Angel (No Relation)

The Thrill of the (Job) Hunt, if By “Thrill” You Mean “Eternal and Miserable Slog”
(Complete with GIFs!)

10% of Americans are currently unemployed. I mention this not because I intend for this post to be political, but because I’m just too good enough at some things but not good enough at other things to be in that excessively lucky 10%.

Now, here are some things I appreciate, and I will say I think this is mostly the only thing Arizona hasn’t fucked up lately (that is political): I get free health insurance (although apparently it will no longer pay for medically necessary organ transplants, so let’s hope my organs hold out), and today I joined the ranks of People Who Have Food Stamps. Some people feel shame over the fact but I threw a party. I invited one person: me. I ate salmon and asparagus because it is the first time I have been able to afford food that is not soup since a bajillion years ago. So it was a cause for celebration. (Then, and this was not purchased with food stamps, I ate some of an avocado that must be like 100 years old, and somehow, miraculously, was still good. I bring it up because I suspect it is a miracle.)

My favorite thing about being unemployed is that one begins to get a reputation as a “filthy layabout.” I suppose this is not helped by responding using those words when people ask me what I do for a living. This is whether or not you actually spend more hours per day applying for jobs than lots of people spend actually working at the jobs that they’ve got. People just assume, if more than three months pass between the receipt of your degree and the rest of the world, that you’re not really trying.

Let me walk you through an ordinary day. This is changing as pilot season approaches, which is unfortunate because it pretty much just means that I’m going to spend a lot more time doing similar crap that wields no results than I was already doing.

I wake up in the afternoon. This makes it sound like I am in fact a layabout, but when you consider I went to sleep at about 11 a.m., it’s not really. A large portion of the actual job application process in 2011 is online-only. As such, a large portion of my time spent applying to jobs can be completed at any time of the day. I could list about 3,000 websites that all index jobs that I apply for repeatedly and follow up on, but it turns out, are never really hiring. Thanks for making me spend 10 billion years on your repetitive application, Borders. Borders, by the way, is by far the worst, because they won’t allow you to apply for multiple jobs at the same location/multiple locations at the same time, even though the application is identical. They ask for pretty much everything short of a DNA sample. And never once, in the 7 or 8 times I’ve applied for them, never once have they responded to any of my queries. It’s just never happened. Pardon me, Borders, but who exactly are you looking for to fill your prestigious cashier position? I fail to see how my relevant retail experience and my college degree leave me unqualified for this the most auspicious of duties.

Okay, so let’s say I get up in the afternoon. I make lunch/dinner. (Soup. I don’t even like soup! I live in the desert! Soup is a valueless food here! Sometimes I get really adventurous and make pasta. Occasionally there’s even a can of vegetables when I’m feeling really saucy.) I generally only eat one actual meal a day because that is the maximum number of times per day that I can stand looking at soup.

I go on the Facebook. Oftentimes, I read people’s status updates just to see if they’ve quit a job that I can quickly try to take before they realize they’re morons for quitting a job when the unemployment rate is so high and most of our jobs (I have a lot of media arts friends) are virtually valueless in everyday life. Then I spend a while looking around at jobs but not applying to them. (I wait till later to do that.)

Then I exercise maybe if I’m not feeling like there’s just no point in even bothering. Then I attempt to make contact with other humans just to make sure that the zombie apocalypse hasn’t happened without my noticing. This can sometimes prove difficult because apparently nobody recognizes that the ringing sound that your telephone makes means that somebody is calling you. Often I get job hunting advice from people. This usually sounds something like this:

FRIEND: Hey, have you gotten a job yet?
SELF: No. No I have not.
FRIEND: Oh. Well, have you tried looking? You should try looking.
SELF: What an extraordinary concept. It had never occurred to me before.
FRIEND: Well, I’m glad I have helped you in your quest to get a job.
SELF: Yes, your advice has been extremely valuable to me. Now I see that what I’ve been doing wrong this whole time is waiting for money to teleport itself into my bank account.

Please note: many of the people who offer career advice to me are still in school.  (Still, if you really want to make them feel like jackasses, you could always just look at my resume and offer me a job!)

After that I’d say I spend about an hour wallowing in self-pity, wishing that I were an alcoholic. Sometimes, I watch some TV.

So far, I’ve applied to at least 200 jobs following my graduation. What I should’ve done was kept count so I could quantify EXACTLY how much of a failure rate I’ve got. I mean actually, I’ve got a 100% fail rate, but it’d be nice, in the event that I actually succeed at some point, to have some way to demonstrate precisely how much of a pain in the ass it was for me to get this hypothetical miracle job from the heavens. I say 200 jobs, and I’d say this is about a 50/50 split between jobs that are actually related to my career goals, and joe jobs that involve selling my soul because I’d do almost anything legal and not gross to pay my phone bill. Interestingly, it takes less time, every single time, to apply to a job I actually want. I spent less time getting my Daily Show internship than I spent on a single Borders application, so let me reiterate, Borders: fuck you. I cannot believe The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart, a pretty much universally-recognized TV show, has a more reasonable application process than you do. You’re BORDERS. YOU’RE BORDERS.

So I spend hours of my life doing this at night. I’d say I spend 3-4 nights a week doing this. At some point you can only do so much, because you begin to realize you’ve applied for every listed job already, so you spend a great deal of time modifying search queries trying to find hidden jobs that are awesome but someone messed up while posting them in the same way that you try to find a deal for a Wii on eBay because someone messed up and misspelled “Wii.” (I’ve seen it happen.) So far this has never worked, but it doesn’t stop me from trying!

In all of these 200 jobs, I have had one interview. This interview was incredibly deceptive because it occurred within a week of the commencement of my job hunt. I figured that I might actually get interviews. My mistake.

Anyway, at the time, I wasn’t particularly upset that I didn’t get this job. It was for one of those portrait studios inside a Wal-Mart. I’m not gonna lie; I’m not a Wal-Mart enthusiast. This is also not a political thing but mostly because I have witnessed numerous gross occurrences at Wal-Mart. Also because Target is better. And if I can avoid it, I’m not really into what is essentially telemarketing, although I volunteered to phone bank for Obama a couple years ago so I’ve got quite used to calling people I don’t know and having them shout at me and can live with it if I must. Anyway, my point is that I wasn’t heartbroken that I didn’t get the job. I figured there must’ve been better applicants, like people with more retail experience, or people who were less obsessive-compulsive about finding the perfect photo and more focused on doing like the best out of five for speed. Fair enough, right?

Except I kept an eye on this job listing. This was in May. In June it was still up. In July it was still up. In August it was still up. In fact, it continued being up until December.

There are two explanations. They both mean someone is an asshole. Here is what they are:

1. They kept this job posting up for months even though they were not hiring, which is awesome because it means that apart from my applying multiple times again in the future, other people wasted a significant amount of time applying for nonexistent jobs. This is highly possible since I know it happens all the time; I can’t tell you how many times I’ve called places after applying for jobs they actually list as available only to be told that they aren’t hiring right now. However, this job has gotten progressively more difficult to apply for. Last time I applied, they had added a math test. I wish I was making this up. I had to take a motherfucking math test to apply to work at a portrait studio.
2. They were still hiring. In fact, they were so intent on finding the perfect low-level part-time employee that it meant simply waiting seven months to find the perfectapplicant, even though I know for a fact that there was at least one college grad with academic photography experience and practical retail experience who applied for the job. I don’t understand. JUST HIRE SOMEONE. Who are you waiting to apply here, Annie Leibovitz? YOU’RE IN A WAL-MART.

After trying to explain my plight to a number of people, I have listened to every single one of their suggestions and tried them myself. I have changed my resume. I have changed my cover letter, significantly and repeatedly (I mean I already customize it for the job, but you know). For the joe jobs, I have even tried omitting information like where I’ve done my interning or even, occasionally, the fact that I have a degree, because some people have suggested they won’t hire me because I’m “overqualified.” Whatever the fuck that means. Shouldn’t you be ecstatic if you pick up someone’s application and discover that you got better than what you asked for for the same price? Anyway, none of this has worked.

The most disheartening part of it, and perhaps my favorite, are the applications that allow you to log in and view the status of your application once you have submitted it. Chief among these are the ones that show whether or not anybody has even looked at it. And guess what? Every single time I check, it has never been viewed. So, the suggestions that I change my resume or my cover letter or any information are completely moot because I could put that I was George VI, spoke 27 languages, invented Google and Facebook, cloned dinosaurs from DNA extracted from mosquitoes fossilized in amber and was a principal shareholder in Skynet and no one would have even seen it to know that I was lying.

So, many hours of my day are spent doing this. I also occasionally try to mine my (few) contacts for information. This has not wielded any results either. One can only doing this so often without looking like a jerk. I just want you to know that I haven’t forgotten this.

Anyway, let’s say that this occupies the time between maybe 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. Then, I sit around in misery and self-loathing again because of the countless number of hours I’ve spent applying for jobs without even getting an interview for…let’s say until 6:30. Then I check Twitter. That’s 7. I take a shower. That’s 8. I go on the Facebook. That’s 9. I watch an episode of a TV show that I’ve already seen. It’s 10. Then I spend another hour in misery and self-loathing tossing and turning in my bed thinking about how useless I am, before I wake up again a few hours later and repeat the process.

But you’re right. I’m not doing anything. If I really wanted a job, I would get one!

http://angelnorelation.com/resume