Employment Update

It looks like I finally got the help I needed with my Resume. All the necessary changes have been made and approved. I have four separate resumes for experience and skill sets: Audiovisual, computer, navy and retail.

The problem is my experience varies from one field to another intermittently over decades, so there will be huge gaps of time in each resume. They are each reduced to only two pages, if I presented my complete resume it would be about eight or ten pages long.

I'll be lucky if anyone hires me because I'm 54 in July, but the doctors at the V.A. told me I'm healthy, no signs of cancer, no STD's. I'm working out at Planet Fitness and eating right. So far I lost around 24 pounds, but I have at least 140 more to go before I reach the green zone on my BMI chart.

But I live in isolation for economic reasons. It's boring and lonely. I need challenges so every day I go online to forums where people need help with Adobe or Microsoft and I make suggestions or edit files. I often answer questions at Quora.com for young people who are about to make some of the mistakes I made growing up. I sometimes do research and gather data for charts and tables.

If you scroll to the bottom here, you'll see some of my other blogs, except for spfldnet. Just google "spfldnet" and you'll see where else I spend my alone time. It's not the best quality, but hey, I'm not getting paid for any of it.

I would like to get paid for what I do, but Patreon or GoFundMe accounts yield nothing. Freelance work online is globally competitive so it's a race to the bottom.

Still looking for work

I'm still looking for work.

I picked up yet another domain name for my menagerie. www.Buylocalspringfield.com

There are all kinds of local non-profit organizations with people who know about getting grants or have themselves set up to legally accept donations for their causes.

I don't.

I'm just a technical person who knows a little about computers, the Internet, graphic design, video production and photography.

Here's what I have to date.

http:www.atheistinsurgency.com
http:www.bachelortimes.com
http:www.buylocalspringfield.com
http:www.coffeecoup.net
http:www.empiredusk.com
http:www.fredslocombe.com
http:www.iicc-iesi.org
http:www.menagerieofmadness.com
http:www.sageofspringfield.com
http:www.spfld.net
http:www.spfld.tv
http://safeworkspace.blogspot.com

There are blogs, Google accounts, MySpace pages, Ning.com accounts, and many message board accounts associated with most of the aforementioned sites.

I'm not really a business person, but if I were to start a business, my model would be unrecognizable.

I can't just do the typical in-your-face advertising everyone else does. I did that for eight years working for the cable company. I have this idealized sense of justice and service to small local businesses who are being steamrolled by multinational conglomerates and I'm tired of the same type of advertising.

It's better to just be easily accessible, direct, concise and associated with community support programs. The main contest is exposure, exposure exposure. The opponents are the national franchises and multinational conglomerates.

I only have my one PC and a few gadgets.
I wish I had an office somewhere accessible to local businesses.

The newest way to do business - do favors.

Since I was downsized, I'm focusing on my skills at my computer and with my digital camera. I'm gaining experience by doing favors for people. Digital photography and Adobe Creative Suite 4 allow me to create fliers, posters, websites, electronic forms, presentation slides, T-shirts, mugs, calendars, magazines, posters, and other forms of communication, for free.

Yes, free. Just because I'm unemployed doesn't mean I shouldn't stop gaining experience.

I enrolled in online training at Lynda.com and every day I spend at least two hours training on software such as Adobe Dreamweaver, Flash, Acrobat Pro, Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, and more.

If you visited www.spfld.net in the past you may see some improvements as a result of my continued education. I’m currently working my way through Flash Action Script 3.

The rest of my time is spent looking for work. I occasionally volunteer at a PBS television station, work on other websites, and get involved in political and social causes.

So the new way of doing things, since no one is willing to pay me, is to just keep doing it for free. If you have a problem with that, hire me before I officially start my own business.

Life decision time

One of the symptoms of chronic anxiety is the gnawing feeling that it's time to make a "life decision." The psychological "noise" in the background is not really noise, more like a feeling generated by a slight overabundance of epinephrine.

Coffee will do that too. My big decision is whether or not to literally buy a farm house. It will put a huge dent in my monthly payment, slightly over a third of my gross monthly income. That would mean making a real commitment to my current job.

I would be stuck where I am right now and the current economic situation is just beginning to coast down the other side of the highest roller coaster peak at Wild Ride America.

The farm house is near Edinburg on N. 900 East Road. It's one of many properties I'm looking at. I haven't decided. I still need to talk to a bank about qualifying for a loan.

If I get this place, or one like it, I will be stuck here. The last time I made a decision like this was when I joined the military. I joined because I couldn't find a job, and after I signed the contract and made the commitment, another job opportunity came up that I really wanted. Too bad, four years off-course.

I don't know exactly what I would do with a place like this, but I do know that I would have space enough to do literally anything I wanted. I don't know how close the nearest neighbors are, I only saw the property from Google maps, and the satellite image is way too blurry to tell.

Work issues keep me on the edge of my seat, ready to bolt for the door. My chronic anxiety fills me with so much impatience that I skip details at work that wind up costing me extra time later when I must go back and finish the little details. I get criticized all the time for it. I feel stupid, but then I have an exemplary military record and two college degrees that prove I'm not stupid.

It makes me wonder what details I'm missing right now. Sometimes I'm stuck trying to figure out what I'm forgetting, there's always something I'm forgetting. This cycle becomes panic after a while, almost like a petit mal seizure. I could sit for hours and re-prioritize my to-do list, all the while doing nothing but staring at my computer.

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?

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.