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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