“You’re wearing a tie. You must still have a job.”

“You’re wearing a tie. You must still have a job.”

C- lives in my building. We almost always shoot the breeze when we see each other around. We ran into each other one night during the last weeks of winter. I was coming home from another long, dreary day in the New York office.

C- worked in Marketing for the online division of a national bookseller. Smart and fun to talk to—we often talked about books and music—she was laid off the second week of January. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, the economy sucks and you’re being let go and whoever is left will be doing their job, your job, and the jobs of all your other colleagues let go during this economic downturn. I talked to her about a week after it happened. She looked stunned. Tonight, it is painfully obvious she is still reeling from being let go and the rotten job market only amplifies anxiety.

“At least for another week, I have the tie and the job. Publishing is bad. Things are bad. No one is enthused about business.”

“I’ve been going on five interviews a week.”

C- had faith that online was a growing business and she was good at it. She persistently improved her skills. She devoted herself to the career, sacrificed personal time to build that career, endured office politics to move ahead. Online was the new gold rush, she survived the dot.com bust, young enough to master the technology and old enough to apply proven business experience and avoid the pitfalls of other web businesses which the bust eventually had killed off. Can she—and will her field—survive the current economic crisis? Uncertainty grows one piece at a time.

“That is good. It’s about numbers. The more interviews, the closer you get to your number being up.”

I always use the numbers line when somebody is ‘on the beach.’ What else can you say, really. The more resumes you send out, the more interviews you go on, the more likely you will get a job offer. That’s how things used to go, in bad times and good. These days are not the same as other bad times however.

It is a very dark night. A chilly wind scrapes across our faces as we stood on the corner.

She is hurting. So much worry on her mind. Probably cooped up in her apartment all day. I’m used to being along, thrive on solitude as I believe Bukowski once put it. Not everybody can take so much alone time, especially when you are doing all you can to find a job and nothing positive results. I’ve been there. I do not recommend it.

“They aren’t calling back. Somebody told me that for this position, where they would usually get 40 resumes, they are getting 4,000.”

That’s what she said. A hundred times more resumes than usual for this particular job opening. To be selected for an interview out of that number should boost confidence. Then again, how many more interviews are being conducted for this position? Then you read the newspaper and unemployment is up, then you hear about another person you know joining the ranks of the jobless. It’s almost incomprehensibly daunting. More of your waking hours are taken up quelling anxiety, sleep is harder to come by because you can’t stop worrying about everything you worried about during your waking hours.

Then A-, passing by, stops and asks how C- is doing.

Real Estate sales guy, also a neighbor. He’s very gregarious, knows everybody. Two, three years ago or maybe four, A- tooled around the neighborhood in a Foxton car—it was a little bigger than a go-cart and had an emblem of a fox on the side. He sold commercial and residential properties. That company went belly up. Made a lot of news at the time—a harbinger of the real estate woes that grew in its wake. I shot the breeze with A- about it a few times. Almost immediately though, he had another real estate job. A- is always upbeat, even after being hit by a motorcycle crossing a Jersey City street. He had to deal with a court case where he was suing the driver who hit while also recuperating from his injury, which required physical therapy. He had a limp for a long time.

“I didn’t get one interview this week.” That’s how I find out he is also unemployed now.

“I had five job interviews this week.”

“All through the internet?” he asks.

“Yes. There were some head hunters, who just wanted to see me and put me on file.”

“You have to be positive,” says A-.

“I’ve sent out more than a hundred resumes.” More than 100 resumes, and it was only about a month since being let go.

“You just have to downsize,” says A-.

“I don’t want to downsize,” said C-.

“You have that big apartment. I have a studio, like Tim.”

I don’t even want to think about that scenario—looking for a job and a new apartment and then explaining to prospective landlords that you are unemployed.

“I still have the severance. And the unemployment.”

“They just raised it $25,” sneers A-., “like that is going to help.”

“You can’t live on unemployment, you can’t. I have the severance, and I have parents too, but I can’t ask them. I’m going to be 40. I don’t want to ask my parents for help.”

“You just have to downsize,” A- insists.

“I bought a few outfits to go on the interviews. Probably the last time I’ll be able to buy new clothes for a while.”

“Everybody is in the same boat,” says A-, “which is not much solace.”
I’m in a different boat, the guy wearing a tie. I’m over-worked and under-paid and no one is enthused. The economy is at a high level, business is being done. But one expects growth in capitalism. If your competitor isn’t doing something new, why should you. I interview and deal with in general people in several different industries. Let’s just say there’s a lack of exuberance at every level.

“I am not ready to work part time yet, I won’t.”

“But you can work part time and still look, but then that messes up your unemployment,” says A-.

“A lot of marketing people have lost their jobs.”

“I see that all the time.” I finally have something to add. “You have sales people and marketing people so they keep the sales people because they make the sale, produce the revenue, that’s the one to keep. But then they have no marketing support.”

“Then their sales go down even further.”

“I don’t want to work for $45,000,” says C-. Her eyes catch the light from the street lamp and glisten with her fear and frustration.

“Stay positive, something will break if you keep looking,” says A-, who says he has be somewhere and says goodbye. “Let’s go Mets, Tim.”

That’s right, Spring Training is beginning. Who can keep track of these things anymore? I notice that his limp seems entirely gone.

“I was told by one interviewer that they are just doing interviews now and won’t be able to hire until the budgets are approved, and the budget was supposed to approved in December.”

“Save by delay. That’s a trick people do. Not just not give raises, but delay. Save by delay. Budgeting gets done not the first month of the first quarter, but the third, or the second quarter. That will automatically cut the budget because we will just make do for another month or so. Why budget when there’s no reason to anticipate growth? You delay the budget, and that means you forestall spending and don’t spend, and then you say, we saved money by what I did, except everybody works harder for less salary.”

“The people I know still at my old company, they’re miserable. Their salaries were cut 10 percent across the board and they have to do so much more. I think they’re more miserable than I am.”

I look at the expression on her face. I want to believe her.