With all the news about the economy being in the toilet and people left and right losing their jobs (and unable to find new ones), I’m reminded of the personal recession I once experienced shortly after I graduated college, waaaaaay back in ‘98.

I had just wrapped up my undergraduate “career” and finished with a degree in computer science, all during a time when the IT industry was BOOM-ING, BABY, OW! You couldn’t so much as turn without smacking right into an IT/computer related job. I had made the right choice for a degree, patted my back for a job well done, and at 21 years of age I was ready to take on the world and start on my way to becoming a buff, studly FBI hacker who would single-handedly capture Russian bad dudes with nary a few taps on the keyboard. The world was my oyster, baby!

Well…

One job interview went by. Then another. Then another, and yet no one got back to me. Soon I started getting rejection letters, and it wasn’t long before my post-college bravado gave way to concern, and then outright fear. I was going to job fairs, handing out resumes like candy, responding to newspaper ads, emailing companies, literally knocking door to door, and all I was beginning to show for it was a growing stack of rejection letters (which I still have by the way.)

What was I doing wrong? The industry was booming, I had picked the right field, the demand was high, and yet no one wanted to hire me?

One month became two, then six, then before I knew it a whole year had gone by and I was still gainfully unemployed. My relationship with my parents was really taking a turn for the worse too. At some point things got so bad between us that they eventually became convinced that I wasn’t serious about finding work, that the only thing I was really doing all day was playing games on the internet. So as punishment they took my speedy 28.8 dialup modem away.

There’s probably nothing more demoralizing to a 22 year old college graduate than to have not only his modem taken away, but access to a car as well (since my parents both worked during the day.) So there I was, with no access to the internet and no access to a car, and yet I was still expected to somehow find a job.

Their suspicion that I would only spend the day playing Battlezone 2 or surfing Usenet groups to argue with stupid Christians was totally unfounded too. Ok… MOSTLY unfounded. It said nothing of the fact that I was desperate, DESPERATE to get the holy FRICK away from my parents and get my own place so I could live my own life. You think they’d understand that ALONE was more than enough incentive for me. I wasn’t gaming all day long on the internet. I was trying to network, research and brainstorm ways I could find a job. Then when I needed a break, I’d play a round or two of Wolfenstein. What else could I do, really?

But still they locked up my 28.8 dialup modem in their bedroom before leaving for work every day, and my only means of transportation then was a 20 year old woman’s bicycle (with a flowery basket in front) that we kept on the porch. Thank God YouTubers weren’t around then to capture the comical display of me riding around in a suit on a girlie bike with a stack of resumes crammed in my basket. I never would have lived it down.

Most of the time when I wasn’t out riding into town and feeling really stupid about myself, I was left to twiddle my thumbs while I stared blankly at the wall, wondering why God hated me so much.

I think the first low point then was when I managed to get a part time job delivering flowers, only to get fired a week later when I asked to come in later than usual so I could go to a job interview. When they realized I had graduated college and was spending time going to interviews they figured I wouldn’t be around long term and fired me. My parents blamed me for it because I shouldn’t have said anything about a job interview, but I wasn’t street smart enough to know about these things. Their harsh criticism and the embarrassment of being fired from a florist delivery job made me hate myself more than anything. I thought I was the most worthless idiot on the planet. Everyone else was landing jobs left and right and here I couldn’t even hold on to flowers.

Eventually after some more time passed, I had an idea. My modem was still being locked away safe and sound in their bedroom, but one evening I had to go to the supermarket to get some groceries for my parents and borrowed the car. When I went to get the keys, I realized one of them was the key to the bedroom.

Hmmmmm….

I had a bunch of extra quarters saved up in a can somewhere, so I grabbed those up, got in the car and stopped by the hardware store.

“Yeah I’d like to get an extra copy of this key?”

“Sure, be a few minutes.”

I watched him as he forged a magical key that would unlock the mysteries of the kingdom. I dropped a bunch of quarters on the counter while he threw a quizzical look at me, as if to say “Are you so cheap you can’t even pay in bills?” but thankfully took them anyway and gave me change.

YES!

The next morning I cheerfully waved my parents off as they went to work, then waited a few minutes to make sure neither of them came back in case they had forgotten something, and raced to their bedroom door.

*click*

You could hear the angels singing as I unlocked the door and the light from outside shone into the room. I started looking around and quickly found my beloved dialup modem. I was in the game again!

The thrill of sneaking around like that breathed some new life into me, and I would spend the next few weeks making the rounds of unlocking the bedroom door, grabbing my modem and then going through my daily routine of job hunting, networking and whatnot before I ended with a fast game of Battlezone, then quickly returning the modem back into the bedroom and locking the door again when the timer I set for myself buzzed, signaling the time I needed to get off so I wouldn’t get caught redhanded.

Once my internet time was up, I would break out the Ragu pizza sauce I kept hidden in my room and use the bread machine we had to make pizza. We had the same equipment restaurants used to make brick oven pizza, and with it all I was turning pizza-making into an art form, even learning how to toss it up to spread the dough. It was truly my source of comfort and joy. I would take a few hot slices, head over into the living room and watch General Hospital so I could catch a glimpse of my dream girl at the time, Rebecca Herbst. The fantasies of getting snuggly wubsy woos from her and the exquisite tastes of my homemade pizza helped get me through some very dark times then.

You could have had my pizza anytime, baby....

I’m not sure if my parents ever figured out I had been able to get into their bedroom, but they must have been suspicious. One day when I was going through the usual morning routine of unlocking their bedroom, I stepped in and suddenly saw an empty seltzer bottle rolling around on the floor.

Hmmmmmmm… where did that come from?

When I picked it up and tried to get a read on where it had been before, I realized it must have been right behind the door. There was no way to avoid knocking it down when you opened the door either, and that’s when it occurred to me that it was placed that way on purpose. My parents had set up a primitive boobytrap to see if I was indeed invading their bedroom while they were away at work. If it hadn’t rolled around in my view the way it did, I might have never noticed it, and it would have made for a very awkward conversation that day.

Ah well.

I took the bottle and placed it upright again behind the door before leaving and locking the room.

And so it went, week after week, unlocking their bedroom, knocking the bottle down, and then putting the modem back and setting the bottle upright just before I locked the room up again. I felt like James Bond. Fitting that they would use an empty bottle for this too. They always did see the glass half empty. *sound of corny 007 music playing*

I think after a while my parents finally started to mellow out and realize I was indeed going through a hard time here. After about 18 months of job searching, I hit my lowest point when I was even turned down for a job as a cashier, but not before enduring three humiliating interviews where they put me through a psych test, a counting test, and a few other tests to determine my knowledge of all things cashier related. I got the rejection letter 2 weeks later.

That last rejection had me throwing up my hands in defeat and ready to jump off a bridge somewhere, but shortly afterwards a recruiter found one of my resumes in a databank, at long last leading me to my first full time job, 19 months after I graduated college. Finally, my recession had come to an end.

Of course I would soon be laid off 5 months later, but that’s another story.

Tags: car, career, college, computer, economy, graduate, internet, job, jobs, life, networking, parents, part time, pizza, recession, rejection, work
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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You know, I seriously hate my job.

But before going any further, let’s run through the gamut of why I should be so grateful to have a job first, just to give the dweeb monkeys out there the satisfaction before they start berating me over why I should kiss the sky for still being gainfully employed in this craptastic economy, and if my job is something less than ideal then too bad, I should just shut the flip up and be grateful anyway.

Are we done?  Good.

You know, I seriously hate my job.

How did I end up in a career where the most critical assignment I’ve been tasked with is to shuffle papers and stare at the wall all day?  My job didn’t even require a college degree, which is why you’ll usually see me on the floor convulsing in spastic fits every I make my usual monthly payment towards my school loan.

Sigh, I remember what it was like when I was still in school and had a dream.  I was going to work for the FBI and specialize in solving computer crimes, or something.  I tailored my education toward that end too, and started networking with people already in the field to learn as much as I  could about this growing industry.  It was an industry that was in strong demand, and I knew I was in good shape to land on my feet once school ended.

And then I graduated.

There are times I wish could go back to that 19 year old boy I once was and beat the living snot out of him for coming up with the most ass backwards, uninformed career ambitions ever. I mean, really.

And now here I am, in a recession-proof job with plenty of good perks, great dental plan, decent pay….. and I’m completely miserable. It is bar none one of the most unfulfilling jobs I could have ever ended up in, with no promotional path at all and no room to maneuver. I just marked my 9th anniversary yesterday, and my title is exactly the same as it was my first day on the job.

9 years…. gees, where did it all go??

And now of course, I’m completely lost. I don’t know what I want to do anymore, except maybe win the lottery. I’d love to make a living blogging maybe, but it will never happen. Everything I tried to bring more traffic to this site failed miserably. And while I enjoy writing, but I’m not as prolific a writer as I’d like to be, especially when my muse abandons me like a cheap ho and I’m left to stare at the empty screen on my monitor because I have no idea what the flippo dinks I want to write about.

Maybe thing swill get better once I finally pay off my school loan. With that much more breathing room I’ll have more freedom to enjoy life, travel and do…. something. Anything. Put myself out there and see if I can’t finally find what I’ve been looking for.

Maybe that’s all I need.

Tags: ambitions, anniversary, blogging, career, college, dream, economy, education, fulfillment, job, life, living, work, working
Categories: In The Coal Mine
 
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I recently got an email from a reader who said I was the perfect match for her sister, so I sent her sister an email and we shared a few things about ourselves. Here’s what I learn about her:

She loves to fish in Alaska and went to college on a football scholarship. Even worse, she’s from Tennessee. No offense to the natives of the state of course, I just think you’re all a bunch of donkey hicks (though I’ll make an exception for this gal here, only because she knows me and if I didn’t she’d hunt me down like a dog and saw my legs off.)

Anyhoo, after inquiring a bit further about this football thingie in the vain hope that colleges also extend football scholarships to cheerleaders as well, evidently she got the scholarship as a result of being the equipment manager for her team, and has been entertaining a life long dream of being a contracts agent. She majored in sports admin and now works as a… paralegal.

My final “Oh My God Get The &^%$ Away From Me!” note to her went as follows:

Dear “Meg,”

You’re either a man or a very, very ugly looking woman. If you’re wondering why you might be having trouble finding guys to date, the spitting and scratching your privates (of which you have none) while you hang out with your football buddies might clue you in somewhat. Maybe it’s not your fault though, just the fact that you live in a state with an in-bred population that rivals only Utah in numbers, and as a result it’s often hard to tell the gender apart.

I’m not sure why your sister thought I’d be a good match for you though. Maybe she felt I’d be able to help you discover your feminine side by offering you the love that only a fine, studly man like me could give. Yet despite the fact that I have been known to work miracles every now and then, sad to say, I simply cannot bend the laws of physics to my will in order to transform you from a hairy, lumbering, mountain man-thing to a soft, doe-eyed work of womanly art that I would be proud to roll around in the hay with.

So, best of luck to ya, hope you do fulfill your dreams of being an agent, and who knows, maybe I’ll read about you someday in Sports Illustrated, though it quite obviously won’t be the swimsuit edition.

Much Love,
Lincoln

Tags: college, dating, dear john, email, football, men, scholarship, tennessee, women, women suck
Categories: Romance and Relationships
 
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When Hell vomited forth its presence onto the Internet, the net result was the creation of Myspace.

I’m no stranger to online social networking, but what goes on at Myspace can only be adequately described as some drug induced psychotic nightmare that even the marginally sane among us would do best to avoid. At one time I had actually thought this might be a good place for networking and meeting reasonably intelligent, morally upright women. Good God, what the hell was I thinking?

But what truly irks me is not so much the neon green text on a yellow background layout that some brain damaged Myspacer thought would look cool, or the auto-streaming of some lame urban rap song AND a music video all at once (?!?!?!), or the appalling mass of bloated crap Myspacers upload to their pages that could cause even IBM’s Deep Blue to grind to a screeching halt. Instead, it’s the utterly obnoxious, completely unhinged, whacked out to the freaking gills mentality these Myspacers exhibit. Having all the grace of parentless teenagers on crack, the contents of the Myspace universe are often lewd, obscene, vulgar, and at times downright disturbing.

The only redeeming quality I could see in using Myspace is if you want to look up people from your college or high school days. There were about 400 people in my graduating class in high school, but I found less than 30 of them were on Myspace. I pretty much didn’t recognize any of them either. Either the rest of my classmates hadn’t caught on, or they turned out to be very smart people. So much for me connecting with my old high school buddies.

I have to admit, scouting sites like Myspace can be a very depressing experience, especially when my only desire here is to find a network of likeminded people who I could truly connect with. That and of course, finding the girl of my dreams. It’s not just Myspace though, it’s also the many other networking and matchmaking sites that turn out to be utter crap. My personal favorite out of this bunch has to be eHarmony though, of which I filled out three personality tests at various times in the past and got back three different results. Either I have multiple personalities, or eHarmony’s questionaire isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit. For this they charge 50+ dollars a month?

Apparently though, I’m not the only one who’s been getting frustrated over this. A recent article indicated that social isolation has been steadily increasing for quite a while, in spite of the rapid rise of online social networking. Even with the Internet, people are more disconnected from each other today than they ever were before.

This quote by the way from a Slashdot commentator was quite telling:

I agree and I face this situation on a daily basis. Every potential social outlet has been closed off in the face of shopping malls and such and it seems like the only place to meet anyone is at the bar where you have the choice between the girl with tatoos or one of the girls… {uhh, no more need be said about these sort}. It’s getting quite desperate. It’s actually getting me to think about going back to school or joining some type of community service organization just to meet people. The world has turned into a lonely, lonely place. Online socializing isn’t the solution though, I’ve learned that much. But it is the symptom of a larger problem that will probably not be going away anytime soon.

In spite of the declining number of social outlets that could possibly suit me, the sobering reality is that I’m going to have to put myself out there more often and as much as possible, even though it requires far more work… and far more risks as well. It’s so easy for me to just plop down in front of a computer and try to network that way, but I can’t help but feel it’s an ass backwards way of developing a genuine social network of friends. It seems more ideal that I meet and connect with people first in real life and then continue that correspondence online, as so many others have successfully done.

Instead of expecting it all to be handed to me on a silver platter, it looks like I’m gonna have to actually put some muscle and effort into this. I may even have to, God help me, start talking to people as well. Oh the depths to which I must now sink in order to find my true love! Will there be no end to this atrocity???

Tags: classmates, college, crack, dating, eharmony, friendships, good god, graduating class, high school, love, matchmaking, mentality, music video, myspace, nightmare, rap song, romance, social networking, soulmate, stranger, teenagers, urban rap
Categories: Romance and Relationships
 
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