I Can’t Figure It Out

I rarely read op-eds from The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel because as a rule I find it such an unpleasant experience and, well, life is only so long. However, I deviated from my typical practice to look at this op-ed in the Washington Post and immediately came up with a question. Here’s her statement:

Corporations continue to ship good jobs abroad, while the few jobs created at home are disproportionately in the lowest wage sectors.

There appears to be evidence that this is the case. Unfortunately, the report cited has a problem. It’s comparing apples to oranges. Sectors with low median wages and low wage jobs are not synonymous. You can’t derive the wages being paid by new jobs based on the median wage in the sector. The jobs could be paying the highest wages in the sector or the lowest. There’s just no way to tell using sector as a benchmark.

Let me give an example. Median wages are higher in the healthcare sector are higher than in most other sectors of the economy and over the period of the last decade the healthcare sector has seen substantial job growth. Is this a good or bad thing from the standpoint of “good paying jobs”? The answer is there’s no way to tell based on this information alone. If all of the jobs are for cardiac surgeons, it’s a good thing. If all of the jobs are for bedpan emptiers, it’s a bad thing.

But here’s my question. Let’s assume that the jobs that are being created are mostly low wage jobs, as suggested by Ms. vanden Heuvel. How do you reconcile that with the assertion that the way out of our fix is more education. Will that result in a “Field of Dreams” outcome (“if you build it they will come”) or will it just result in the best educated bedpan emptiers and fast food order takers in the world?

I can’t figure it out.

28 comments… add one
  • jan Link

    How do you reconcile that with the assertion that the way out of our fix is more education. Will that result in a “Field of Dreams” outcome (“if you build it they will come”) or will it just result in the best educated bedpan emptiers and fast food order takers in the world?

    I believe it will be the latter. More education is simply not giving the results of guaranteed better jobs, unless the degrees are in science, math or targeted pragmatic majors. However, more and more students are opting for a generalized ‘liberal arts’ education, or even making up their own majors, which have weird names and no real serious worth attached to them.

  • Drew Link

    jan –

    I think Dave, as a historical proposition, makes some very thoughtful and provacative assertions re: education. I’m not sure I always agree, but we are all prisoners of our own experience. Some thoughts:

    So. I’m an education advocate.

    Me: A BS in Metallurgical Engineering. Nobody know what that means. Its Chemical Engineering in metal systems vs carbon/hydrogen chemically dominated systems. And a Masters in same.

    Then: process engineer in a plant environment. That means you wake up every day thinking cost, quality and productivity. That’s what process engineers do. Now this is in the late 80’s. And it became fashionable to say: “the problem with American business is they are run by idiot finance guys, and the manufacturing guys are second class citizens. We should pay them more!” Imagine. I was clapping. But I was young and stupid.

    Fast forward. MBA from the best business school in the country…….get into the private equity business with some interesting stops along the way. NOW…….you are in the game. Education, experience and scars have paved the way to influence and accomplish what you really want to do with your professional life.

    Now its no bullshit. No Obama-esque pontificating. No subsidies to cover the eff-ups. You are in the killing fields. You see what it really means to run businesses at the highest levels, not just from the perspective of some functional exec.

    You invest money – yours and your clients – and you win or lose. Its a merciless profession. Unlike politics, the metrics are as clear as perfect crystal. As in sports, and unlike politics, you perform or you are gone. And now you really realize why they pay finance guys the way they do. They are stewards of huge amounts of capital, and they can’t hide behind “well, the gloppada-gloppada machine had a yield problem this month”……………..as long as the govt doesn’t step in and subsidize.

    So the point? I think education is crucial to a positive result. Yes, experience etc is as well. I just have this spot in my heart for formal education as a seed entry to formulate the critical thinking and perspectives that last and inform a lifetime of work. Others may disagree.

  • Icepick Link

    So Drew, you say the metrics are clear. As the finance guys have taken over a larger and larger share of the country, the country has done worse and worse. Except for the finance guys, of course, who are doing better and better all the time while the rest of us slide into serfdom. It’s great to be Jamie Dimon or Vikram Pandit!

    Yep, the metrics are crystal fucking clear.

  • Drew Link

    You miss the essential point, Icepick. The “finance guys,” as defined as bankers, have been subsidized by government.

    Their grasp and accumulation of filthy lucre has been facilitated by government.

    You need to redirect your howitzer.

  • jan Link

    Drew

    You have a fascinating ‘life’ journey. There were so many moving academic parts creating the person you are today. So, I can see why you are invested in the idea of education being crucial to one’s success.

    However, kids today oftentimes don’t pinpoint their goals with academic pursuits like you seemed to do. So many go to college without a clue as to who they are, what they want to become, or even what interests them. College has become, for many, just an extension of high school, a place to park themselves until they become a little more mature, or simply get fed up with the educational experience.

    I personally think education needs a revampment, from the earliest grades on up. It should be restructured, revitalized and updated to address diverse learning styles, needs and the interests of today’s kids. And, I don’t think all classes should necessarily be geared to college prep either. For those, like yourself, yes college is a vital stepping stone. For others, though, it could be trade school, theater. And, for still others it could simply be an enrollment in the ‘University of Life,’ where they go out and experiment until their niche is found

  • Icepick Link

    Drew, the finance guys at Goldman worked for an investment bank, not a commercial bank. That is, until there was government money to be had as a commercial bank but not as an investment bank, and so they converted.

    The finance guys at AIG weren’t bankers either, yet they got gobs of government money.

    The finance guys at GE weren’t bankers either, yet they got gobs of government money.

    The finance guys at GM weren’t commercial bankers, until they filed the paperwork for their finance arm, after which they got government money. And that doesn’t even count the 50 billion or so poured into the automotive side of GM. Those finance guys got subsidized nicely.

    It’s not clear to me if Fannie and Freddie are supposed to be banks or not – it looks like NOT, in the traditional sense. They got gobs of money. Which incidentally subsidized every finance guy involved in real estate in the country for the last few decades.

    The finance guys at the big defense contractors get plenty of government money when they have their inevitable cost overruns. The government almost always throws more money at them.

    The finance guys at the oil companies get plenty of government subsidies to run their businesses.

    The same is true for the finance guys at Big Pharma, and the other finance guys in charge of the healthcare industry.

    I guess that leaves the VC guys in Silicon Valley. Except that pretty much all of the stuff done their is stuff that is spun-off from decades of Defense Department work. There’s a kind of subsidy, too.

    So, which of you finance guys don’t run to the government with your hands out for subsidies at every turn? I’m sure you will claim you don’t, but I’d love to see your company books to confirm that. After all, you claim to have sprung forth from the Noble Brow of Zeus with no one having ever helped you in any way for any thing. No help from government subsidized schools, no use of government built roads, apparently you only fly in and out of privately owned airports on airplanes that had no government contracts behind their development, etc., etc.

  • Icepick Link

    I guess the short story of all those conversions to commercial banks is, “Build it, and they will come.” You finance guys love free hand-outs as much as the next guy, and you always manage to get more of them, somehow. I guess it’s because you are so morally superior, yes?

  • Icepick Link

    Not to mention how much the financial sector in general has benefitted from QE and QE2 and the TWIST and so on and so forth, ad nauseum, ad infinitum. Unless you AS A FINANCE PERSON are not using any money at all, your ass is getting subsidized at the expense of everyone not on the gravy train.

  • Drew Link

    Icepick –

    I’m not a “finance guy.” I’m a business owner. Sorry to disappoint you. And the capital we employ hasn’t benefitted one bit from QE.

    Second, its admirable you spent so many words replying, but its all the same. All those various finance functions basically are in the same realm, and have benefitted from subsidy. And by subsidy I mean regulations, preferable sourcing of capital or bailout in the event of loss of capital.

    As I said before, your ire is well earned, but you should redirect your howitzer.

  • Icepick Link

    Well, Drew, are you a steward of a huge amount of capital or aren’t you?

  • Icepick Link

    As I said before, your ire is well earned, but you should redirect your howitzer.

    Shit. I can’t even afford a pea shooter. As Michael Reynolds likes to tell me, I’m a loser. I’ve lost damned near everything, and give me a few months and I will have probably lost what little is left. Meanwhile, you BSDs just keep getting fatter and fatter. FTR-BOTA.

  • Drew Link

    “Well, Drew, are you a steward of a huge amount of capital or aren’t you?”

    Yes. But we aren’t funded at retail, or by the Fed, with QE subsidy. We don’t do car loans or mortgages or things that get bailed out.

    Our funding sources are the endowments of major universities or medical research institutes. Teachers pension funds etc. Further, what we really have are commitments to fund upon our call. And that’s important, because those are gathered for a fund at time zero, and are live for about 7 years. Its not about what Helicopter Ben thinks today. And as I said, if a deal goes bad we don’t apply for a refund to the government like a bank, an investment bank or insurance company. Lastly, its not called “private” equity for nothing. Its been a universe outside of SEC regulation since 1940.
    Sophisticated capital providers (“qualified investors”) and sophisticated capital investors coming together to invest not in things you pick off the stock tables in the WSJ (“Gee, Apple looks cheap today.”) but illiquid, long term growth oriented investments in private companies where we actually take an active and collaborative role with the company managers. Mr. Dodd and Mr. Frank are attempting to destroy this right now, but that’s another subject.

    Do we understand investment theory? You bet. The portfolio managment tactics and considerations of our LP’s? You bet. Risk adjusted returns and the state of the capital and credit markets……discounted cash flow etc? You bet. But you may have noticed I have two degrees in engineering, worked in a manufacturing environment for about 7, and ran a small business for about three years. And then an owner for 15 years running. I’m not doing what I do because I took Finance or Investment 101, its because of the other stuff.

    We spend 90, if not 95% of our time on running businesses – organizational develpment, reaction to competitive or supply issues, manufacturing efficiency, capital allocation, marketing and sales channel development etc. So look, and I don’t want this to be infammatory, I can understand how people who don’t really understand PE can call it “finance,” but that just shows a lack of understanding.

    As for this: “As Michael Reynolds likes to tell me, I’m a loser.” Like me, he’s not shy. And I’ve been a frequent (and at times deserved) subject of his invective over time. I’ve done some research. Michael is a tremendous talent in his chosen field. But he suffers – IMHO – from the same disease as other creatives and specialists (the IT, entertainer, and advertising guys seem to be the worst) that because they are smart and talented in a narrow field they know all about everything, including business. And they have their tool kit of horror stories to “prove” it. I’ve been dealing with it for many, many years. I once made the mistake of promoting such a person into a general management role. About 6 months later this individual came to me asking to be “demoted.” “I can’t sleep, everyone is on my ass for decisions, time is short, damn, this is harder than I thought….” Well, yeah.

    So my unsolicited advice is to take Micheal for what he is, a very good writer (and perhaps he’s got some blossoming venture he’s conjured up) and probably rather well read. But as I’ve noted, and what always gets he and I at odds, he has some views on business and investment that create belly laughs for those of us who are successful practitioners of the craft. As they say, it is what it is.

    Lastly, I know I pissed you off several months ago in what you took as “needling” and what I intended as a pep talk. I know the job market is awful. I’m trying to do something about it in my profession, and in the philosophies I espouse. My message to you, then and today, is to not get down in defeatism, and to think creatively about how to deal with it. Those in the fetal position stay there. Those who rise up and fight will find a way.

  • Icepick Link

    Drew, the short description is this: You are gambling with other people’s money, and you take a skim off the top. THAT is finance.

    As for Reynolds? I despise him for particular reasons which you haven’t touched on. The fact that he called me a loser? That was funny because he thought he was going to hurt my feelings. But I’m burned out – completely burned out – and I’ve been told by the American economy that I’m a loser often enough that I’ve come to accept it as fact. There’s no getting around it, it’s simple empiricism at this point. The idea that he thought he was taking off the kid gloves? Ludicrous, and absurdly myopic.

    As for keeping my chin up and keeping a positive attitude? That is bullshit Drew, and that is why I hate your fucking guts. (That and your smug sense of superiority – really, Reynolds is the only person on the site that compares. Not even (s)teve has the arrogance of you two, and he’s a fucking doctor.) Seriously, what kind of bullshit is “Those who rise up and fight will find a way.” You do NOT UNDERSTAND what is happening in the economy. You do NOT UNDERSTAND what it means to be long-term unemployed in an economy with an UE rate up over eleven percent. (The only way they get to 9.1% is by saying we’ve dropped out of the labor force. That’s also bullshit.) Frankly, it’s like this. The economy has no use for me. None. Not one fucking use whatsoever.

    Here’s how much the economy doesn’t want or need me. The next to last job I interviewed for, things seemed to go well. When I didn’t hear back from them at the appropriate time, I called the HR rep who had set up the interview. The first day I couldn’t get a hold of him on the phone. The second day the receptionist picked up. She explained that rep wasn’t with them anymore, and promised to have another HR rep contact me. When I didn’t hear back the next day, I called again. This time I got an automated message telling me that the entire HR team had been let go. The next week I saw in the paper that the entire division of that company had been shut down – thousands of people lost their jobs. This was apparently just because the economy had it in for me personally.

    That’s a true story, BTW. It’s almost funny. It would be funny if it only had happened to me. It would suck to be me, but at least there would be a certain bleak humor in it. But those thousands that lost their jobs? They’re in the same boat. And I know lots of people with stories like mine, and I’m aware of millions more in the same boat.

    I’m aware of engineers for big successful companies who have been RIFfed this summer, with little press notice as the jobs get stripped from these SUCCESSFUL companies to magically reappear in places like China or India. Yeah, if I only keep my chin up, and move to fucking India, I can no doubt overcome my employment difficulties, and maybe make enough to afford some curry. Out-fucking-standing.

    At this point, I cannot get an interview. Not for anything. I’ve been unemployed for too long, and no HR rep will put their neck out for me or any of the millions like me. We’re dead meat. There will never be enough jobs in the country again that employers will be forced to hire the likes of me. Never.

    And expecting entrepreneurship will help me (or the millions like me) is bullshit too. Just today, driving around town whilst in the middle of various errands, I saw nothing but more businesses going OUT of business. Even if I could think of something to sell, who’s going to buy? There aren’t enough people out there spending enough money to keep the fucking Chinese carry-out places in business, what hope have I got? None. Besides, who’s going to finance me? It sure as shit wouldn’t be you, PE BSD. It won’t be the banks, they’re not lending to people that have assets and successful business models. (Oh, the stories I hear.) I don’t even have credit cards to finance some dumb-assed venture, so that ain’t happening either.

    That’s the truth. The economy has no use for me, and my Governor, of the state you look to as your tax-haven of choice, just wants me to die so guys like you and him don’t have to spend any money on us poor fucking losers. But hey, great news for you, Drew, you won’t have to pay any fucking taxes for a goddamned thing in this state. Excelsior, bitchez!

    So what<god-damned fucking use is “Keep your chin up”? We’re rapidly approaching the point where I’m going to be better off going to some banker’s house and trying to kill him, his family and his security guards in the hope of finding some spare fucking change in his couch than in even considering gainful employment. Worst case scenario? I am successful and get some spare change. Best case scenario? I get killed and my wife collects the life insurance. (It’s killing us to keep paying for that stuff, but you have to pay The Man, right? At least if you want to be able to afford to die.) But you want me to keep my fucking chin up. Yeah, that’s really going to help. Nice practical advice there, dipshit.

  • Icepick Link

    Actually, I sort of got to the creative solution to my job problem in my last comment. If us unemployed folks just go out and kill enough of you employed people, some of you assholes in charge will simply HAVE to hire us to replace the dead workers. The beauty of it is this: Just like Krugman’s Keynesianism, if it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll just do more in the second wave!

    Is that the kind of creativity I need to get a job?

  • Ah. Have you read The Ax by Donald Westlake, Icepick?

  • Drew Link

    “Drew, the short description is this: You are gambling with other people’s money, and you take a skim off the top. THAT is finance.

    Well, Icepick, that is simply factually incorrect, and rather immature, but it informs my following comments.

    You really need to look in the mirror, Icepick. You tell us you are a well educated and talented financial person. I have no reason to dispute that, except that you show no insight into what I do, certainly. You really should have a better grasp, given your stated expertise.

    Second, I really hope you don’t present to potential employers the way you do here on this sight. I know you’ll again think me the ultimate prick, but if I was the interviewer I’d dismiss you midway in the interview as an organizational malcontent.

    Reynolds and I were in one of our typically ascerbic back and forths and he made the comment “the reason we hate each other…” I responded, I don’t hate anyone. It’s bad form, unproductive and life is too short. And its true. My blog personality – as I’ve pointed out so many times I’m bored – is to be provacative with an intent to incite robust debate. It works with some, it backfires with others. (I don’t have an arrogant bone in my body, by the way. I come from too humble beginnings. Think about that.) I apologize, I really do, that this approach with you cuts so close to what is obviously a very raw nerve because of your current situation. I mean no harm.

    That all said, my basic message to you must remain the same, because I have to be true to my experience and principles: please don’t give up. If you have the qualifications and talents you say you do you have no choice but to fight the battle every day. I’m sure it is withering to the point of being overwhelming at times. But I once found myself on the midnight shift at the #4 BOF steelmaking furnace in East Chicago Indiana in January/ February/March where the wind can was whip off Lake Michigan and it at times is zero to 10 below zero – freezing me arse off – yet on the side 10 feet from this ladle of steel, I was burning hot. And I said to myself “and I got a degree in engineering for effing this???” Desperation and depression would be apt terms.

    And now, after a long journey and alot of sleepless nights and blah, blah, blah………..here I am.

    One thing is crystal clear, Icepick – you’ve got fire in the belly. I implore you – direct it productively.

  • Drew Link

    Icepick – PS

    Have you ever really looked at Dave’s career history? Talk about eclectic and self made. Think about it.

    “Hate my guts if you must,” but use it every day to motivate you to succeed and stick it up my………

  • Icepick Link

    You really need to look in the mirror, Icepick. You tell us you are a well educated and talented financial person.

    I don’t make any claim to be educated as a finance person. I was a “math” guy that ended up in finance in a round-about fashion. I never liked it, and I never really liked finance people. Mostly they’re boring as dirt, with a tendancy to think they can win at various forms of gambling despite being educated to know better.

  • Icepick Link

    Second, I really hope you don’t present to potential employers the way you do here on this sight. I know you’ll again think me the ultimate prick, but if I was the interviewer I’d dismiss you midway in the interview as an organizational malcontent.

    First off, it’s ‘site’ not ‘sight’. Secondly, you assume incorrectly that my demeanor here is my demeanor at all times. Thirdly, you assume that my demeanor NOW is the same as my demeanor in the past. Finally, you assume that how I would appear in an interview matters, when I’ve made it clear repeatedly that people in my position DO NOT GET INTERVIEWS ANYMORE. I base this not just on my experience, but on that of everyone I know in my position, and from what little reporting is done about those I don’t know but who share my circumstance. THAT is why I claim you have no idea of what the Hell is going on. You still treat the current job search situation as though it were sometime pre-December 2007. It is not.

    As for Dave being ecclectic and self-made. Please. He did that during the fat years. There is no point in his earlier life that he faced anything like the economic challenges enveloping the world’s economies over the last several years. It’s like listening to some Boomer cite* their own personal example of having worked their way through college back in the day without taking out loans. Of course they/you could THEN, because that was before decades of inflation in higher-ED tuition costs kicked in sttarting in the early 1980s. No shit you could do that then. Try that now, with the lack of jobs of any sort and ridiculous costs. Goddamn, you’re an entire generation of geezers saying “Back in my day …. ” and you haven’t even had the courtesy to get old, retire and get the Hell out of the way yet.

    But yet, that’s the helpful advice you have to offer: “Do what we did when times were fat – it’s bound to work now in the famine times!” Brilliant advice, and deep.

    * Cite. Site. Sight. Three different words. Learn them. Know them. Love them. Use them correctly.

  • jan Link

    I don’t make any claim to be educated as a finance person. I was a “math” guy that ended up in finance in a round-about fashion. I never liked it, and I never really liked finance people.

    So, Icepick, are your job interviews and quests in finance or math? If you don’t like ‘finance’ then why look for a job in this field? Your disinclination probably bleeds through in any interviews.

    “What you resist persists,” is an axiom I’ve found to be obnoxiously true. If you keep doing the same old thing, if you resist figuring yourself out, the circumstances in one’s life will persist, continuing to be a source of great frustration.

    Much like Drew’s experience at the steel furnace, most of us find ourselves in those ‘how low can you go’ moments. For me, this is often the time of greatest clarity. It’s when the excuses have run out, there is no one left to blame, and the weight of everything is just too heavy to carry anymore without either shifting the load or cutting loose from it entirely. I’ve had a few of those times, really awful times I wouldn’t relish reliving. But, the options do become crystal clear — one either shrivels under their misery/melancholy or , like a phoenix, rebuilds themselves/their life from the ashes of their dispair.

  • Icepick Link

    Drew wrote: ”I’m sure it is withering to the point of being overwhelming at times. But I once found myself on the midnight shift at the #4 BOF steelmaking furnace in East Chicago Indiana in January/ February/March where the wind can was whip off Lake Michigan and it at times is zero to 10 below zero – freezing me arse off – yet on the side 10 feet from this ladle of steel, I was burning hot. And I said to myself “and I got a degree in engineering for effing this???” Desperation and depression would be apt terms.”

    I have been out-of-work for three-and-a-half years. I have had my career – my working life – destroyed. I have had my finances destroyed. My living circumstances get worse and worse. I, and everyone I currently know, gets fucked in the ass with a chainsaw every time we run into Big Whatever. Doctors fuck us over. Government fucks us over. The banks fuck us over. No accountability for any of them, and we always bear the brunt of their fuck-ups, as well as our own. There is no hope that anything is going to change for the better any time soon. As each month passes the destruction of my career prospects (through what are allegedly my most productive years) becomes more and more complete. I can never hope to recover what has been lost, short of hitting the lottery. Not some metaphorical lottery where I come up with a bright idea and pursue it doggedly through to Sergey Brin-type fame and fortune. (As outlined above, even if I had such an idea, I’d have no chance to implement it. No one would back me.) No, I am totally out of these three-and-a-half years plus all future potential earnings compounded with interest unless I hit the actual goddamned lottery. Any idea on what the odds of that eventuality are? I’m one of millions of people, Drew, in the same situation. Just one of millions, and I know better than to think that I’m somehow special. Even if by chance I somehow do succeed, and recover, and prosper, what are the odds that even 20% of my new compatriots manage to get out of this mess too?

    Against that, you think that having once had a lousy starter-job on your (then) desired career path gives you insight into my psyche, that the situations have some equivalency. Un-fucking-believable. Seriously, I cannot believe that you are really that clueless, but I cannot imagine any other motivation. I guess that means I don’t have the imagination to be a fiction writer, so I can scratch that career option too.

  • Icepick Link

    Drew, you wrote: Well, Icepick, that is simply factually incorrect, and rather immature, but it informs my following comments.

    Earlier you had written: Our funding sources are the endowments of major universities or medical research institutes. Teachers pension funds etc. Further, what we really have are commitments to fund upon our call. And that’s important, because those are gathered for a fund at time zero, and are live for about 7 years. Its not about what Helicopter Ben thinks today. And as I said, if a deal goes bad we don’t apply for a refund to the government like a bank, an investment bank or insurance company.

    So, you get funding from outside sources, and you acknowledge that deals can go bad. So, at which point are you NOT gambling with other people’s money?

  • Icepick Link

    Ah. Have you read The Ax by Donald Westlake, Icepick?

    Never heard of it before following your link. See, all the good ideas HAVE been taken, LOLOLOLOL! Identifying your likely competitors, and giving you info on how to find them? Isn’t that what LinkedIn is for?

  • Icepick Link

    Jan wrote: So, Icepick, are your job interviews and quests in finance or math? If you don’t like ‘finance’ then why look for a job in this field? Your disinclination probably bleeds through in any interviews.

    Why pursue finance jobs? When I started it, it was because that’s where the jobs were. I didn’t know I would loath it then.

    There aren’t any jobs available for someone with my levels of experience with mathematics. I lack sufficient credentials for college teaching, and even if I wanted to teach snot-nosed brats (perhaps the language gives away why I shouldn’t) in K-12, teachers are getting laid-off by the tens of thousands.

    So in the meantime, I retrained for another line of work. That added to my debt-load of course, because the financiers must get theirs. And at the end of it no one wanted to hire anyone in that field unless they had at least two years of experience. Such lines in want-ads are just a fancy way of telling everyone that they don’t want any re-trained losers who had failed in previous lines of work to apply for their positions.

    As for my “disinclination” bleeding through in interviews, well, that calls for reviewing the records. In my last set of interviews I got one “we loved you, but we loved someone else a little bit more”, one “we loved you, but there is no way you would work for us for what we’d pay you” (Why the fuck do they think I applied?), one “we’re sorry, but we decided to close the division instead”, four or five rejections of a very peculiar sort from the same company for the same job via several lines of inquiry (hard to explain in less than a paragraph – though technically I probably shouldn’t count these as I never interviewed with the company, just with the recruiters), and one bad interview. Not to mention several mock and real interviews with various recruiters. Other than the one I know was bad, I got nothing but positive feedback on the interviews. Of course, the last of those was almost three years ago now, so who knows how I’d do now. Probably terrible. These days I can’t get hired by MacDonald’s – as mentioned before I can’t get interviews or even a cursory review by HR reps or hiring managers, so whatever might bleed through is moot.

    Let me respond now to the meat of your comment. How should one face adversity? How should one face tough times? How should one rebuild oneself? Let me state that I don’t think you understand the situation. I have had over a third of a decade of my life stripped away from me. There is no sign of my crisis abating. This relentless grind wears on my psyche, plagues every moment I’m awake, frequently doesn’t let me sleep, and sometimes follows me into my dreams. (Fortunately I don’t dream often.)

    “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
    Creeps in this petty pace from day to day….”

    And then the days blur to weeks, the weeks to months, the months to years. Before long the years will have become decades, and my life with have been wasted on nothing, for nothing. THAT is the crisis I face.

    You really think some KBr will help?

  • jan Link

    Icepick, I’m not trying to assume I know what your problems are. What I do know is that every person seems to have times in their lives where their own personal loads seem unbearable to them. Most of the problems I’ve encountered have dealt with insurmountable medical ones (being a nurse) and addiction (having briefly immersed myself as an addiction counselor). That latter one, in particular, has their own brand of demons.

    However, what I’ve noticed, in people who are able to recover from these adverse cycles, are that they stop dwelling on what they don’t have, accept what they can’t change, and throw their attention into building and focusing more on what they can change. This is incorporated in the 5 stages of grief, where one moves through the emotions of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance to reach the other side of their ordeal.

    From your writing you seem to be caught up in a whirling cycle of being down, loading up with resentment, which makes you even angrier. The third of a decade you have lost, you will not be able to get back. However, by mulling that over in your head all the time, having it fester in everyday thought, you will not only keep reliving that lost time, but will energize it to continue on for however long you feed it.

    Here is an applicable parable:

    One evening an old Cherokee Indian told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, ‘My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all.One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

    The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.’

    The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: ‘Which wolf wins?’

    The old Cherokee simply replied, ‘The one you feed.’

  • Drew Link

    OK, Icepick. You are right, and we are clueless.

    I wish you nothing but the best of luck in your job search and personal life.

    If you ever deem me worthy, I would be happy to be a sounding board. Don’t dismiss it out of hand.

  • Icepick Link

    So if I’m just happy and forget about all the shit, things will get better for me? It has nothing to do with the fact that therer aren’t enough jobs to go around? Or that the economy is stagnating at best? Or that the people running the country have been sending the good jobs (except for their own) oveerseas for decades while importing more and more Third World peasants? Wow. I had no idea it was just all in my head….

  • Icepick Link

    Drew, seriously, there aren’t enough jobs to go around, and no one will hire someone that has beenout of work for years. How are you going to change that? More and more jobs get sent overseas every year. How are you going to change that? The government has decided that the place to cut is in help for the poor (see Rick Scott, Businessman’s Hero), while making certain that the rich get trillions more in government money. Why would you even bother to change that?

    You seem to think that my problems are wholly of my own manufacture. Even if many are, I didn’t make this economy. In this economy someone like me cannot get any traction to save their life, even if they’re a perfect little lick-spittle brown-noser, er, angel. What exactly do you think someone should do if they can’t even get an inteview for a dead-end job?

    The thing is, you’ve got no answers other than to spout bromides that no longer apply. And you have the unbridled nerve to think that you have some insight into my situation because you once had a job you didn’t like. Here’s the first clue that you’re wrong: I don’t even have a job to dislike.

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