The New Job

Okay, so I landed this gig in White Plains, working for a luxury resort and hotel chain, as a Print Production Manager, which is what I DO, fachrissakes.

If anyone had told me that it would take me SIX months to land a gig, I would have laughed in their faces. I mean, I'm Jane Doe, dammit. Smart, motivated, hard working, reasonably attractive, all that good stuff. Impeccable eye for color. Tough but fair. Blah blah blah...

Actually, all the experts DO say it takes about six months. But since I started my path of unemployment absolutely convinced of my own specialness, my own star power (insert jazz hands here), surely, I told myself, it would only be a few weeks for me.

HAH. The echo of the Universe's ugly laughter still peals in my ears.

So -- now I know. It takes that long. So here are the hard, fast, practical things I learned from unemployment:

1) The experts are right. Have six months of living expenses set aside, MINIMUM. And if that sounds like it's too hard to do, picture yourself scrambling to explain to your landlord that you can't pay your rent, ducking phone calls from creditors, selling your car for a per-pound rate, and choosing to feed your pets over yourself. And if that doesn't get your currently-employed self to start saving, I don't know what will.

I was lucky. NYS Unemployment didn't even cover my rent, but I'm lucky enough to have a friend who loaned me a chunk of money, and my sisters stepped up as well. There were a couple of times when hooking seemed like a fairly viable option for me, honestly.

2) The experts are right, the sequel. You have got to make finding a job your job. None of this aimlessly sending your resume out to cherry-picked ads on monster or hotjobs. You've got to spend about 4-5 hours a DAY looking for a job -- that includes not just cruising the internet, but getting on the phone as well. My experience is that any more time per day than that is too tiring/demoralizing -- for some reason, looking for a job is much more draining than actually having a job.

3) There will be days on which you will wake up, consider another day of unemployment, pull the covers over your head and want to go back to sleep for another 50 or 60 hours. This is called the blues and it is natural. Some days, you just gotta listen to that inner voice very very closely. If you're paying attention, you will know which days you should just stay in bed. (Generally, for me, it was the ones with the dumping rain).

4) Prepare yourself to become unhealthily obsessed with the characters on a syndicated show. I actually said this to a friend at one point: "I hope I don't get a job too soon because then I won't find out how they killed Pru off on "Charmed." Hello? Time to take off the drawstring pj bottoms, put on some hard shoes and re-enter the world.

5) That being said, the smartest way to NOT have this happen is to get up, get ready and GET OUT OF THE HOUSE without turning on the TV at all. (Charmed also comes on a 4pm here, so I knew I could watch after a productive day of job hunting). Cause before you know it, CNN American Morning is morphing into something else, which morphs into something else, and before you know it, you're watching Turk and JD do one of their black guy/white guy comedy routines in a Scrubs re-run.

6) I recommend NOT doing it at home. Too many opportunities to procrastinate, distract yourself ("hmmm, wow, look at the dust kittens under the refrigerator...and behind the toilet...you know, come to think of it, i haven't given the apartment a good cleaning in a while...") Trust me. While my apartment was gleaming during my unemployment, it's all too easy to let situational ADD take over so you don't have to actually deal with the fact that your ass is unemployed. Pack up your laptop and go somewhere with free wireless. While I was looking for a gig, I was grateful that I don't have internet at home. If I did, I would never have left the house. I would go to The Bean like it was my job, which in essence it was.

Next, more tips for the Underemployed....