A Little Rant About The Job Situation

I’ve been looking for jobs for a long time now, a process I’m just terrible at.  It involves wasting copious amounts of time on dead ends and red herrings.  It puts me in uncomfortable situations.  It forces me to spend way too much time trying (unsuccessfully, mind you) to read the mind of HR people, who are in turn trying (unsuccessfully, mind you) to determine whether or not I’d be a great employee.  Let me tell you right now:  I would be a great employee, no matter what job it is.  Unless you’re talking about something really executive, really technical, or really unethical, that is.  Everything else is something I’d be amazing at.  So, in many respects, this whole job hunt thing is just a race to find out the lucky person who gets to hire me, and thus, improve their organization in countless quantifiable and unspoken ways.  I’m smart, I learn things, I buy into company rhetoric, I execute directives, people seem to like me, and I got a 28 on my ACT back when the maximum score was 32.  At the risk of sounding cocky (and really, why stop now?), I would be a great hire for any organization looking to not suck.

But you can’t just say that, because it’s unprofessional.  It’s like the business world has chosen to wring honesty out of itself for the sake of preserving the status quo, which is mostly based on nepotism, class warfare, and trying to artificially make the positive-thinking dogma of The Secret a reality.  In that climate, I’m toast.

It doesn’t help that I only recently discovered that I’m called to be a writer.  The main reason it doesn’t help?  I’m totally unestablished in the writing sector (and using words like “unestablished” can’t be helping, btw), a place where it usually takes a long time to establish one’s self.  I’ve been gaining meaningful experience in the past three years, but it’s been in computer support.  Yeah, so has everybody else, apparently.  I’m convinced it’s nearly impossible to get a job in the technical world without one of those things I mentioned before, such as nepotism.  And here’s the important thing — not that I would really even want to get a job as a computer technician, at least if it wasn’t in the right company.  I really am a writer now, sad to say.  I know people support themselves in other ways as they get established in their careers, a la all the waitresses in Hollywood who are looking for their big break.  It’s part of dues-paying.  Or as I like to call it, “carving a hole in the wall of life and sleeping there like a badger until something better comes along.”

So I apply for these jobs that I’m overqualified for, and keep getting told (either explicitly or by impersonal and unprofessional silence) that I’m not qualified for them.  This has made me cynical, and bitter, and a giant ball of seething unprofessionalism.  HR representatives are the gatekeepers for me, and I can’t think of a way to explain my way out of the courtyard and through the gate.  Obviously, they’re not going to change.  What I need is somebody to take a chance on me, like Abba says.  If HR representatives change their mind about the kind of false qualifications one needs to get a job in IT, I’ll be first in line.  Honey, I’m still free.  Take a chance on me.

Look, I get it.  I know it’s hard for hiring managers in this current climate where everyone is underemployed and disloyal and looking for a new job.  Part of the blame lies with me and my inability to convince anyone that my work the last three years has actually prepared me to do tech support.  It’s hard to tell people that, yes, I believe I could figure out Novell e-Directory, or administration of a Citrix server, or how to enter support calls into a database, etc…and have them believe me.  Truth is, I’ve been having to figure out stuff like this on the fly for the last three years.  For some reason, nobody can see my point.  Again, all I need is a chance.

I’m going to put at least one book out in 2010, which will hopefully be the start of a long and fruitful career composing things that people actually read.  I’m probably going to go back to pizza delivery, because how else is a man supposed to support his writing habit these days?  That is, if I can find somebody to hire me for that job.  Even though I’ve only been doing it for 12 years, I feel I might be qualified.