest idea what it's like to look for work these days.

A friend of mine in New York recently chatted with me online about an interview that wasn't--an experience I'm sure I had at one point or another job hunting. She was scheduled to have an interview but was phoned beforehand and told the company had already chosen another candidate. Subsequently, though, she kept seeing the same position advertised on a major job site, and she called up to see if perhaps she might interview for this position after all. She was curtly told that, yes, the first person who had accepted the job had backed out but that, again, another candidate had been chosen and was about to start.

6) "You need to read more career-related books and take their advice." Umm...I have. And the advice they give is either obvious or contradictory. One of the few infuriating parts of my TEFL training was a section on resume writing in which my trainers gave instructions from a book called The Resume Bible on how to format a resume. I tried meekly to object that I had seen similar books on the subject and that they all gave different advice. Believe it or not, employers have different ideas about what makes for a brilliant cover letter or a perfect resume.

7) "You want too much money." Always a favorite. There's nothing like listening to a gainfully employed person tell you that your unemployment is due to greed. I, on the other hand, have had the experience of doing temp assignments for $8 an hour in New York City and having temp agencies send me to interview for jobs paying less than $30,000 a year--not a living wage in a city where even a studio apartment costs a minimum of $1000 a month.