It is with pride that I present the first of a serialized account of my recent adventures in the electrifying 21st Century Amusement Park. No, I don’t mean the ride in the Large Hadron Collider (although that final twenty-minute acceleration in the super proton synchrotron to the peak seven teraelectronvolts is worth every penny). With Labor Day right around the corner, it’s the rusty merry-go-round in the World of Employmentland. Or Non-Employmentland, as is the case for many of us. Some events have been invented for ease of understanding and to keep the narrative at a bubbly and high-spirited pace; others I left to burn with the unquenchable taste of truth. It is from these contrasts that create those magical moments for this Op-Ed columnist and imagery that resonates with familiar tones in his readership.
PART ONE
I had just set the controls of my personal airship, the Silver Pelican, on auto-glide over the Chesapeake Bay in preparation for another grueling session in front of the iMac, in my continuing, though heretofore unsuccessful quest to find a paying job. The internets, of course, are the preferred application procedure for almost every potential employer, putting as many obstacles between the applicant and hiring manager as possible. Meet or talk to a real person? In your dreams.
After pouring myself another mango and tonic (a variation on a Rum Rockeroo; more on this later), I loaded the Futami self-confusing artificial intelligence employment database software into the Mac’s hyper drive, punched up The Who Sell Out on the PA system, and began to waste another afternoon pretending I share Corporate America’s absurd notion that an $8.50/hr. job has as many qualifications and responsibilities as the vice president of the company. Hey–you’re advertising for a grocery clerk. Doesn’t matter though; they believe it. Sick thing is, it may. They just compensate it like it was 1910 instead of 2010.
We’re rolling back the wages and benefits for you!
I recently spoke with a career counselor who told me to re-do my entire documentation–resume, cover letters, all of it. She said at my age, seeing as how I’m looking at that “career change thing” (a nice way of saying that I’m really in the soup), I should chuck anything that doesn’t relate to the race-to-the-bottom jobs for which I’m applying. Unfortunately, I saw her point: they’re looking for young drones who will work for nothing, and expect less. Intelligent, creative types, especially those of us nearing retirement, are now applying against people less than half our age, not to mention half-way across the world, for entry-level jobs. We are little more than walking advertisements for Goody’s Headache Powder for HR Departments. I took out almost everything sophisticated relative to thirty year’s experience and replaced it with meaningless fluff like “team player,” and “takes initiative,” as if I was sixteen years old. My resume, my life, and my achievements, for what they’re worth, are now reduced to one page.
At least when I was sixteen, you could just walk into a place, actually meet the manager, and after briefly looking you over, they’d say something like, “Can you start on Monday?”
Near the top of my newly revised curriculum vitae, under my name and address, is a header for “OBJECTIVE.” After saving my latest high score on “Galaxy Girl” (part of an impressive video game collection on the Silver Pelican’s raid array), I decided to be honest with everybody right off the bat (they’ll figure it out quickly enough anyway), re-opened my resume and wrote “Apply range of abilities toward expanded career path.” Sounds credible, right? My career counselor liked it, but still felt it a bit dicey. She suggested adding something eye-catching like “Sales Associate” or “Customer Service Rep” after that. Has it really boiled down to this: at this moment in history, in the once-greatest country in the industrialized world, if you’re middle-aged and unemployed and don’t have a resume that confuses people with Albert Einstein, or don’t know him personally, you are basically hosed?
“Hey Mr. Buzzwell, check it out: another garden-variety middle-ager trying to get a lousy job here at USA, Inc. One more middle-class Dad who played life fair and square; close to retirement, and then we wiped out his job and half his IRA at the worst possible time. Now he’s just trying to find something to stay afloat.” “Sucks to be him, all right,” says Buzzwell. “Toss his paperwork out with the rest and tell him the usual– too many applications…wasn’t among the best qualified..all that crap. On second thought, don’t reply at all. Just ignore him. And then run and get me a triple-shot caramel machiatto cappucino with extra soy milk foam and cinnamon sprinkles. And make it a big one, will ya?”
The mass media touts the mature worker as a real asset to the employment ranks. Wise, stable, experienced, dependable, clocked in on time for thirty years, responsible, knows the drill. The truth is we’re annoying. We expect something fair for our efforts, and just a little protection for our jobs and our savings. The 98% of us who every day scrape off more imitation leather from the Chinese shoes offered at Lou’s Loafer Lounge still vaguely remember something about our once-enviable quality of life. What we are is expendable. And they’re trying to finish us off.
It’s a real self-esteem killer when you discover that even though you’ve had a good job for thirty years you evidently don’t even have what it takes to work at the box store. In the past year I’ve filled out applications at my friendly Bag ‘n’ Load, my neighborhood Bloat ‘n’ Go, the various marts – Wart Mart, Drain Mart and Cringe Mart, the Buy-Too-Much, and even our local Food Parts store. I recall one of them had a remarkably comprehensive application for a position that could have been competently filled by an common budgerigar.
In fact, get this: Julian, my pet budgie, applied at the Wag ‘n’ Bag, the big pet warehouse down the street as a part-time customer service associate and was actually scheduled for damn interview! These mecenaries parlayed a sweet tax deal with the county with the usual bogus promise of bringing more jobs and of course wiped out all the neighborhood mom and pop pet shops: Bob’s Budgie Barn, Cap’n Burl’s Bow-Wow Bunkhouse, Fish! Fish! Fish!, Patty’s Possum Palace, Cousin Carl’s Kitty Kat Korral – all gone.
Hell, those bastards at the Wag ‘n’ Bag never even called me back! I was so pissed I didn’t speak to Julian for a week, and that’s a big sacrifice for me, as I have more insightful political discussions with that plumed pundit than with many human acquaintances. The only reason he didn’t take the job was because after meeting the pimply-faced department supervisor, an insufferable cockatiel named Boogie, it turned out they were really looking more for a cage cleaning associate than the toy demonstrator the ad had led Julian to believe. When you’re being paid in seeds, you can only tolerate so much.
At any rate, mighty slim pick’ins if you’re an unemployed human over forty. Over fifty? Are you crazy? Pushing sixty? We’ve always had age discrimination in this country but this feels deliberate. How could anyone survive on these wages in Cheesedale, let alone Manhattan?
I want to go up to some radiantly insipid hiring manager at a food store and ask him with a straight face if maybe some additional credits or classes at the community college would help. I know I’m skilled with vegetables and I’m strong on fruit juices–always have been– but all right, there are other areas in which I can no doubt improve, things like canned goods arranging and cereal box deployment. But does my future manager really think that’s what’s holding me back from getting a foot in the door in the exciting and competitive world of retail grocery clerking at this point?
I suppose I should take the Republicans’ advice and just unload one of my Aston Martins or sell off about twenty thousand shares of Goldman Sachs and be back on the links in no time. Or maybe move back in with my 80-year-old mom. How about move in with Newt Gingrich’s or Mitch McConnell’s mom instead? Certified, anti-american lunatic John Boehner wants to raise the retirement age to 70. Hey John, take a break from your golf game and have a look around at the conditions you and your corporate profiteers have created. America is just a worker’s paradise, isn’t it? Had we all not taken “early retirement” at 55, we’d just be drowning in good paying jobs at seventy.
Damn, I should have stuck around, and I can’t wait to tell my kids about Congressman Boehner’s fantastic job creation plan. Can you imagine the enthusiasm tingling through all the young people, minorities, middle-agers, and the rest of the deferentially-described “discouraged” workers (whose real unemployment figures are calculated at depression-level rates of over 20%), as this torrent of payroll checks cascades over their heads? Why not raise the age to draw Social Security to 80! And throw Medicare into the Wall Street casino while you’re at it, too. It’s just socialism for losers anyway, and Reverbo The Human Boy and 90% of the rest of his peers will be pushing up bindweed before they even see their first check. Let’s repeal the entire liberal agenda and privatize the whole damn thing. If you ain’t rich, you can’t afford it. Corporatocracy at it’s most efficient. It will be jobs-o-rama here in no time. The conservatives can see it now: 100% employment finally realized in the USA under their watch. Welcome to Drain-Mart. Too bad we don’t pay you enough to buy anything we sell here.
They are trying to finish us off. I know I said that already but I like the way it sounds and I really believe it. It almost doesn’t matter that hardly anyone with an IQ above 12 takes these implausible ideas seriously, as long as the mass media keeps jamming microphones into the mouths of avaricious schemers who are actively promoting these destructive models.
Well, as long as my lighter-than-air account was still open at Harry’s Helium Hideaway, I was good for another week of cruising for income generating opportunities on board the Silver Pelican. I had just noticed an opening for a floor mat rotator at an airship salvage yard, when the weirdest damned noise suddenly came from somewhere aft of the aft ballast tanks. I can only describe it like a whooshing sound, as if the rear cargo hatch had sprung open. My investigation revealed the most surprising and delightful source of the audio phenomenon imaginable. Emerging from a luminous cloud of sparkles and beams, and attired in the latest in leisure blimp-wear, was none other than Ross Perot!
I stood there, stunned. He does look good in pastels; it seemed the appropriate response. The peculiar but prophetic 1992 United States presidential candidate shortly broke the silence. “Now Larry, you’re probably thinkin’…well, Ross, what are you doing here? What’s the deal on this? Well, the answer is on these charts I’ve prepared,” he said, taking out a handful of tables and graphs from an overstuffed briefcase. “Fix me one of them Rum Rockeroos that your drinkin’ and let’s set these up in your command pod, Larry. You and I are going to fire a bulls eye right into the whole job jugular vein. By the way, I. Love. This. Blimp. How come I don’t have about six of these?”
I thought of saying, “Ross, you could probably buy sixty of them,” but all I could think of while staring at this incredible vision, whose existence on my ship was unclear by all accounts, was, “Why is he calling me Larry?”
Next: Ross and Reverbo load an IGBB (Inter-Galactic Ballistic Bazooka) into the Pelican’s forward launch tube and blast 30 years of economic madness a new blow hole.
Reverbo Critic-At-Large
