Raving Rant: The Down Economy - Editorials

Axel rants about "outplacement services", happy hippy bullshit, the economy, and finding a new career path.

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Raving Rant: The Down Economy

The following is a true story. The names have been changed to protect the incompetent, which is a damn sight better than they deserve.

Last month, my day job finally came to an end. The department was being moved back east. For those few and hardy souls that managed to keep the works spun up on a near daily basis, our choices were thus: relocation or layoff. A couple chose relocation, and I wish them well. The rest of us, for one reason or another, chose the severance package. As part of this generous package, arrangements for "outplacement services" had been made. For those of you who have never been laid off before, this usually consists of a 3rd party company sending representatives out to talk with you and make sure you're not going to come back with an Uzi and a carefully thought out suicide note in your breast pocket, then maybe looking over your resume and suggesting ways to basically place yourself in the same sort of cubicle hell that you have so recently been ejected from. In this particular exercise of "outplacement services," we didn't get a live human being from the 3rd party company. We got their website and a couple passwords. The website promised us wondrous tools to help make our job search better and more fulfilling. It promised us that we could develop a whole "self-marketing plan" which would make us more attractive to employers.

I've filled out tax forms that were less cryptic. I dutifully filled out all manner of electronic forms, took all sorts of self-assessments, and basically discovered what you gentle readers have already known for some time: I would be best suited as a writer.

Little could have been less shocking to me. However, it's a well known fact that writing for a living is not the easiest sort of career to break into, or even jump into from another career. Plus, as has been reported, the most likely venue for somebody to get a decently paying job as a writer has been slowly bleeding out because the corporate overlords running most newspapers aren't smart enough to figure out how to make a buck on the Internet reporting the news. And despite what Rupert Murdoch thinks, a subscription scheme for news websites isn't going to

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be a viable model. For specialist publications, maybe, but for day-to-day news at the city, county, state, and regional level, and investigative reporting of all stripes, it's a losing proposition. A rant for another time. The bottom line was that my particular talents irrespective of my previous vocation, while undoubtedly useful, applied to a field of work in the midst of undergoing a radical adjustment. Put more

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bluntly, my timing sucked, and trying to get paying work as a writer would be exceedingly difficult if not impossible.

Compounding this instance of bad timing was a more serious problem. The IT field no longer held any attraction for me. To be sure, I hadn't lost any of my affinity for computers. I hadn't woken up to discover my unexpected conversion into a Luddite. I just couldn't see myself rolling out of bed in the morning for another IT job. The thought of another meaningless and soul crushing job stuffed into a cubicle filled me with the sort of sick loathing normally reserved for defending war criminals. I understood as never before the frustration and disaffection behind Tommy Lee Jones' epic rant from Under Siege. I had grown tired of coming up with last minute solutions to impossible problems created by other people, and while I wasn't quite at the point where I would sooner steal nuclear tipped Tomahawk missiles than fix another server alarm, I was well beyond the point of "this job sucks."

As part of our "outplacement services," we were assigned a representative, who I shall call Annie. Annie was based out of the corporate headquarters for the company providing the "outplacement services." We had her email and her office phone number and it was stated quite simply that we could call her or email her if we had questions or concerns. However, we had no means of speaking to her face-to-face, or speaking to anybody face-to-face, about our concerns or our questions. My former employer hadn't considered it important enough for us to have real human contact with the people purportedly laboring on our behalf to make the period of unemployment as brief and painless as possible. Because they didn't think it was important, they didn't deem it necessary to include in the package, and thus didn't pay for it. It's particularly troubling when you consider that my department didn't have much in the way of human contact when we were employed. Our office was windowless, pass carded, and tucked into what used to be a secondary server room. A very small secondary server room. We went in, we came out, and if we happened to pass somebody in the hall or bump into somebody in the break room, it was never long enough to make any sort of lasting impression. We were an invisible hand, a group of helpful techno-gnomes who fixed things without making much in the way of ripples or made other people aware that there was a very big problem that needed to be fixed. We might as well have called ourselves the NSD: No Such Department.

When I called Annie to inquire about the possibility of seeing somebody in the local branch of the company handling the outplacement, I didn't think it would be any trouble at all. It seemed a perfectly reasonable request. Their local office was only a couple miles down the road from my apartment. I could have walked there and back, gotten some exercise and some help with my career plans, and probably been a pretty happy camper all things considered. That was when the limitations of our outplacement package were revealed to me and I was rather stunned when it sank in. I had a long phone conversation with Annie. I made it painfully clear to her that I wanted out of the IT field. I made it painfully clear that I needed help translating the practical effects of my skill sets into a different field that might be more professionally satisfying. I didn't get much in the way of guidance or assistance from Annie. She sent me a couple of examples of what is known as a functional resume, something that lists your skills and accomplishments, which would be nice if there had been much in the way of anything we could rightly call an accomplishment. I think employers don't consider "three years without committing suicide due to job related soul drain" much in the way of an accomplishment.

Since Annie and her company didn't seem to be doing much for me, I began hitting job fairs. This led me to the county's "Workforce Center," a public resource that purportedly would do all the same nifty stuff my former employer had blown stupid amounts of money on for no out-of-pocket on my part. I sat through a couple of orientation meetings, ran through some more self-assessments, and once again determined that my desired career path which my skills were best aligned with was that of a writer. I didn't particularly need that revelation again, but the Center staff apparently did. I arranged to see a person who I shall call Betty.

Betty's official title was "career guidance specialist." I spent half an hour with Betty and came to the horrifying conclusion that she was fundamentally incapable of offering anything special or that bore even a passing resemblance to guidance regarding one's career. Much as the second round of self-assessments had determined what I had already known before the first round of assessments, my time talking with Betty had pretty much been the same as it had been with Annie, though it was considerably shorter with Betty. The observation that the current economy and job market sucked and there was nothing to be done regarding my desire to change my career path. There were all manner of pious platitudes, lots of "I wish I could help you" statements, and other sorts of useless drivel that did nothing to help clarify my options and did far too much to ignite a searing rage in my heart and mind.

I understand the economy sucks. I've often joked that I helped bring the country to its knees just by keeping the servers running while they processed America's economic disemboweling. I understand that when the economy tanks, management gets even stupider than normal and fires everybody rather than take a hit to their profits for a quarter or two. Shareholders might vote them out of their comfy CEO chairs. Laugh, if you must, but consider that Ken Lewis went from the top of the world to out on his ass in little more than a year. The fact that the economy sucks shouldn't stop people from doing their goddamned jobs. Two different employees, in two different entities, faced with exactly the same customer did exactly the same thing: they failed him. They failed to take upon themselves the challenge of helping their customer achieve a satisfactory result despite adverse conditions. I am quite certain that they would couch any defense of their actions in the fine language of weasels.

“We're only facilitators.”

“We're here only as a resource.”

"We can't guarantee any kind of results.”

The people that are in the best position to help people in the worst position have absolutely no motivation to do so. It might entail effort. It might entail failure. And failure might lead to their comfy little chairs being removed from under their dead asses. What happened to all this happy hippie “Yes, we can!” bullshit from a year ago? What happened to this “sense of renewed hope” everybody is suppose to be feeling? The call for service to our fellow man? Much like any other chunk of campaign hype, it's been vaporized by the realities of human failing and the vagaries of an economy that tanked at just the wrong time. When the rubber met the road, nobody seemed to possess the intestinal fortitude, the ferrous content in their spine, or the basic sack to grit their teeth and carry on with their ideals even in the face of what was certainly the most adverse financial environment in a generation. If you can't carry your ideals when the shit hits the fan, you've got no business claiming them in the first place.

The most damning statement I heard was “I don't think I can help you.” Which begs the question: if you don't think you can help, then what exactly the hell are you doing in a job where you're expected to help people? Not to simply help clean up resumes and point people to a website, but help them get their bearings, to figure out what to make of themselves, to guide them from the wreckage of a destroyed career path to the beginning of a new one. The lives of millions are fucked up beyond anything in living memory and we're stuck with feckless incompetents who can't seem to summon even one iota of effort or imagination for the people coming to them for help. We've got a bunch of lazy peons working in positions that demand ass-kicking warriors. We need some honest to God champions willing to take up the banners, to plot out the campaigns, and to storm the battlements when the resistance of inertia threatens to crush us. But those champions are not to be found. The only people with the passion and the desire to get the job done are the same people are in trouble in the first place. We must become our own champions. We must take up the arms by which our new lives will be made and carve out our niche with our own hands. We must armor ourselves with fierce determination, bullheaded stubbornness, and unadulterated fury. We must take the current climate not as a hopeless challenge but merely the rough terrain of the battlefield. We must look upon the fat self-satisfied leeches who can't be bothered to lift a finger when a real problem comes up and sneer at their “best efforts.”

Ayn Rand once wrote, “The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.” In this down economy, it's all too easy to let ourselves get stopped, to simply accept it's not possible to go where we wish and make what we will with our lives. But we can't do that. We have to get back up when we get hit. We have to take the hits, again and again and again, crawling forward on our hands and knees with daggers between our teeth, bruised and bleeding if we must, but we cannot let ourselves stop ourselves. And if we cannot stop ourselves, then we cannot let others stop us, either. We must be willing to advance, one foot at a time, without flinching, to achieve those dreams and to make the new lives that we so desperately need. We must dare every last person who even looks like they're thinking of trying to get between us and our goals to take their best shot, then laugh at their failure to deter us. The only place to go in the down economy is up. Up on our own two feet. Up over the rubble of broken careers. Up through the apathetic ranks of mindless drones that can't be bothered to stand and fight for a better future, leaving their battered remains in our wake.

Follow me.

- Axel Cushing

(December 31, 2009)