I went for a walk and kept my head down to stare at my phone like a lot of people do these days. Google likes to follow my habits. It knows which websites I’ve visited. So the app sends me suggestions on what to read. Well, I found an article from a business journal about someone who’d applied for over twenty-two hundred jobs in the United States. He still hadn’t landed one. Wow. In the teaser, you could call it, it said the person was thinking about giving up the search. How depressing. What a hopeless feeling it brings. The teaser went on to describe the man as having served in the Navy with a handful of tech jobs he’d included on his resume. I scrolled down the page with my thumb to read the article, and as soon as I did, a pop-up appeared with subscription options. So if I wanted to read further, I would have to agree to be swamped by emails every day by this journal. No thanks. I get enough junk as it is. So much for reading it.
But what I read had bothered me for the rest of the night. Over twenty-two hundred jobs. Think about that. If he were to apply for one job a day, the search would’ve gone on for over six years. And maybe that was how long it had taken him so far. I might give up too.
So who’s to blame for a person as qualified as him to be unemployed? He could be overqualified for many jobs. After reading briefly about his experience, it was enough to know about him that he was surely competent. What hope does it give those of us who don’t have his qualifications? I’ve been applying here and there once a week for close to five months, and no one has considered me for an interview. It doesn’t help that I don’t know what I want to do for a regular jobby job. You know. Something I don’t want to do but have to do because it’s sustainable, and the company offers benefits as opposed to something I want to do which has no safety net. I’m walking along a razor, fighting against globalization, artificial intelligence, lack of skills, specialized jobs, recession, staff reductions, increased expectations from companies, and geography. All of this leads to burnout, or how I felt after what I saw in that article. I’m better off ignorant.
My therapist told me I should tell my supervisor that my work is impacting my mental health. She’s right. And I should transfer to another department. I could work with drivers again like I did in the beginning, unfortunately for less pay but also a healthier balance instead of stressing over work, even when I’m gone. My days and nights consist of work, exercise, eating, and sleep, in that order. But work is on my mind all day about mistakes I’d made and the inundation of assignments, and when I’ll get fired. Where will I land?
A new marketing strategy they assigned on Thursday morning, one I don’t understand at all, possibly had to do with a bonus program for customers. I don’t know. I didn’t attend school for a degree in marketing, and so what are these buzzwords? Not only do I have to complete that assignment, but I also have to close my cases, prevent businesses from attrition, and answer emails that are three days old. And the list keeps growing. There aren’t enough hours in the day unless they expect me to work overtime which I refuse to do. They put me on a salary, and I’m haunted by the word expectations. Expectations, expectations, expectations… I can’t maintain, and I’m supposed to meet a quota each month, which I’m not even close to meeting. Our products suck, and most customers aren’t interested in buying. We’re far inferior to our competitors and do nothing close to competing, making everything a harder sell.
I have my own book of business with over three thousand clients, and I’m supposed to take care of them all. One of them was interested in staying with our company but was offered a deal from a competitor of a fifteen thousand dollar signing bonus, and he asked me what we could do to compete against the offer. I didn’t know. I’m clueless when it comes to marketing, and my company is full of so many stipulations that I had to ask the higher-ups what we could provide. And so the higher-ups decided for me to pitch a promo of five dollars off any order over thirty-five dollars. Are you kidding? I thought, how the hell would the owner reject the fifteen thousand dollars for a puny promo like what my company offered. Not to mention the customer was partially deaf, so I had trouble hearing him talk over the phone. At one point, he said, “Do you even know what you’re doing?” No. Not at all. He could tell I was inexperienced.
There are so many actions I can’t take. They go against company policy. I have to email everyone who wants me to set up their promotions, and they have to agree in the email and over the phone. The email has to be accurate, and I must show the email to the higher-ups to receive a credit, or I could be terminated. I don’t know how much commission I would make off each one, but I do know my payslips have been sad. I can’t make a living off this job, and they couldn’t make me work any harder.
I have to walk away to restore my sanity. I’m not sleeping. I’m no longer enjoying the simple pleasures. My job has clutched me at the throat. I’m cooked. I should complain to HR, but would they have my back? I’m not sure. I heard HR works only in the best interest of the president and the company. Employees are expendable. I’m not needed. They wouldn’t care if I left tomorrow, evidently through the payslips. But hey, they provide me with medical and dental insurance from an insurance company that blows, of which my therapist has refused to partner, so I have to pay her the full amount without any coverage.
And she’s just okay, nothing great. I see her once a week and don’t feel any better. Have you ever sat with a therapist and ran out of words to say before the fifty minutes were over? I go through that problem every time. And she just sits through my laptop and says close to nothing. And when she does, she regurgitates what she has already said. I feel hopeless. I’m waiting for a glimmer.
I had a nightmare where a snake was chasing me down the street. It had legs from what I can remember. I awoke around 1:30 and couldn’t go back to sleep. All I thought about was the snake and my job. They correlate. So now I can’t focus on what’s in front. I wander like a zombie and feel like one too.
I applied for another position yesterday but doubted I was qualified. These companies want experience, yet they’re not willing to train. How is anyone going to learn anything when all they’re looking for is someone who has learned already? Where does one start when beginning a new job? This is the worst that life has to offer: searching for a job. I wish it was over, but I have no choice. I’m not making enough money to live. You would think full-time employment these days would support anyone but such isn’t the case. They wave their flag of diversity yet pay someone scraps. It doesn’t make much sense. These job sites offer nothing but positions in which I have experience, but I don’t want that experience any longer.
I’m going back to work today after taking three days off because of my left hand and how I can barely pull my cell phone out of my pocket. That’s how they expect me to work. The doctor still hasn’t called me back to set an appointment. I have a feeling he won’t. Maybe it’s because of the possibility of worker’s comp, and he wouldn’t want to get involved. I don’t know. It’s just a guess. I could be negative, and he will call to set one up.
All I do know is this isn’t the way I can function. They’ve dumped a bunch of work on me after I was gone for three days. It isn’t right because other employees had been off for about a week, and everyone had to work their cases. Yet I took a few days off because of a medical emergency, and my cases were untouched. The amount of work has grown and left me buried. Where’s the sense in that?
And then there’s the pay, which makes the least sense of all. They promised me a certain salary but I saw from the last two paychecks that I was being paid significantly lower than before. Now it’s below living standards. Call me cynical, but I don’t subscribe to people’s words when they say that I have to find my calling, or that I need to go soul-searching. I can look for those things for the rest of my life and still come up short. Why, I’ve been doing that already for many years and have never come close to finding any semblance of a soul, and I can look for my calling all I want but may never find it for the rest of my life when all that’s left is a job that overworks and underpays. I thought I was getting a promotion, but not even close.
The sun has risen in the distance as I type this slowly, trying not to miss a key. It’s the middle of the week, and I’m hoping for the best to come before the weekend. Now that I have found a path to get there, I can gather the ability to relate to others and their passions. They seem so furtive as if I’d found them out, except I can’t. I’m not that observational.
But anyway, the middle of the week is like a dog that scratches itself. I watch him as he works his ear and shakes his head at what has gotten to him. It’s the dead of summer. I say “dead” between my gums with emphasis. The heat has weakened me. I drink my water like it’s never going to last. Just like the weekend is too short, so is water. And the heat dehydrates me. What else is there to do but stay inside until the summer ends? And that won’t be for at least another several months. September rolls along just like a train that coasts down the track too slowly. And I’ll be stuck in August with a job that breaks my back. My new supervisor told me she wasn’t a micromanager, which isn’t always good. I mean, no one loves a micromanager. Except I think we all need someone who can watch us for what we’re missing.
A lot has happened since the newest development. I’m working on a salary, not hourly. No longer do I have to punch the clock. Now some people may say that that’s a good thing, but that’s them talking. I have to hold myself accountable, except I’m a different person when it comes to my job. I go a steady pace which doesn’t work for everyone, and that can bring a lot of stress to me. I worry about what will happen next.
I see a woman with a dog in the shop who ordered coffee. Her shirt says, “All I need is coffee and my dog”. That’s like me wearing a shirt that says, “All I need is coffee and my laptop” as people see me at this table. She should wear that every time she comes in here with her dog. It’s a K-9 police dog. Yesterday she wore a collared shirt that didn’t say anything. She should buy seven shirts that say the same thing. They can be different colors. I wouldn’t be pedantic about that. I wear shirts with nothing on them, no statements, no letters or numbers, just plain shirts that don’t bring attention to me, or unwanted attention that is.
The dog is panting, and he looks around as the lady chats with the older men at the long round table. I adjust to the sun shining through the window. They pull the shades down in here to keep it away. She left with her coffee now. I have nothing to look at. The shades come down. I take a break.
I’ve hated all of my jobs in adulthood except for one when I would deliver for restaurants when I was in college. That one was easy. We used walkie-talkies back then. The dispatcher would tell me to drive to a restaurant to pick up food, and I would deliver it, no problem. That job lasted all but a month.
Other than that, jobs have been hell. I was a substitute teacher for two years, and the kids wouldn’t sit in their seats after I’d told them to. They paid me eighty dollars a day to supervise the classrooms at those schools. I gave up hope of ever becoming a teacher. It took a certain person to do that.
I also applied through a temp agency when I was living with my parents right after college because no one was hiring. They set me up with the weirdest job. I had to file medical records in a trailer right out front of the hospital in the small town. They stuck me with a kid who was about nineteen years old. He was a thug. I was about twenty-three, twenty-four. I can’t remember.
The manila folders in which the papers were kept were so old that they were dry and sharp. I would get papercuts along the edges, and I would bleed on the folders. Not to mention the kid would try to fight me.
“What are you, a p****y?” he would say. “I’ll f***k you up.”
I would just keep my eyes on the medical records in that trailer and try not to engage with that punk. The job lasted for only two weeks before I turned that scumbag in to the temp agency, and I quit. I remember there were bandages on my fingertips after doing that miserable job. That was about as blue-collar as far it went.
When I moved to Los Angeles from the small town, I went with what I was good at and took up another restaurant delivery job. It was flexible, like most jobs in the service industry. I got to choose my hours, and I would write in my spare time (or attempt to write). It wasn’t easy driving through Los Angeles through all that traffic. I still get post-traumatic stress over the thoughts of some of those nights. Or maybe they were just bad memories. I don’t know.
There was one night when the transmission on my Honda Civic was failing, and I was at the edge of a cliff near Mulholland Drive after delivering sandwiches to some rich guy in Beverly Hills. When I released the parking brake and turned on the ignition, the car began rolling backwards towards the cliff, and I slammed the brakes. In order not to fall off, I had to punch the accelerator quickly enough, or I might’ve died. I closed my eyes, counted down from three and punched it just in time to where I could safely drive up the hill in that guy’s driveway. It still keeps me up at night.
Restaurants hated me when I came in to pick up food, especially the takeout people, because I didn’t tip them. Maybe I should’ve, but it was against company policy. But I dated some of those takeout women. It was unethical, but this was at a time when it was still socially acceptable. Now that that’s been taken away, I’m sure people are still doing it behind the scenes.
When I got good enough at my job, they promoted me to dispatcher. So then I was just a part-time delivery guy. I made more money delivering orders, but it was safer to sit in the office and listen to a guy singing loudly in the dispatch room. It was in the other room from the call center, which was all women with a man as the supervisor. They would take calls from angry customers and check the status of our drivers to see how close they were.
The call center was like a nursery, but the dispatch room was like a bar. Eighty percent of the dispatchers were high when they came in to dispatch. I wasn’t one of them. I always came in clean.
The guy who sang all the time was a movie buff who directed short films on the side. He’d spent over fifty grand on a short that lasted five minutes. Most of the money he’d spent was used on a crane to make a sweeping shot in one of the scenes.
The other dispatchers made fun of him behind his back. I felt sorry for him for spending all that money on such a wasted film.
But anyway, the dispatching job lasted for over ten years. People came and went obviously, and years went by too fast. Most of the drivers were either Brazilian or Bulgarian. They would speak in their native tongue to each other in the same room. I had no idea what they were saying. They were probably teasing us or saying bad things about us because we were forcing them to drive everywhere in town and not making them enough money. This was before the advent of cell phones as wallets. So, we drivers had to copy the customers’ credit cards using receipt paper and a mechanical object that I couldn’t name. Yes, those were different times before Steve Jobs took over the world.
Do I miss them? Well, I miss the partying or the self-medicating–depending on how you perceive the traumas I went through.
But one thing I do know. When people ask me, “How do you like it?” My job they were asking about. I would say, “It’s just a job.” In other words, I didn’t take it seriously, and it wasn’t who I really was.
