It just so happened that I graduated from High School during our current recession. Up until then I hadn't given our economy that much thought; it didn't really effect me. Well, I spent that whole summer looking for a job. I had a decent resume for someone fresh out of High School: 3 jobs, two of them held for roughly a year each. It's safe to say I was optomistic when I woke up one day and walked around Battle Ground with a stack of resumes and filled applications.
My first stop was a Taco Bell. I had dressed to impress despite the ridiculous heat. I walked up to the person taking orders, smiled and handed him my application. He leans back, stares at me like I've lost my mind, and then leans forward to say, "Man, you do NOT WANNA work HERE!" I stopped smiling, looked around quickly and then, not knowing what else to say, asked him the age old question: "why not?" Then began fifteen minutes of him spewing off how much his job sucked, and how he only got paid minimum wage (what a pansy, right?). When he was done, he was breathing like he had ran a marathon. Honestly, by this point I did not want to work there either, if for no other reason than I might have to work with that emotionally unstable employee. However, I was determined not to exclude any potential job, so I gave him my application anyway.
Every day I continued this pattern of turning in applications and resumes. Every day I checked my phone and email to see no response from any potential employer. It's psychologically devastating when you get rejected for a long enough period of time. It wasn't until mid-July that I found a Subway near where I was living that showed promise. I had an interview with the manager which lasted a good hour. We laughed, talked about what he expected in an employee and all that jazz. I thought he was impressed with me, and was happy when he asked me to come in for a second interview. Well I did come in for a second, and a third, and a fourth...a fifth, a sixth...
A SEVENTH! AN EIGHTH! AND YOU GUESSED IT! a ninth interview....by this point, I was relatively confident that my chances of getting the job weren't any better than the ten other potentials that interviewed alongside me. It wasn't until I spoke to one of them, found out he had had 9 interviews as well, and was STILL planning on going in for a tenth one, that I took a long look at myself and asked: "Do I really want to be THAT guy?" The answer, it turned out, was no. I would rather be the unemployed-for-six-months guy.
"Six months?" you might ask. "Are you legally retarded? You couldn't find a job for five months after giving up on Subway?" Well, the answer is yes. To the unemployment thing, not to being retarded. And I'll explain why, some other time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)