The Unemployment Thread

[animalrescuer]

In this thread, you'll be able to talk even vent about being unemployed for any length of time, how it feels and what you're doing to keep busy during this time.
I'm sure most of you are familiar with my situation. I've been unemployed for two years after college even though I have a college degree and I'm a licensed veterinary technician and no one and I mean no one is willing to give me a chance because I have very little experience! How am I supposed to get experience if I'm not hired because I don't have any? That is the stupidest thing ever! Being unemployed feels like you're the biggest failure in the world, you feel like you did everything right, but you feel like you did everything wrong! Maybe I chose the wrong college, another possible reason why I can't find a job! They want people who graduated from another college with the same major I graduated with! I know I'm not the only one in the country that's experiencing this, but I feel like I'm the only one sometimes. Everyone I know in college has the job they want, but me! And pretty much everyone in my family has a job but me! Well, my brother doesn't have a job either, but that's a different story. So far, I've been keeping busy with exercise, catching up on continuing education and watching TV and reading, but that's not enough for me. I pretty much get bored every single day and I'm sick of it!

If you currently don't have a job, what are your stories?

 

[D'Snowth]

A discussion like this came up in another forum I post at, so I'm just going to copy and paste my thoughts here...

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I don't know, but I honestly don't think you need a degree or even a college education to be a mail carrier... at least, that's the impression I got from SEINFELD:

ESTELLE: Why don't you take a civil service test?
GEORGE: I'm not taking a civil service test.
ESTELLE: I don't understand, you get job security, you get a paycheck every week...
GEORGE: I'm a college graduate, you want me to be a mailman?

But even if you did, in this day and age, with the job market and the way the economy is now, even a degree isn't a guarantee you'll get a job; I've known people who've gone to college, gotten degrees, gotten Masters and such, and either have menial jobs, or can't get a good job in general. My best friend in Canada's held about a hundred different jobs all at the same time, at one point, she was doing factory work, tour guide work, and teaching, and that was all at once!

Heck, even janitorial jobs want you to have X-amount of years experience... how much experience can there be to cleaning toilets?

The way I see it, there's two kinds of people in the world (yeah, I know that's an old saying, but I have my own variation): people with talent, and people with skill.

Now, the way I see it, talent is something that just comes naturally to people, some might say a person's talent is a God-given gift, and I've always been a firm believer that talent should be put to work, not sent back to school. Talent isn't something you can really teach, a person's talent is unique to their self and their personality; you might can teach them different method or techniques to possibly broaden their talent, but you can't teach them something that comes from within them. There are a lot of genuinely talented and gifted people out there, and as a friend of mine once said, the most selfish thing someone with talent can do is keep it all to themselves - talent needs to be exposed, and talent needs to be put out there for the world to see... unfortunately, that kind of world can be pretty dicey and picky-choosy, and sometimes those they choose end up throwing away all their talents and set themselves up for their own demise *cough*Lindsay Lohan*cough* *cough*Miley Cyrus*cough*

Skill, on the other hand, is a little different... now, say you want to enter a field that would require a lot of expertise in certain areas on your part, like medicine, law enforcement, engineering, or anything like that, then yes, I would argue that those are fields and areas where furthering your education in college or university would be in your best interest - surgery isn't really something you can just walk into and ad-lib as you go along, you really need to be able to know what you're doing and what you're going to be working with. Skill is something you can acquire with the right amount of education and training, but at the same time, skill is something you also have to develop something of a perfection at, especially if you're going into a field where other people's lives would be in your hands.

Of course, the downfall to both is the same thing: money. There's really no money to be had in fields that require talent (look at all the people out there who work multiple jobs to support themselves at art), meanwhile jobs that require skill simply want more and more money these days (it's hard to find a decent doctor who is genuinely more interesting in a patient's well being than their wallets).

 

[Drtooth]

But even if you did, in this day and age, with the job market and the way the economy is now, even a degree isn't a guarantee you'll get a job; I've known people who've gone to college, gotten degrees, gotten Masters and such, and either have menial jobs, or can't get a good job in general. My best friend in Canada's held about a hundred different jobs all at the same time, at one point, she was doing factory work, tour guide work, and teaching, and that was all at once!

Heck, even janitorial jobs want you to have X-amount of years experience... how much experience can there be to cleaning toilets?

The experience catch 22. The *&^%$ Experience Catch 22! Do you know how long that's been holding me back?

I mean, first of all, heck freaking yeah a degree is worth absolute garbage now. No. No... no... Garbage is freaking free. A degree sets you back a fortune, and you sell your mortal soul to credit agencies to pay for one, so it's actually worth less than nothing to the point that it will drive you into huge, incurable debt. And everyone that has one of those things that didn't spend all of Middle School since that didn't have part time employment get so incredibly screwed that I can't even describe it without saying something depraved and X rated. Suffice to say if you didn't spend your free, not doing school work or home work or chores or anything time working, you have no experience. And yeah. TRY to keep the grade point average up enough if you have to work after school.

But the experience thing is the biggest pile of manure ever. Yeah, I want an experienced surgeon operating on me or an experianced chef serving me a 50 dollar friggin steak. ANY freaking person can clean a friggin toilet, any moron can type in data entry if they have just the slightest keyboard skill. Why the *&^$ do you need someone who spent 5 amount of years at a crappy start up job to do a crappy start up job they're only going to take because they have to? That makes zero freaking sense. How the *&^% is someone without experience going to get experience if you can't get experience unless you already have experience. Hire someone off the &^% street to do something menial for crying out loud!

So, where from there? Well, we have an entire generation of kids who were brainwashed into thinking "you have to go to college because it's the get out of poverty free card" only to find out they were fed the longest, thickest line of bull going, and now to even get spending money to the extent of not having to beg for it from their parents, they have to fight to the death for crappy minimum wage jobs no one wants because they pay garbage because the companies' CEO's are greedy morons who will spend more than complying to a higher MW to buy politicians to make dang well sure they don't raise the MW out of principle. All the while we have these obnoxious fat loudmouths paid to be obnoxious fat loudmouths condemning anyone under the age of 40 for being so entitled that they don't want to work at 3am for 7 bucks an hour, all the while saying that it's high socialism to raise the dang MW. Yeah, it was a stop for you for 3 years in high school before you got the ultra stress inducing hard work of whining on a network and selling books about how awful everything. But HEY! Don't say a darn thing about how bad out corporate overloards are. They deserve all the money they inherited from their parents.

So yeah. Sore subject. You can blame politics and rich morons all you want for the lack of good paying jobs, but the true problems are obsolescence (Poor, poor coal workers will lose their jobs if we came up with a better source of energy, sure, but let's turn our backs on everyone that worked at Blockbusters, Suncoast, Boarders, and whatever you can use an iPad for now), outsourcing (crappy factory jobs are still jobs, and that's how working people carved a life for them selves in the 40's and 50's), and my favorite, the complete head up the butt-ness of HR jerks that only look for overqualified people with enough money already to do entry level midpaying jobs. They have no right to whine about how they create all these unfillable jobs when they themselves make them unfillable.

 

[charlietheowl]

I don't have anything to really say on this subject except being unemployed sucks, and it's frustratingly hard for me to find a job, even when I have progressively set my sights wider and lower on the job scale. Very irritating and many words I can't say on this forum.

 

[fuzzygobo]

This almost makes me feel guilty to have a job.

Once upon a time in the not too distant past, you could still walk into any business, no references or experience needed, tell the personnel clerk (the outdated term for HR people) you saw the Help Wanted sign, and within 10 minutes, you were hired. How soon can you start?

Nowadays, to even get a foot in the door anywhere, you have to know someone who works at the place you're applying for, to mention to the HR people "I know a good candidate for this position". Cold resumes are a dime a dozen. Which puts recent college grads at a disadvantage because if you don't know anybody inside that can go to bat for you, your career there is over before it even starts.

It's been almost ten years since I've had to deal with unemployment. I still remember how painful it was (mercifully it was only six months, but seemed like eternity). It must really suck when your ambitions are reduced from landing your "dream job" to settling for anything just to put food on the table (or stopping your parents from hounding you).

But this vicious cycle can't last forever.

 

[D'Snowth]

Just to lighten things up, anyone remember that SNL skit where Jason Sudeikis was LeBron James's high school guidance counselor? LeBron said that despite the NBA already offering him a contract, he decided he wanted to continue his education and go to college, which his counselor immediately tried shooting down, "Do you know how much a contract to the NBA is worth? It would take one thousand of me and one thousand years just to make your signing bonus!" LeBron says he's always dreamed of earning his diploma, so his counselor offers to sell his to him. LeBron asks if he'll feel ashamed to work with people who went to college, to which he counselor says, "You know how you get over that? You dunk on 'em! Then you hold your arms out and say, 'I guess they didn't teach you how to stop LeBron James in college, *******!'" Finally, the counselor offers one last anecdote: if he drives over 40mph, his glove compartment pops up, so he has to go to a garage where a guy - who didn't go to college - says he can fix it for $400, which makes him want to go back to his old college and burn it to the ground. LeBron is finally convinced not to go to college, especially since the counselor tells him, "If you don't know something, just Google it!"

Of course, the skit also had a funny stinger with Kenan Thompson as Kayne West's counselor.

COUNSELOR: Kanye? Look... go to college for one year, drop out, write songs about it.
KAYNE: Sounds good!

 

[mr3urious]

I recently applied online for a stocking job at Petco that requires no experience. Here's to the best of luck that they approve my application and schedule an interview. I previously applied for a job at Goodwill but they turned me down, probably because my resumé sucked, but I was able to improve on it a little more thanks to this job training program I started going to.

They've also helped me find a couple other jobs around my area that are available, so if Petco doesn't work out, I'll give those a go, though I have to apply in person.

 

[Pig'sSaysAdios]

I recently applied online for a stocking job at Petco that requires no experience. Here's to the best of luck that they approve my application and schedule an interview. I previously applied for a job at Goodwill but they turned me down, probably because my resumé sucked, but I was able to improve on it a little more thanks to this job training program I started going to.

They've also helped me find a couple other jobs around my area that are available, so if Petco doesn't work out, I'll give those a go, though I have to apply in person.

Did you get that job you applied for or any other job?

 

[mr3urious]

Did you get that job you applied for or any other job?

No I didn't, unfortunately. But now that you brought that up, I do have an interview today for a part-time courtesy clerk position at Fry's (a grocery store chain in Arizona owned by Kroger).

And I was able to re-apply for a job at Goodwill and even got interviewed by the asst. manager, though I'm only seeing that as a stopgap job.

 

[Pig'sSaysAdios]

No I didn't, unfortunately. But now that you brought that up, I do have an interview today for a part-time courtesy clerk position at Fry's (a grocery store chain in Arizona owned by Kroger).

And I was able to re-apply for a job at Goodwill and even got interviewed by the asst. manager, though I'm only seeing that as a stopgap job.

Good luck!