Why am I back in Springfield?

Downtown Seattle from the
top of the Space Needle.

How long has it been since I was back from Washington State? One week or two? Every day here in Springfield washes into the next. It's the same routine. I've been looking at jobs here and out west still.

I had a Hell of a time trying to find an affordable apartment in the Pacific Northwest. I looked on the Internet and used apps on my iPad to find well-recommended and affordable studio apartments, but after finally flying out and spending a week visiting those places, none of them had the affordable units available. The people I spoke to said those units were occupied and then they offered me a more expensive unit. I was very disappointed.

The lessors I visited all said that they rent to people who have been employed steadily for six months. They all quoted me rates of $730 to $750 per month and then told me that monthly income must be at least three times rent. If that's the case here in Springfield with my previous job, I would only be able to afford rent of about $330.00 which is one-third of my net income from the state of Illinois' minimum wage after deductions, and that's if I am allowed to work a full forty hours per week! Most minimum wage work is part-time. I just don't understand business owners are so callus about the lives of their employees. They appear to only see payroll expenses.

I also spent several days applying for jobs in the Pacific Northwest. Most of the prospects replied that they would keep my application, but to contact them once I get settled out there. So, there's that catch-22 situation. Lessors want tenants who are already employed and employers want local tenants. I could get a cosigner, but there is no guarantee that my job prospects will come to fruition before my cosigner is slapped with debt. I refuse to put family at risk. It sickens me that some people are so eager for tenants to risk the financial health of their families.

So I come back to Springfield and sit here in my room day after day, continuing to apply online for jobs. I'm beginning to think that job boards like Careerbuilder.com, Monster,com and other job sites don't get solicited by employers, but instead these job boards go fishing around employer websites for open positions and then post them on their own boards. I received automated responses that appear to be from the employers, but I think they are fake, because I think I heard from one original employer in the last month and had only one interview.

Alma Mater Calling

I received a phone call from my Alma mater a couple of nights ago.

The caller graciously as he could (considering his wage and status as a temporary telemarketer) conveyed a congratulatory message written for him on his computer's monitor, slightly above the din of clattering worn computer keys and the muffled voices of his cohorts.

The university wanted donations from its alumni.

"Look buddy," I said, "it must be rough but I have to say this. I'm still waiting for my initial investment to pay off. Still waiting for those high-dollar corporate recruiters to show up who are looking for professionals."

Sure there were the job fairs with the usual suspects looking for clerks, typists, sales persons, and the one idiot who tries to do it all until he or she gets burned out, blows a circuit and winds up working for tips at Deja Vu.

I'm with a Temp agency making minimum wage. I did the telemarketing job twenty years ago.

"Oh, uh, well, I'm sorry to hear that..." he said. He went off script and it sent him over the cliff of improvisation into the stuttering scrub.

"No problem, I got the same message you did from the temp agency, but I decided to ignore it. I'd be you right now if I picked up that phone. We probably work for the same company."

Then I apologized for taking his time because I knew that he had a minimum quota of calls to reach that night. I wonder if he was also a graduate from the University of Illinois?

My Day-Job Hunt

I've been applying for jobs for the last few days. I'm a little impatient and anxious about hearing back for interviews, but I imagine employers these days must have huge stacks of applications on their desks.

I would really like to have my own business, but what? Video production? Graphic Design? Anyone need business cards, a logo, or retouched photo? How would you like to get your first website off the ground?

Who couldn't do that? At least I didn't try to invest in "Desktop Publishing" when I thought I could actually make a living at it. Everybody does it now.

I bide my time now doing economic research. For example, I compiled a database from the Illinois Department of Employment Services and the Census Bureau. They already have them, but they have them published in a way that makes it difficult to find out certain information.

There was one set of data that contained employment information about the types of jobs, their tax reference codes, and the number of employees in those jobs at the time the survey was taken.

Then another set had the tax reference codes, the types of jobs, and the actual salaries and wages for those jobs.

Why were they kept separate? You can draw your own conclusions, but when I combined them in a Microsoft Access Database and ran the numbers in a pivot chart, I was amazed to find a massive discrepancy of income for Sangamon County.



So now I can determine the distribution of wealth and the dominant type of employment in Sangamon County.

It was tedious, but satisfying in its own way. I'll keep practicing with Microsoft Excel and Access by compiling crime statistics from Police Beat, and employment statistics from the Classifieds of the Illinois State Journal Register.

Employment statistics like the turnaround rate of employers and types of positions. That should be very interesting indeed.

In My Previous Life: Credit

I found a job with a Temp agency. I’m currently on my first assignment and everything appears to be going well. But still, I’m just a temp. At least I’ll go out in the ‘Recycle’ bin instead of the ‘Trash’ bin where the full and part time employees go when they get laid-off.

I wound up in a corporate trash heap back in 2001 and never recovered. It doesn’t look too promising anymore either. Because I worked in a media outlet, I was under the mistaken impression that working in the mass media meant job security. Instead of our jobs getting out-sourced like tech jobs, our jobs were consolidated by media mergers.

Technically, I’m one of the new suburban homeless, a 42 year-old living in my mother’s house. She doesn’t mind because she can travel with the comfort of knowing I’m watching her house and the pets.

Still, I suffer the humility of my situation. I miss my independence. In this culture we are measured by what we have. It’s a sad, pathetic way to judge someone, but it’s a fact of life in our industrial plutocracy.

I once had my own house full of things on an acre of land. I thought I had a good job. I thought I was set for life. That kind of thinking is dangerous.

I began to accept credit card debt as a fact of life. Getting away with only making a minimum payment month after month was keeping my mind off of the total debt. My monthly minimum payments gradually crept up from around $12 to $40 and I didn’t notice it because of “Creeping Normalcy.”

Creeping Normalcy is what creditors count on most for their profits. They count on us to not turn the page and read the fine print on the back of our bills. Tiny obscure fees began to appear for less than one dollar. The tiny obscure fees would sit there unchanged for about six months, or longer, and then they would start to gradually increase.

I got rid of all of my credit cards in July of 2002. I sold my house, paid them off, cut them up, and never saw or used any again. I now only have a checking account. Money trickles in every now and then and I can keep my phone and my car insurance. If I’m lucky I can get some gas for my car.

Job hunting

I’ve been looking for work. Any work. I’m a college graduate. It should be easy, right? I keep my eyes and ears to the media, hoping to find something. Then I see statistics that show more high school graduates are working than college graduates.

How is that? That's easy! College graduates are not supposed to be looking for jobs. They are supposed to be making jobs. So, why are college students complaining about not finding work?

Evidently, it’s a symptom of a bigger problem, the General Requirements Curriculum. The big picture was completely missed. A plan was never formulated. In my case it’s easy because I got an Associate degree somewhere else and transferred credits, so I couldn’t even declare a minor.

My education was fractured by circumstances engineered by a capitalist society with no vision of long-term consequences, only greed at the top.

So now we have a large number of college graduates who don’t know entrepreneurship. They just try to look for work. This has been going on for a long time in the U.S. And guess what.

We have been creating our own terrorists. We have sent far too many foreign-exchange students out into the world without the crucial information needed to actually make work instead of complaining about not finding a job.

It's far too easy for zealots with money to take advantage of so many people who know just enough to make a bomb, but not enough to start a company making better mousetraps.

Here in the U.S. it's manageable because we have such a powerful and intrusive law enforcement system, and the culture is so homogeneous that volatile social cohesion is limited to urban street gangs.

Some high school teachers have caught on to this and are teaching entrepreneurship in the K-12 levels. It's too little too late because of one major obstacle, tenure.

Gee, it took me this long to figure it out? I'm in really bad shape. But at least I can see the candle in the distant window. Now I just have to find my way around the dark fjord of capitalist influence.