A life lesson

About a month before I got fired on Christmas eve, I heard a girl screaming in the store warehouse.

I wasn't quite 19. I had been hired for the second time at a department store in Rockaway, New Jersey, and worked as a salesman in the seasonal department. The first time I worked there, I had unloaded trucks on the loading dock. Now that I was out on the sales floor, I had to wear a tie and a name tag. In addition to helping customers and stocking shelves, I assembled hibachis, grills, swing sets and other items depending upon whatever season it was. My supervisors were adamant about us wearing name tags, although they were oblivious to what the name tags actually said. Mine said "Hubert H. Humphrey."

There was an artist who had a little office off the sales floor. He was a young guy, stocky, with a red beard and a wicked sense of humor. He was really good at lettering and design, and made all of the sale signs for the store. He was also an excellent and fast cartoonist, and would create nasty cartoons of managers he didn't like and share them with me and other friends he trusted. They weren't "blue" or anything like that. He just put them in absurd situations to poke holes in their self importance. He drew a picture of me once. I can see it in my minds' eye. My manager was named "Milt," and the cartoon was of me with tiny body and gigantic head, holding a hibachi. The caption read, "Hey, Milt! What's an hibachi?" I don't know why it seemed so funny at the time, but I really wish I had that picture.

In the New York/New Jersey area at that time, there was a spaghetti sauce commercial that ran incessantly on TV showing an Italian mother in the city calling out the window, "Ann--tun-eee!!! Ann--tunn-eee!!!" And little Anthony would smile and run home to his delicious homemade spaghetti dinner with sauce that tasted just like mother used to make, as long as mother made it in a factory along with all of the other sub-minimum wage workers.

In the housewares department worked a bespectacled middle-aged salesman with thinning hair who was always doing something funny in a snarky sort of way. He was the kind of person who was certain he was too good for the job he was doing but had no other options in life except to do work that was beneath him. He had a recording of the Italian lady yelling for Anthony, and would occasionally play the recording through the store's PA system. The managers would rush around trying to figure out who had done it, but to the best of my knowledge, they never figured it out. It was funny for the first five or six times.

A friend of mine was the receptionist. She had a little kiosk at the front of the store, greeted customers as they came in through the doors and made announcements about what was on sale in the various departments. I fancied myself quite the talented faux radio announcer, so occasionally she would pass the microphone over to me and let me make an announcement about something or other. Most times, I was flawless. One afternoon, though, she asked me to announce a special over at the snack counter. I said "Sure!" and proceeded to totally screw it up. I became tongue-tied, stuttering and unintelligible, as if English had suddenly become a foreign language. I tried to correct myself, but everything I said just made it worse. As I was digging an ever deepening hole, my friend hissed "Give me the mike!" while the manager at the snack counter yelled "No! No! No!" Finally, I handed the microphone back to her, while the store manager came by and said, "That was terrible!" I nodded sadly. Thus ended my career as a radio celebrity.

During the holidays, the seasonal department expanded from the regular sales floor into part of the adjacent warehouse where Christmas trees were set up and a huge assortment of holiday decorations were put on display. On a slow morning about a month before Christmas, I walked into the warehouse and heard a girl's bloodcurdling scream. I raced to the sound and found one of the girls who worked in the beauty products department with one of her arms jammed into the rollers of the conveyor belt system that moved products from one area of the warehouse to another. The conveyor belt was still moving, with her arm grabbed by rollers up to her bicep. As she was screaming, I ran for the 3-button panel that operated the conveyor. I pressed the button that stopped the conveyor, but her arm was still caught fast. The only way to release her was to reverse the conveyor belt. But the buttons that did that were not marked. If I pressed the wrong button, her arm would get jammed even more. As she was begging me to help her, I took a deep breath, took my best guess, and correctly pressed the button that reversed the belt. I helped her pull her arm out, and as she sat on the floor crying I called security and she was soon taken to the hospital. Fortunately, although her arm was bruised, it wasn't broken. She was back to work a few days later, and never said a word to me.

At the time, I was working really long hours, opening and closing the seasonal department with practically no help from anyone. I suppose they didn't want to hire anyone else since I seemed to be able to handle it all on my own. Then one afternoon, as I was helping a customer with his purchase, the owner of the store appeared and started to chew me out for the appearance of the department. He was literally screaming at me, while the customer and I just looked at him in disbelief. He had lost it. I took it for awhile, and the rebel without a clue inside me took issue with the injustice of it all. I lost it in return, and started to yell right back at him. He stopped screaming, turned a bright shade of red, and stomped away. I looked at the customer I was helping, and he said something like, "What was his problem?! What a jerk!"

He avoided me from that point on. In my extreme naivety, I thought there would be no repercussions for standing up to the boss.

A few weeks later on Christmas eve, it all fell apart. Some friends of mine and I were in the employee break room. A bottle of cheap wine was being passed around just as one of the more aggressive security guards walked by. He started chewing us out for drinking wine during store hours, and for some reason I was completely put off by the total injustice of a world that would not allow hard working store employees to drink wine while families shopped frantically for last-second Christmas gifts and stocking stuffers. I challenged him and asked, "Why?" That was apparently the wrong question to ask. He now demanded that we put the wine away. Again, I said "Why?" I mean, who was this guy to demand that we do anything? It's a free world, after all. He grabbed me by the arm, marched me upstairs, and Milt, my manager, handed me my paycheck, complete with pink slip inside the envelope.

Milt took me aside, and was painfully nice to me. I remember that he let me go with a mix of sorrow and compassion. I didn't lose the job because of my nonsense of defying a security guard. Ever since the day that I had dared to talk back to the store owner, my job was on borrowed time. I should have expected it, but I did not. "Steve," Milt said. "You just can't tell off the boss like that and expect to get away with it." I nodded my head, thanked him, and went home.

I was just a kid, nice enough for the most part, who could be at times both self-righteous and foolish.

And I hadn't even touched the wine.

So what am I going to call this blog now?

I lost my old job on 11/11/11. 

I found a new job on 2/24/12.

Yea!

Since late last year, I have been locked to this computer, sending out an endless stream of resumes and cover letters to potential employers. Yet now, today, I've found one. I've been hired by a really cool company in Addison. I can focus on the future, learn lots of interesting new things, and contribute my time and talents to the success of another company.

Yea!

I was so worried about finding another job. All kinds of potential scenarios went through my head. So many "what if" thoughts chased each other with a redundant rapidity through my brain. They were there when I went to bed, and they were there when I woke up in the morning. But now, it's like a great weight has been lifted off of my shoulders.

Yea!

Not having a job is scary! I don't see how people who have been without work for a year or more cope with it.  November to February was more than enough to me. The stress and sadness of not working take their toll on your body and your soul. There were many times, especially early on, when I would sit here at this computer and find myself totally stressed out. WhatamIgonnado, whatamIgonnado, whatamIgonnado, whatamIgonnado?

Sometimes I'd have to consciously force myself to take slow, deep breaths, relax my shoulder muscles, close my eyes and just focus on my steady breathing (a trick I learned in my Job Seekers group at church). It worked, though. It really helped. Well, that and some dark chocolate.

So now, it's done. I have another job. I start Monday. Thank God.

Yea!

I'll have to rethink this blog. I plan to continue it, but I guess I'll have to shift the focus away from my job search to delving more deeply into the Wonderful World of Steve.

Yea?

One last thing to mention. When I left my previous job, my supervisor's name was Stephanie. When I was looking for a new job, a lot of my support came from a Life Coach named Stephanie. Now that I've found another job, my supervisor's name is, of course, Stephanie.

Thank you, Stephanie.

Back to work!

Yea!

The magical world of unemployment

Looking for a job is, in a way, magical. Your future is unknown. You could be on the road to success. You could be on the road to failure. You could be trudging toward total mediocrity. (Come to think of it, I guess that's not all that different from being a full-time employee, really.) To ensure my future employment, I have conferred with my associates living in the Magical World of Disney to determine what is required to convince a future employer of my worth as their loyal subject.

My dear friends Pluto, Mickey and Bambi all agreed that what I need to do right now is to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Literally. So this morning I donned my realistic white beard and my pointed hat, grabbed my custom-made Gandalf staff and began my journey to the Land of the Employed.

And a treacherous journey it was. No sooner had I rounded the corner and left my sheltered home when some bedeviled  creature with a ruddy red face and ruddy red hair screamed at me from his ruddy red BMW. I don't remember being as frightened when facing the Drooling Morlocks of the Midnight Netherworld. (Yes, these were the same Morlocks from The Time Machine. They were drooling in the Midnight Netherworld well before Mr. Wells was playing Martian Invasion in his sandbox.)

As I proceeded on my quest, my road split three ways. I could go left to the prancing liberal land of the Pelosi or I could go right to the dreaded Bogs of Newt. Rejecting both of these options, I decided to go forward and take the Middle Road, even though I knew that led to the seductive but disappointing Audacious Articulations of Barack.

For the nonce, all went well. The trees were singing. The birds were shining. The leaves smiled down from the blue night sky. When of a sudden, I found myself falling. In my reverie, I had failed to watch my step and stumbled head-over-heels into the Endless Pit of Reality. My heart pounded full gallop in my very bosom, just as it did that day when I went over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house. Despite what you may have heard, the horse did NOT know the way to carry the sleigh.

I waved my staff and screamed these words into the very heart of  the darkened pit, "I SHALL BE EMPLOYED!"

With a flash and a thud I was expelled by the pit into the Downtown of McKinney. I found myself rolling as I did as a child when I attended Gollum's "My Precious!" Gymnastics class for wizards.

As I sat on the sidewalk, a strange gentleman with an aloof demeanor tossed a few coins at me. I heard him mutter to his female companion, "All he needs is a cardboard sign and he'd make a fortune."

The light of enlightenment burst forth and shone through the very substance of my brain, shedding illumination upon the very problem I had set out to resolve. A cardboard sign! That was the very thing.

And so my friends, should you in your own journey find yourself in the Downtown of McKinney, visit me, and toss a few spare coins my way. There is a home in the Shire that I must pay for.

For a taste of my magic, click upon my face if you dare:

I was only 16

My very first job was working in the receiving department of a now defunct department store in Rockaway, New Jersey. I was 16 years old. There was no resume involved. All I did was walk in off the street one Saturday afternoon and ask the receptionist if there were any openings. She paged one of the managers, and pretty soon a stocky middle-aged man with thinning hair and a mustache came stomping down a flight of stairs that led from the store offices upstairs. I can't remember for sure what his name was. I'm pretty sure it was "Mr. Feldman."

He looked me over with a skeptical eye and asked me what I was looking for. To this day I have no idea why he even bothered to talk with me. I'm certain I looked like a scraggly, underfed and disheveled street person. I was also intensely shy at this age, and I doubt if I gave him very much eye contact, preferring instead to study my sneakers and the floor tiles. For whatever reason, kindness or sympathy, he gave me an application to fill out, told me to get a haircut, and then put me to work on the loading dock where all of the other refugees from society were safely stashed away from public view.

I learned more about life and people by working on that crummy, dirty loading dock than at any other time before or since. The store had an upstairs and a downstairs, and a huge attached warehouse and receiving area in the back. To get to work, I'd have to walk through the store, go down a big flight of stairs, navigate past the record department and the seasonal department and then push through big hanging sheets of thick plastic that led into the warehouse. It was pretty brainless work. A truck would pull up. You and a handful of other street urchins would unload whatever was in it. The truck would drive away. You'd take whatever had been in the truck and put it in its proper place in the warehouse. Another truck would arrive. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I don't know how I managed to fit in with the receiving crew. Sheer determination, I guess. Even at that age I wasn't easily deterred from doing something I needed to do. I needed to buy records, so I needed to work. If I didn't work, I would not have records. So I worked, and did my utmost to fit in among a mix of rough, tough and goofy teenagers, a nice but often sarcastic manager named Bob, and an old crusty security guard named Bill.

Everyone had a name given to him by the other kids. I'm not talking about names like "shrimp," or "fatty" or "retard." No, this crew of the soon-to-be-high-school-dropout crowd was far too creative for such trite nonsense. They considered every angle, weighed different names, and then decided upon the one most inappropriate as the one most appropriate.

One of the kids was called "Speedy," because he once took some speed while at work on the loading dock and raced around doing the work of 10 other people. One was "Hairy," because he already had a thick mat of hair on his chest. One was "The Armenian," since his family was from Armenia. It went on like that.

I didn't have a name at first. They didn't know what to make of me. I didn't immediately fit in with them, and for the first few weeks I just came in, did my job, ignored the stupid pranks they would play on me, and then went home. Until one day...

I came in to work, and Speedy smiled his absurdly stupid ear-to-ear smile, raced up and pulled me by the arm to a joint gathering of the loading dock crew. They all looked me over, turned to confer among themselves, looked at me again, and laughed. "It's true!" one of them said. "He looks like a vagina!"

So I got my name, and if I wanted to work there, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I didn't even know what it meant, because I had never even heard the word before. Among my least educated brethren, and to Bob the manager and Bill the security guard, I was now Tw@#.

I learned to ignore it, but sometimes that just wasn't possible. During the holiday season, it was our job to tie Christmas trees to the roofs of customers' cars. One evening, as a man, a woman and their teenage daughter stood outside their car, I was tying a tree to the roof of their car when Bill the security guard came outside and shouted, "Hey,  Tw@#!"

I jerked slightly, but otherwise did not respond. I couldn't believe it. There were customers here. What was he doing? And then it happened again.

"Hey,  Tw@#!" Bill repeated with increasing aggravation. "Hey, Tw@#!, don't you hear me?"

I totally ignored him, and thankfully after a minute or two of shouting out this vulgar word for female anatomy, he eventually gave up and went back inside. To their credit, the man, his wife and their daughter never said a word.

After they drove off with their tree, I went inside and Bill confronted me. "Hey,  Tw@#! Why were you ignoring me out there? I had somethin' to tell ya!"

Then Bob the manager came out of his office and said, "Bill. Think about it. You were shouting  Tw@#" in front of customers. Not once, but a bunch of times. What was he supposed to do?"

Poor Bill. He was really a nice old man. We eventually became pretty good friends, and when I finally quit the loading dock about a year later, he tried to talk me out of it.

"Whatcha gotta quit for, huh?" he asked.

I told him that I had to focus more on school, but that was only part of why I was leaving. I had saved enough money to buy records for awhile, and although I was friendly with most of the guys at the loading dock, there were a couple of the really tough ones that I never got along with and just didn't want to deal with anymore. I missed Bill, though.

About a year later, having run out of money, I went back to the store and talked to Mr. Feldman again about working there. He said he'd rehire me, but this time I was going to work on the sales floor. I guess he realized that I was presentable in public after all. 

"And get a haircut!" he said as I was leaving.

Boy, I've been busy!

For everyone in my vast blogging audience, I must extend my profound apologies for not having written in a couple of days. You see, I have been extremely busy. After searching for the perfect job since November, I believe that I have finally found a position that suits my talents perfectly.

Yes, I'm a balloon. Who would have thought that that would be an option? It's awfully tiring, having to flail my arms like this hour after hour, but the pay is incredible. I had no idea I could make an upper-middle-class living as a balloon waving to people! It's truly astonishing, and pretty enlightening. This must be what they mean by the "hidden job market." The job market that no one tells you about. I mean, here I was, sending out resume after resume for hours on end, when the ideal position was practically waving right at me as I drove down the local access road.

There was a large "We're Hiring!" sign by the local Honda dealership. I pulled up and without even getting out of my car, I rolled down the window and yelled over at a manager.

"Hey! What positions are you hiring for?"
"It's kinda like a job in advertising."
"Advertising? Why, I have an advertising background!"
"You do? Hey, that's great. That's just great. Well, park your car over there my friend and let's talk about it."

Needless to say, I got the job! The hours are pretty long, but I don't mind. I actually enjoy this line of work. It reminds me of my old days back in the 1980s with Richard Simmons, a personal friend of mine. If you look closely at one of his old VHS tapes, like "Flailin' to the Folk Songs," that's me in the background with the harmonica holder, shaking my arms and legs with a charming spasticity.

The only problem with this new balloon job is, twice now I've been carried up about 100 feet into the air by strong winds. Once, I actually flew over Central Expressway, and landed in a completely different car dealership's parking lot. I almost got fired for freelancing with another company. My manager seems to understand that it wasn't exactly my fault, and he promises to look into the possibility of having an ergonomic review done of my work space to help me to perform my duties better in the future.

Well, if you're in McKinney anytime soon, come by and wave at me. I'll be sure to wave back. In fact, I might even wiggle at you.

I'm such a rogue.

Your resume must be prefect.

If you ask 10 people about what should and should not be on your resume, you will get 20 different opinions. It seems as if everyone has an opinion, but according to Stephanie at my Job Seekers group, the only opinion that matters is the Hiring Manager's. And from what I've heard, you have 10-30 seconds to grab their attention. Otherwise, goodbye and on to the next.

Once upon a time, I assisted the Hiring Manager in my department by helping to interview copywriter candidates. I have read hundreds and hundreds of resumes, and I cannot tell you how many times I found a typo or something weird in them that caused them to go into the reject pile.

One person spoke of her work with the "Untied Way." Obviously she meant "United Way," but despite her work for this great cause, her resume stopped right then and there. Many people misspelled the name of the very company that they were applying to work for. The name was a little tricky, I admit that, but for someone to apply for a job and praise themselves for being an excellent writer and proofreader only to misspell the company name, well, sorry, the resume goes into the circular file.

Now when you apply for a job and when you have an interview, it may be old fashioned but it is still a good idea to take the time to write a personal thank-you note and mail it off to the person or persons you interviewed with. Immediately. Right after the interview. Yes, some people send emails (text messages may be next) and that may be the way the world is heading, but a personal note sent via snail mail is PERSONAL. It requires a little more effort, and impresses an employer that you cared enough about the job to dot that I and cross that T.

One person sent us a great resume, and did incredibly well during the interview process. We were all excited about her because we thought that she would be an immediate fit, and we were all happy to receive a thank-you note from her. Until we read the note. It was full of misspellings. Not just one. There were lots of them. In this case, it would have been better for her NOT to have sent the note, because we didn't hire her. The pieces just didn't match up.

Bottom line, whatever you provide to a potential employer, make sure that it's perfect in every way. Do not rely upon spell check in Microsoft Word to catch misspellings for you (remember "Untied Way").

I've been sending resumes and cover letters out like crazy lately. I have applied for 42 different jobs over the past two weeks. For each one, I have tried really hard to tailor the wording of the resume to the job description. For example, for a copywriter job at GameStop, they said that the ideal candidate should enjoy video games and have multiple gaming consoles. We have gaming consoles in our house that date back to the Atari 2600 and Intellivision (they still work!), as well as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. So, I added a bullet point on my resume:

• Own pretty much every gaming system known to man

I completed the online application, uploaded a new cover letter and the resume with the bullet about gaming systems, and then moved on to another application for a writer job with Mary Kay. (Hey, if Mary Kay will hire me to write copy for cosmetics and anything else, I will gladly write that copy and be proud of it.) So I completed the online application, uploaded a new cover letter and resume, submitted the application...

...and failed to remove the bullet that said:

• Own pretty much every gaming system known to man

I'm sure an HR person at Mary Kay is getting a good laugh right about now. My resume is probably getting passed around. In fact, it's probably posted on a bulletin board by a coffee machine with that bullet circled in red. It's what I deserve. I don't think I'm going to be working for Mary Kay any time soon.

No won is prefect. Even, and especially, me. But I try so hard...

Heck, LinkedIn is quickly replacing the purpose of resumes anyway. I don't think there's anything about gaming systems on my LinkedIn profile...

Uh...

Gotta go.

"Interviewing." What an odd word.

Why is interviewing called "interviewing?" I suppose the "viewing" portion is just what it sounds like. Is the "inter" portion related to "interesting" or "interested?" Maybe it's derived from "interactive" or "interdisciplinary" or possibly "inside." I could go on and on here, but I won't.

So would that make not getting an interview an "outernonview?" I've had a lot of those. Or haven't. Whatever.

I had an interview this morning, and I was so happy to get it. You never really know, but I felt it went really well. The people I met with were incredibly nice, and the job looks both interesting and challenging. Crossing my fingers, toes and eyes here.

But regardless of what happens, it's so encouraging to simply get an interview. Obviously the people that want to talk with you realize that you've got a lot to offer. You must be doing something right in your job search to stand out among all of the other resumes, LinkedIn profiles and blogs all clamoring for attention. "Hire me! Hire me! No, hire me! Look over here!"

For me, I worry more before the interview than during the actual interview itself. What if the car breaks down while I'm driving there? What if I spill something on my suit? What if they don't like me? There are a whole string of potential "what ifs" that go through my head before an interview, and none of them ever happen. (Knock on wood. Or knock on the computer screen. Gently.)



It's like I have an angel and a devil on opposite shoulders sometimes.

- I just pray that my car will start that morning.

- Has it been causing trouble?

- No, it hasn't been giving me any trouble.

- But what if it did?

- It won't!

I hope I get a job soon so they both stop bothering me.

For some reason, once the interview starts and I'm faced with other human beings with lives and families and interests of their own, I'm able to calm down, focus, and hopefully demonstrate to them that I have the talent and skills they need, all wrapped up in a nice package called "Steve." Anyway, I think the interview went well, and I'm hopeful they will call and let me know one way or the other before the end of the month.

I also have another interview with a different company on Monday morning, so I get to do this all over again in a few days.

No, I am GLAD to be able to do this all over again in a few days.


As long as my car starts and I don't spill something on my suit.

Filling out form after form after form after form after..

When life rudely intervenes to disrupt and unsettle your routine and settled life, after you get over the sudden smack on the head and other sensitive places, you may find yourself as I did suddenly in the business of finding another job.

With the help of Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed and other job sites, I applied for 21 jobs only last week. So far this week, I've applied for 16 more. I expect to apply for five or six other jobs by the end of the day on Friday. Altogether, I will have applied for an excess of 40 jobs in the last two weeks. That's not even counting all of the jobs I applied for in weeks past.

I am not complaining! Thank goodness I live in an area where the job market is humming along. I have lots of experience, I have a college degree, I'm modestly articulate, modestly smart, very nice, very reliable and oh-so-worthy of whatever job I end up landing. I'm trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave and reverent. I guess I left out "clean" from that list. Don't worry, this Boy Scout took a shower this morning.

For every one of the jobs I've applied for, I've provided a slightly modified cover letter and resume, each tailored to include keywords that appear in the job description or from that company's Web site. It's a lot of work. I could be lazy about it and just cut-and-paste over and over again, but I'm trying to go about doing this job search the right way.

Yesterday, I spent a long time totally updating and revising my online portfolio. Before I had two, neither of which I was particularly thrilled with. The new one is a whole lot better, far more organized, and includes some modestly cool features like live links to my LinkedIn profile and this wonderful blog I'm writing. I am so glad my wife and I bought Adobe CS5 recently. Adobe Acrobat is so perfect for creating interactive portfolios.


What bothers me most about the job-search process is having to constantly fill out online forms. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to fill out my first name, last name, address, county, home phone number, cell phone number, which number do I prefer for them to contact me with, and on and on and on.

What's really fun and frustrating are sites where you just completed a very complex online form with your entire life history, press the "submit" button, and then lose everything because the next page fails to load. So you go back and try it again, fill it all out again, press "submit" and lose it all, again. I'm pretty sure the problem is at least partially dependent upon the browser. I love Google Chrome and use that pretty exclusively. I used to love Firefox, but it is so darn slow compared to Chrome. I try to avoid using Internet Explorer, but darn it, it seems to have the fewest number of problems with these online forms. There's something about it that keeps the connection alive so you don't lose your data. "Maybe Microsoft is finally doing something right," Steve said with a slightly bemused look on his face.

One of the cool features of Chrome is, it will remember what you've filled out in other similar fields and automatically fill out a lot of the forms for you. That's incredibly helpful, except when it places your phone number in your city field, and your city in the state field, etc. Most of the time it works just fine, but you have to be extra careful and proofread what it fills out for you. And of course, you have to hope that when you press the "submit" button, it actually submits the data and moves on the confirmation screen.

Well, I had started writing this earlier today, and was a bit discouraged since I have had no interviews since last month and no one had responded in any significant way to any of my many job applications. However, in the hours since then, I now have two job interviews to go to! One tomorrow morning, and another one on Monday morning. Plus, this afternoon I had a phone screening interview for another job, and it looks like I may get a call from the Hiring Manager for that about the middle of next week.

It's so exciting to get a job interview. However, I have to caution myself that it's an interview for a job, not the job itself. Still, having two and possibly three interviews to go to soon gives me hope, and that's a great thing to have.

A Valentine's Day story, part three

A spring and a summer drifted by, while what there was of a fall was rudely shoved aside by a fierce winter storm that roared out ice and snow and bitter cold. One night a solitary light bulb reluctantly flickered to life above a metal door marked "Exit," and out into the wind and driving sleet and snow stepped the man who was a sentient bag of sulfuric acid. As he looked back for a moment at a sign that warned, "No Admittance!" the door slammed shut and the light above it gratefully flickered again and died.

Much had happened since he was brought to the secret advanced laboratory buried in the side of a mountain. Scientists working in secret and without restraint had poked and prodded and sometimes humiliated him. Government agents, some apparently evil and some apparently good, had questioned him incessantly about his origin. For a long time they were convinced he was an agent of a foreign government. The words "Potential Terrorist" were used to describe him. All he had to answer their accusations with was the truth, although most times offering the truth was not appreciated or accepted by men and women who were so frightened by world events that suspicion had become their dominant instinct.

However, gradually, he navigated through every lie and accusation and arrived at a point where he came to be believed. Even so, he was dismissed as a "freak of nature" by scientific freaks with far less generous natures. Most though proclaimed him a "miracle of science." It was those he eventually called his friends, although even they kept a certain amount of distance away from him.

Being highly intelligent, but unable to leave the secret laboratory, he took online courses offered by major universities in all of the natural sciences. He read voraciously and quickly developed an encyclopedic mind where every fact of science, art and history was just a thought away. Soon, he was writing papers of international importance.

His scientist friends got him a job at the laboratory and a white lab coat of his own to wear. One day, he was allowed to leave the laboratory with a group of them, and they drove to a nearby housing development where they presented him with a slightly used subcompact Korean car, a barely adequate sum of money and a middle-class home that was a moderate fixer-upper, all paid for by a grateful federal government, with the only stipulation being that he sign a waiver saying that he had been at all times properly treated.

He signed.

"Hey, do you guys want to come in and have a soda or something?" the scientific genius who was a sentient bag of sulfuric acid asked his friends.

It had been a long day at the top-secret laboratory in the side of a mountain for all of them, so they politely offered their regrets and left him on his front porch with the key to his fairly new home that would probably need aluminum siding or at the very least a professional paint job soon. He went inside, turned on a few lights, and saw that it was fully furnished with 1970s vintage furniture and wall decor.

"A little dusty, but hey, home is where the heart is," he muttered to himself, altogether unsure if he did in fact have a heart in the traditional sense. "If I don't have a heart, then why am I so sad?"

And so he drove to work each morning with a sandwich and a bottle of milk pure and simple in a large brown bag placed on the passenger seat beside him, and he drove home every night with the empty brown bag ready to be reused the next day. He enjoyed listening to Morning Edition on the radio, even though he preferred the calming voice of Bob Edwards to the seemingly sarcastic voice of Steve Inskeep.

"Bring back Bob Edwards!" he shouted at the radio. Even though he realized it was pointless to shout at the radio, it somehow made him feel as if he was expressing his opinion in a constructive way.

The days and weeks passed, and one night while working late and all alone in his laboratory, winter arrived with a vengeance. He could hear the wind wailing outside, and the clicking of sleet hitting the single window nearby. Realizing with a start that it was late, he went to his desk, took off his white lab coat and put on his warm winter one. As he was about to leave, he saw something on his office desk, brightly colored, with red hearts. He picked it up and read "Will you 'bee' mine?" with a smiling bee on it. It wasn't signed. He looked and saw that all of the desks nearby had the same little card on them with the same sentiment.

"Wasn't that nice?" the scientist who was a sentient bag of sulfuric acid thought as he placed the card in his coat pocket.

He left by the back metal door. The door groaned as he pushed it open, a light automatically switched on, and he turned to look as the door closed automatically behind him and the light automatically switched off.

His car complained loudly about the cold, but begrudgingly started, and as he made his way carefully back home his headlights barely penetrated the ferocity of the storm.

When he got home, he put on his pajamas and his bathrobe and sat at his kitchen table, drank a glass of milk pure and simple and held up the Valentine's Day card someone had given him. As he looked at it, a wave of loneliness passed through him. He had no real friends. Certainly no girlfriend. Being made of pure sulfuric acid, he could never really get close to anyone else. It wasn't his fault, but it was an indisputable fact of his life. This is just how life would be. He could either accept it, or not. It didn't really matter either way. So he drank the rest of his glass of milk pure and simple, left the Valentine's Day card on the table, washed his glass at the sink, turned out the kitchen light and tucked himself into bed.

He was about to drift off to sleep when he thought he heard the doorbell ring. He was sure he had dreamed it and was turning over onto his side when the doorbell rang again, followed by some urgent knocking.

"Who could that be at this hour, and in the middle of a bad winter storm?" he said to himself, getting out of bed and putting on his bathrobe. As he got to his front door, he turned on his porch light and called out "Who is it?"

"It's us!" a girl's voice said. "Let us in!"

He opened the door, and there stood the girl who had created him, and her father and her mother. He was too surprised to react, so he just stood there holding the front door.

"Aren't you going to let us in?" the girl asked. "It's terribly cold out here. We just found out where you live, and we drove all the way from our house through the storm to see you!"

"Oh!" he replied with extreme embarrassment. "I'm so sorry, please come in! All of you! How are you?"

The girl came into the house with a big smile on her face, stomping her feet and shaking off the ice and snow that partially covered her winter coat. She looked over at her mother and father and said, "It's all right! We can show him!"

"Show me what?" he asked.

The father looked at the mother with a smile and said to him, "Wait just a second, OK? We've got to get something out of the car. We'll be right back!" And so the mother and the father hurried back to their car, barely visible forms lost in the storm.

"I'm so glad to see you!" said the man who also a scientist and who just happened to be a sentient bag of sulfuric acid. "All of you!"

"Mother and Father are both really sorry for the way they treated you," the girl said. "They felt really bad. I felt really bad, too."

"Oh, there's nothing at all to feel bad about," the man said. "What brings all of you out here on such a terribly cold night?"

"Doctor Lerner is friends with someone you work with," the girl said. "He felt really bad, too. He called us and told us where you lived, and all four of us grabbed everything and here we are!"

The man who was also a scientist and just happened to be a bag of sulfuric acid smiled, and then asked, "All four of you? Do you mean you brought Doctor Lerner with you?"

"What? No! After you were gone and I got home from the hospital, mother and father and Doctor Lerner watched as I mixed some of this with some of that, and stirred it up really fast with my Barbie doll. The one without a head. I couldn't find my Ken doll. I think he dissolved or something when I made you. Anyway, it bubbled and stuff, and in the morning there she was, sitting on my end table! Mother and Father were really happy! Me, too!"

"There who was?" the man who was a sentient bag of sulfuric acid asked.

"Me," said a woman's voice.

He looked up, and standing between the mother and the father was a six foot tall woman who just happened to be a sentient bag of sulfuric acid.

"Isn't she beautiful?!" the girl asked him.

"Well, uhm, uh, yes! What?" the man sputtered.

The woman smiled at him, and in a deep Lauren Bacall voice asked "Are you going to make us all stay out here in the cold all night, or are you going to invite us in?"

"No! I mean, come in, come in!" he said.

So as the terrible winter storm raged outside, they all went into the warm kitchen and had a long talk. He told them about what had happened to him since the last time they were together, leaving out certain details due to national security reasons. He did, after all, have top secret security clearance, and they did not. He couldn't help but notice that the girl and her parents were rubbing their eyes and trying hard not to yawn.

Of course they would spend the night. It was far too long of a drive, and the storm was absolutely too terrible for them to consider going home at this hour and under these conditions. Plus, it was a big house, and he had bedrooms to spare. After everyone tucked the girl into bed and wished her sweet dreams, the mother and the father both smiled and excused themselves for the night.

Back in the kitchen, the man who was a sentient bag of sulfuric acid talked quietly with the woman who was a sentient bag of sulfuric acid. As they talked about this and about that, without intending to, he picked up the Valentine's Day card he had received earlier that day.

"Is that for me?" the woman asked.

"No," he said. "I mean, yes! It's yours. If you'll have it. Would you take it?"

She looked at him with just a touch of sarcasm in her face and replied, "Well, sure, as long as you don't need it."

"Sorry," he apologized. "I'm sorry. Please, take the card. It's just that it was such a pleasant surprise to meet you, and to see everyone tonight."

She looked at the Valentine and read it aloud, "Will you 'bee' mine?"

"Sure!" he said. And coughed. And looked with severe embarrassment at the kitchen floor.

"That wasn't an offer, big boy," she replied. "At least not tonight. Boy, you move fast and are kind of cute, in a deadly sulfuric acid sort of way."

He lifted his gaze from the floor and said  "Oh, where are my manners? Would you like something before we go, I mean, before you go to bed?"

"How about a glass of milk?" she asked.

"Plain and simple," he finished.

"What?" she asked, totally confused.

"Uh, nothing! Nothing at all. One glass of uh, milk, coming up." he stammered.

As they both drank a glass of milk at the kitchen table, she smiled at him and said, "Thank you for the Valentine's Day card."

"Oh, sure!" he smiled back. "Happy Valentine's day."

And it was. For all of them.

                                                              The end.

A Valentine's Day story, part two

Breakfast was a revelation for the little man who was a sentient bag of sulfuric acid. He enjoyed cereal. He enjoyed fresh fruit. He enjoyed buttered toast. In fact, he enjoyed everything he was served. But one food stood out among all the rest. He found that he was especially fond of milk.

"What do you call this white liquid?" he asked. "It's delicious!"

"Uhm," the mother replied. "Milk?"

"Milk? I love milk? Milk? is delicious. Can I have another glass of milk?" he asked.

"No," the mother said. "It's not always "milk" with a question mark at the end. It's just 'milk,' plain and simple."

"Oh," he said. "Can I have another glass of milk plain and simple."

The mother paused and thought for a moment about how to respond. "I'll get you another glass of milk," she said.

"Plain and simple," he said.

"Uhm, yeah," she said, looking over to her husband, who was doing his best to focus on the morning paper and not truly succeeding.

And so he grew. Whereas before he was one foot tall, by the time breakfast was over he had nearly doubled in size. This seriously concerned the girl's parents, who were not too happy about having a man who was a sentient bag of sulfuric acid inhabiting their home, let alone one who could suddenly double in size without so much as a moment's notice.

The mother and father hid behind the newspaper and whispered to each other in serious tones.

As they were whispering, the girl coughed and said, "I have to bring my Science Fair project to school today."

"Science Fair project?" asked her father and mother simultaneously.

She pointed over to the little man and said, "Him. He's my Science Fair project."

"Well, honey, let's, let's think about this for a minute," her father stammered.

"I think it's an excellent idea!" her mother exclaimed. "And come to think of it, it's time you were off to school. Get your things, and bring your little man with you."

"Dear," her father asked her mother. "Are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, after all, he's made of sulfuric acid. What if he harmed another child?"

The girl looked at her creation and asked, "You wouldn't hurt anyone, would you?"

He shook his head vigorously, which caused the sulfuric acid to slosh around inside him. "I would never dream of it!" he said.

"It's settled then," her mother said. "Go get your things. The bus will be here in just a few minutes."

And so she went to school with her sulfuric acid creation. They got on the bus together, and he sat right beside her, which was fine with her, since no one ever sat beside her on the bus. Before the bus was in motion, the girl stood up and announced for all to hear, "This is my friend. He's made of sulfuric acid. Don't touch him, because you might get hurt. He's my science project, and he's very smart."

The other children on the bus were stunned. A boy in the back started to make a rude comment about the little man who was a sentient bag of sulfuric acid, but he was quickly shushed by other children nearby. No one said a single word the rest of the trip to school. And when they arrived, the girl and the little sulfuric acid man were the first ones to exit the bus, while all of the other children waited patiently for them to leave.

As they walked together into the school, the little man looked over and smiled at her, and she looked over and smiled at him. "It's nice to have a friend," they both thought at the same time.

Because the school was overcrowded and understaffed, her very first "class" every day was lunch hour.

"Come on!" she said. "We'll have lunch together and then go to the Science Fair!"

"Sounds great to me!" he said cheerfully. "Can I have some milk plain and simple?"

"Definitely!" she said. And so they both sat together at the same table and shared lunch, not noticing that all of the other kids were keeping a safe distance and muttering to each other. Nor did they notice when two girls left a nearby table, approached a group of teachers and pointed in their direction.

A few minutes passed, and then suddenly everything seemed to happen at once. Teachers surrounded the girl's table where she and the little man were eating. An alarm went off and the Principle started to speak over the PA system. "Hello, children! We are going to have a very quick fire drill. There is nothing to worry about. Please proceed quietly and orderly to the nearest fire exit. Listen to your teachers and behave, and we'll be finished in just a short while."

As all of the other children got up from their tables to leave, the girl and the little man began to do the same.

"Stop!" one of the teachers ordered. "Stay in your seats."

The girl and the little man looked at each other.

"What's wrong?" the girl asked.

When no one answered, the little man said, "Heck if I know."

The wailing of the school's fire alarm was met by the screaming sirens of multiple emergency vehicles screeching to a halt in front of the school. A group of men burst into the cafeteria wearing what looked for all the world like space suits. As they approached the girl and the little man made of sentient sulfuric acid, one of the men exclaimed, "Look out! It's growing!"

And so he was. And so he did. The little man who was a sentient bag of sulfuric acid stood up, stretched, and before their eyes became over six feet tall.

"Sorry about that," the not-so-little man made of sulfuric acid told them. "Milk plain and simple has that effect on me. But not to worry. I won't grow any taller now. I've reached my limit. But tell me something. Who are you guys? And what's with the fancy getup?"

One of the men in space suits grabbed the girl and yelled, "We've got to get her to safety!" And as he picked her up and ran with her out of the room, she kicked and shouted, but he was just too strong.

"Stop!" she cried. "Leave us alone! We never hurt anybody!"

And with that she was whisked out of the room and out of the school and put inside an ambulance that already had its siren wailing and lights flashing. As they brought her inside the ambulance, she saw that waiting there were her father, her mother, and Doctor Lerner.

"It's all going to be OK now," Doctor Lerner said calmly. "We're taking you to the hospital just to be checked out, and then you'll be able to go home in a little while with your mom and your dad. They are both so concerned about you."

"Yes," her father agreed. "Your mother and I thought a great deal about it after you and that little man left this morning. We decided that it was just too dangerous for you and other children to be around sulfuric acid, no matter how nice it might seem. It was foolish of us to let you go in the first place."

"But he IS nice!" she cried as the ambulance sped off to the hospital. "And I'm going to get an F on my Science Fair project now! And it's all your fault!"

And she suddenly realized that this was the very first time she had ever talked back to her parents. But what startled her even more was the realization that it was, in fact, all her parent's fault. All of it.



Back at the school, the men in the Hazmat suits forced the now full-grown man who was a bag of sentient sulfuric acid into the back of a containment vehicle.

"Hey! Stop prodding me!" he said to them. "And where are we going anyway?"

"You'll find out," one of them said. "Just get in the truck."

"I'm gettin', I'm gettin'," he said.

He sat in the back of the containment vehicle, the door slammed shut and he found himself in total darkness.

"What now?" he asked himself.

And without the girl with him he started to feel sad and lonely, and more than a little bit afraid.

                                                              To be continued

A Valentine's Day story, part one

He was moderately satisfied with his life. He lived in a moderately nice neighborhood, and made a moderate living from a career that he was moderately happy with. But as he sat at the kitchen table late one night, he stared at the glass of milk he had just poured and felt a wave of immoderate loneliness pass through him.

He had no friends. There had never been a girlfriend. He could never get close enough to make contact with anyone else, so he went on with his life and made it through each day and drank his glass of milk at each day's end and tucked himself into bed.

It's hard to get close to people when you're made of pure sulfuric acid.

Yet, that's what he was. A sentient bag of sulfuric acid in human form. There was no scientist father or mother. No advanced laboratory buried inside of a mountain marking his birthplace. No good or evil government conspiracy. Some kid who didn't know what she was doing with her chemistry set inadvertently caused his creation. She poured some of this into some of that, stirred it vigorously with a headless Ken doll (for some reason she always tore the heads off of her Ken and Barbie dolls), let it bubble overnight, and then when she woke up the next morning he was sitting on the edge of her end table just looking at her. He was about a foot tall at that point. Later on, he grew.

She lifted her head from her pillow, looked over at him and rubbed her eyes. "What are you?" she asked.

"Heck if I know," he said. "You're the one who created me. If I had to guess, I'd guess that I'm a sentient bag of sulfuric acid that's being held together by a totally valid scientific process that modern science has yet to discover that causes me to retain the form of a little man."

She reached out to touch him, but he twisted away.

"Don't touch me! Are you crazy! I'm made of pure sulfuric acid!" he yelled.

"Besides," he said, quietly this time. "I don't like to be touched. Please don't do that again, OK?"

She backed off, looked at him thoughtfully for a moment and answered "OK."

Just then, her mom called her for breakfast, so she dashed down the stairs and told her parents all about her new creation. Her father and mother were seriously concerned. They huddled together and spoke in seriously concerned whispers, looking back at her with occasionally seriously concerned looks. Finally they both turned to look at her.

"Sweetheart," said her father. "Your mother and I are a little bit concerned about what you just told us. Are you sure you didn't just have a dream? You know how your dreams can get pretty scary and pretty realistic at times. We've talked about that before. Your mother says that Doctor Lerner talked to you about that, too, during one of your sessions with him. I think you'd better just go upstairs with me right now, and we'll look in your room to prove that this guy made of sulfuric acid isn't really there. Then we can all sit down and have a nice breakfast together. Does that sound good to you?"

She was pretty confused and unsure at that point. Maybe it was the medication they pumped into her at regular intervals that caused her to see things that weren't really there, although she thought the medication was supposed to stop her from seeing things that weren't really there. It had happened before. That's why she was seeing Doctor Lerner. She liked him. He made funny faces at her sometimes that made her smile.

"OK daddy," she said. "I'm sure you're right. He's not really there, but let's go and look anyway."

So her father held her hand, and together they climbed the stairs and went down the hall and opened the door to her room. It was a bit dark, so her father reached over to switch on her table lamp. As he switched the switch light flooded the room and he suddenly cried out in pain.

"OW!" her father cried out in pain. "Something bit me!"

He rubbed his hand and looked down to see a figure in the shape of a man, but clearly made of sulfuric acid, sitting on the edge of her end table.

"Hi!" said the man made of sulfuric acid, as he proceeded to playfully swing his legs back and forth while sitting on the edge of the table. "Are you OK? You don't want to go around touching sulfuric acid, my friend. You'll get burned. My advice is to please be careful next time, OK?"

Her father put his slightly burned finger in his mouth and muttered something that sounded like, "Mo-ka..."

Just then her mother called from the kitchen below. "Is everything all right up there? I thought I heard someone yell."

Her father took his finger out of his mouth and replied, "Honey, I think you'd better get up here."

He looked at his daughter, and then he looked at the little man made of sulfuric acid, and then he looked back to his daughter. Her mother ran up the stairs and came into her room. Her father directed her attention to the man sitting on the end table. Her eyes opened big and wide.

"Well," the little man made of sulfuric acid said, "Now that we're all introduced, can I join you for breakfast? I don't know about you, but I'm starved!"

                                                              To be continued

I didn't write a blog today

Well, I never got around to writing a blog today. I managed to do everything else but. This morning, my daughter Stacy wanted to get to the Heard extra early so we could finish up as soon as possible, so she and her girlfriend could go to a reptile convention in Arlington.

Yes. My daughter goes to reptile conventions. Tomorrow, I may take her to a Science Fiction convention in Irving. Wanna make something of it?

Whatever. Snakes is cool. Or do I mean snake are cool? I have no idea. All sense of grammar and usage has evaporated for me at the moment. Even the word "grammar" looks wrong to me. Tired.

So I read my Nook for most of the day in my room. In my room. It's a world where I can go and tell my secrets to. I lock out all my worries and my fears. In my room. In my room. All by myself.

I'm rereading the "Foundation" books by Isaac Asimov. There are a total of seven. He started them in the 1940s and wrote his last ones in the 1980s. Asimov died in 1992 of complications from AIDS that he contracted when having heart surgery sometime in the 80s. The last ones he finished were "prequels." So if you read the last ones first and the first ones last, the story has a better sense of continuity. That's what I've been doing. I'm on book three now, which once was book one.

I'm going to go and get ready for bed now, and read more of my book. And don't tell me that by writing that I didn't write a blog, I did in fact write a blog. This ain't no blog. It's just 0s and 1s.

Maintaining optimism

After doing the job search for awhile, it's easy to get discouraged, especially if you haven't had the results you would have wished by the time you expected. One of the crucial things I have found essential to do is to take a deep breath, focus and try to put it all into some sort of perspective. This is not the end of the world, even though there are financial and emotional challenges.

I do my best to maintain my optimism, and keep focused on the goal of getting another job. That's not to say that I walk around with a smile plastered to my face. But by the same token, I try not to go around frowning, either. It's a balancing act.

When this first happened back in November, I lost my sense of balance. Even though I saw this coming, I was thrown for a loop, and it took a certain amount of time to regain my footing. I know for a fact that I took my family along on an emotional roller coaster ride. There were sleepless nights, intense conversations and lots of scary "what ifs." When I finally opened my eyes and saw the emotional toll that this was taking on me and my family, I knew that I had to be the one who changed. The sooner, the better.

Still, it took some time and a lot of effort. But after a long couple of months, even though I was fully cognizant of the seriousness of our situation, I was more able to put it into a more realistic perspective. No, this was not the end of the world. It was the establishment of something new for us. Perhaps something for the better.

One of the more welcome changes was when I began to joke again. Admittedly my sense of humor is a bit on the "hard to get" side, but my family is used to it, they love me anyway, and they more or less understand where I'm coming from. There was a sense that the ups and downs were leveling out somewhat, and of beginning to be able to focus more on moving on. Even though I am still friends with many of the folks I used to work with and hope to stay friends with them in the future, I can feel my situation drifting away from theirs. That's probably a healthy thing.

Forgive the grammar, but I'm trying my best to "don't worry, be happy." Yeah, I do worry about the future sometimes. Money is always a concern. But I know in my heart and soul that this time will pass, and new things and better things will happen. I may not currently have a job, but I have a lot to be thankful for. I have a wonderful wife that I've been married to for a long, long time. I have two great kids who are turning into excellent young adults. I'm also thankful for Dan, my mentally retarded brother-in-law who lives with us. He's a sweet guy who tries hard to please and to help out around the house. He does the dishes (no, he LOVES to do the dishes).

I'm seriously thankful for that.

I'm tired of looking "distinguished"

I have some well-earned gray in my hair. There is still some of my original color, but now that I'm looking for another job, I'm starting to wonder whether or not it's time to dye my hair so I look more like the younger, hip, cool guy that I really am inside.

I know that I exude a youthful demeanor. I'm totally gnarly. I know it. I admit it. The people in my pack dig me. My troops know that I've got the hoops. I can even make up sayings that sound like someone in their 20s said them. Even if they have no meaning, they sound profound. As a great man once said, "I'm a poet. I know it. Hope I don't blow it."

Still, maybe it's time that I take the plunge and disguise what Father Time hath wrought. Today, I visited the local guy's beauty parlor where I got a complete workover, hair-wise.

Here's the before picture:

At first I thought, I'll just get my hair dyed back to its natural color. But the results were not exactly what I expected. I looked like a guy who had spray-dyed his hair, which is not exactly cool when you're trying to impress a potential employer by your youthful, natural virility:

So I went one step further and tried a complete Steve Restyling. A new doo for the new you. I liked the style, but I didn't think I looked like a convincing redhead:

So I tried a different color. By now, the fumes were getting to me and I was a bit delirious, so whatever color they suggested, I nodded my head and agreed to it. "Ssshure! Shounds great to mee!" Much to my dismay, they made me illegally blonde:

I said, let's just start over. Go back to my original gray hair and we'll try something else. By then though, I think the fumes were getting to them, too:

I was about ready to walk out at this point, but they begged me for another chance. By now, all of the hairdressers in the shop were gathered around me like a bunch of physicians trying to figure out how to save the patient. "The next one will be perfect!" they all told me:

Although I did agree that I looked great, and would doubtless impress any potential employer with my eager, youthful looks, I couldn't help but think that things had gone too far. But by now my original hair was so over-chemicalized, it was falling out in clumps. (I just made up a word. I am allowed to do that. Don't mess with me, I've got a license to write, and I'll use it.")

So, here you have it. The solution to gray hair. A new, youthful-looking  me at your service. To all potential employers, I say, "I am ready to work at super affordable act-now prices." The sooner the better, because my wife took one look at me when I got home, screamed, tossed my clothes out the front door, and I'm now living under a bridge. It's interesting how many bald, unemployed guys you find living under bridges these days. I'm making friends I never expected to make when I was working. Good times.

When I was younger, so much younger than today...

...I never needed anybody's help in any way. But now these days are gone and I'm not so self-assured. Now I find, I've changed my mind, and opened up the doors...

Sorry for the blatant plagiarism.

The point is, it has been so hard for me to ask for anyone's help during my job search. It's a matter of pride. It's a matter of not wanting to bother others with my situation. It's a matter of, I'll fix this myself. And yes, it's a matter of me being the kind of guy who doesn't ask for directions until he's totally turned around.

I guess I'm totally turned around, because today on Facebook and LinkedIn, I sent out the following piece of self-advertising:

Short personal message: I’m looking for a job and there are five local companies headquartered nearby that I’m currently "targeting": Blockbuster, Fossil, HRsmart, Michael's and The Container Store. If you have a relationship or connection there that could help me in my search, or if you have any other suggestions, I’d really appreciate your help. Thank you! Steve

This was so hard for me to do. In fact, this was the second time I have sent out a message like this, although this time I was more specific about what I was looking for help on. It wasn't any easier to send out this second message than it was to send out the first. In a couple of weeks, I'll send it out again.

I'm sure it'll be just as painful.

How can I call myself a man now? I've asked for help, even after my testosterone level told me clearly, in a deep bass voice that I should just "man up!" What a sniveling little girly man I have become.

"Shut up, testosterone!"

"Make me, you of the mostly hairless torso!"

"Watch it, or I'll use this!"

"Estrogen injection! Nooooo!"

But the thing about it is, I could spin my wheels for months and months sending out resume after resume, and meanwhile some friend of mine or a friend of a friend of mine might know of a job that would be perfect for me. If you don't tell anyone, you won't get asked to fill a job that they might know about.

I've been told by people who know that there is a hidden job market out there, with more jobs that need to be filled than will ever show up on Indeed or Monster or wherever.com. The only way to find one of those jobs is through networking. I just read this great article called "How to Use Social Media to Find a Job" 

http://tinyurl.com/8xkgmuc

These days, you find work on the net by networking. I just made that up. What a clever little writer I am.

Anyway, that's just how job search is evolving. I have to evolve along with it.

And I was just joking about the estrogen injection. Seriously.

Ugh

It's interesting how I ended up having three interviews around the holiday season, but nothing else since. Yeah, I get the occasional automatic email saying that they have reviewed my qualifications, I'm not a match, good luck, etc. I know, I have to give it time. But I'm ready to stomp my foot and cry out, "I want a job NOW! Gimme gimme gimme!"

Ugh.

So I am currently on-schedule to apply for fifteen jobs by sometime Saturday. I applied for four yesterday and four more today. I hope to apply for four more tomorrow and the next day and the next day. Wait. That would be 20 jobs. The world should be relieved I'm not applying to be a mathematician.

Ugh.

My rear end is sore from sitting here all day. Not to get too personal, but I don't have enough natural padding. I suppose that's a good thing, but it sure gets uncomfortable after a few hours. Perhaps I should sit on a pillow throughout the day. That would have the added benefit of making me feel taller. No one is around to mock me, except the dog. That dog has no problem with her personal natural padding. She's a canine food vacuum.

Ugh.

My son is upstairs in the living room playing some video game of his. It sounds like Mario. The same bouncy, boingy, idiotic music is playing over and over again. Mario is shouting, "Ya HOO! Ya HOO!" This is the soundtrack for today's job search. I can't wait for this level to be complete, so I can finally find the "boss." A real boss. Not one who wants to pound me into oblivion, though. Ya HOO...

Ugh.

It's 3:49 in the afternoon. No, it's 3:50. I am not watching the little digital computer clock, I swear. Oh, it's 3:51. In the afternoon. Not quite four. Hmm. 3:52. Do I hear 3:53? There it is. Time is marching on. I wish I could march on. I have to stay here and research a local company I'm interested in. It's now 3:54. Sure is taking me a long time to type a single paragraph. 3:55.

Ugh.

I'm not wearing fuzzy animal slippers. Not at this hour, anyway. And that's just coffee. See the steam?

Unemployment is a lot of work

This is no vacation. This ain't no party. Far from it. When you're unemployed, don't expect any coffee breaks. There are no friendly chats with your fellow associates. No pot luck lunches in the break room. If you're serious about doing your work to find another job, you seriously hunker down and focus on the task at hand.

For example, my goal for this week is to apply for 15 jobs. When you're collecting unemployment, the minimum number is 5, so I am trying to do three times the minimum. I have to complete this by Saturday. So far today, I have applied for three, and I will apply for at least one more before I clock out for the day. You might think that applying for 15 jobs over the course of a week is nothing. Think again. You have to tailor your cover letter and your resume to each of the jobs you're applying for. There is no "one cover letter and one resume fits all." If you want your information to be noticed, you have to include specific keywords and phrases that you find in the job description or on the company's Web site. If you don't do that, you're wasting your time, because most resumes are initially not even seen by human eyes. In most cases, resumes are scanned by a computer, and if the HAL 9000 doesn't find those keywords, your resume will fall into a black hole. Keywords are key.

One of my other goals this week is to follow-up with some of the companies that I sent resumes to in past weeks. By Wednesday, I need to email an HR manager I talked to in January and see if I am still in consideration for an open position, and I need to call another HR manager and do an informational interview about her company and how I can best position myself to apply and get serious consideration for a job I would love to do. You can't be shy about this. It's too serious to be a shrinking violet. I have too many people counting on me, including myself, to get this figured out as soon as possible.

Monday is also the day I go to my Job Seekers meeting at Christ Fellowship Church in McKinney. Today's meeting was excellent. Stephanie Lyon, our group's Life Coach, changed the organizational setup of our meeting. It seemed a lot more focused and informative than some of the other recent meetings we have had. She is starting to become more demanding of us, requiring us to write down our stated goals and meet or exceed them. I really appreciate that reinforcement.

It would be so easy to put things off. It would be easy to turn on the TV and channel surf. It would be so easy to cruise the Internet aimlessly. The latter is so tempting, since I am right in front of this computer for most of the live long day. But so far, I have had the self discipline to keep the TV off during the day. I occasionally find myself looking at the news or something online, but then the automatic guilt-switch kicks in and I quickly return to my job search.


Writing this blog is also another goal of mine. I am trying hard to write something each and every day. I seem to be veering from being extremely serious to extremely silly in my postings. At some point perhaps I will settle into a routine of being seriously silly.

Steve's Sunday deal

Today, most businesses allow their employees to wear jeans on Casual Friday. Some companies have rejected traditional business attire throughout the week, making funky graphic tees and torn jeans the new norm. What was old is so yesterday. For businesses to succeed in a youthful marketplace, they must reject the old road and venture onto a new "road less traveled."

Thus, I present you with a new era in young and hip non-traditional business attire:


             The egg crate business suit 

It's "suit sexy." One size fits all sizes. Superior softness and built-in insulating properties make it the suit for all seasons. Sweat and odors are naturally wicked away, leaving you fresh and confident so you will, like, totally nail that important business deal. Of course, it's "suitable" for men, women and everyone in-between. Imagine the looks you'll get when you arrive at work, nodding your head, snapping your fingers and cruising down every aisle as you present yourself to the collective sighing astonishment of your fellow associates.

Try accessorizing your new egg crate business suit with a length of rope around the waist. Jewelry, feathers and cartoon characters can be added for a nominal fee. You're not worried about stains are you? They simply wipe away. Comfort? It's unsurpassed, leaving all traditional 3-piece suits in a pile at the local charity store.

And after a long day of making deals and impressing your supervisors and peers, the egg crate business suit  converts instantly into an incredibly comfortable bed covering perfect for most queen or king-size beds.

Only $150 at most high-end department stores. Order today, and you'll receive this amazing cat toy. See how amazed this cat is by a strip of egg crate material? It's one amazing deal.

This is not freedom

I have kept in touch with many former co-workers through Facebook or email. Some of them have already found jobs. Most, like me, are still looking and praying that the job search doesn't take too long. We often forward each other links to jobs we find on the Internet. Looking out for each other like that is an example of true friendship, and I appreciate every one of them.

One thing that I've heard more than one person say after they were laid off was, "I feel liberated!" or "I feel set free!" I understand where they're coming from, but I just don't feel the same way. If their old job was so terrible that getting laid off was liberating, then they were there for too long with too little reason. There is no liberation in being let go from a job you've held for years and knew inside and out. There is no freedom in having to scrape and scramble every day to find another job.

I had expected to be angry at some point. I had expected to feel betrayed. Bitter. I can say with complete honesty that I am none of those. I'd like to think I'm better than that. It certainly does you no good whatsoever to hang onto those feelings and let them take over. It's a trip on a downhill slide that I won't be taking.

From the very first day, my only thought was "How do I fix this?" Not "woe is me," or "how could they do this to me?" That's pointless. As Stephanie Lyon said at a recent Job Seekers meeting, "The past is the past and there's nothing you can do to change it. The future is a clean slate." 

This may sound very Capitalistic of me, but liberation will come when I find another job. Freedom will come when I know that I can pay my bills.

Animal house

I will not tell you how many cats we have. It's enough to say that we have "some." Once, we had two cats. When we moved into our house in McKinney in 2003, one of them, part Siamese,  must've had a mild stroke or something. That's all I can figure, because late at night after everyone had gone to bed, he would suddenly scream/howl about 10 times in a row, with each howl decreasing steadily in volume. You could actually count them: 10, 9, 8, 7, etc.

This went on for years.

It's funny what you can get used to if it happens enough, but to be honest, I never got used to it. At first we yelled at the cat. It had no effect. Then we chased the cat. He would just run under some furniture and wouldn't come out until you gave up and went back to bed. Then, when all was quiet, the howling would begin again. Sometimes he would do this two or three times during the night.

Other than the howling, he was a good cat. Not a friendly cat, at least not to me. When he passed on, we were all sad. We missed him, but to be honest, none of us missed his howling.

After an appropriate time had passed, we took a trip to the local animal shelter to look for another cat. As we drove there, I reminded my family that we were going to get one, and only one cat. No more. And they all agreed that that was what would happen. When we got there, they put us in a room full of kittens. One of them, a little black-and-white female kitten, seemed perfect. My wife and kids fell in love with her, and we decided that she was the one we would adopt.

She had a brother. I watched them playing with each other, chasing, tumbling and play fighting. My wife was already at the front desk, getting ready to pay. We were about to separate a brother and sister. Could I do that? How could I do that? I couldn't. So I went to my wife and asked meekly, remembering my adamant demand about getting just one cat, "Do you want to get her brother, too?" My wife looked like she couldn't believe it. "Really?" she asked. "Yeah," I said.

And this is how it was for awhile. Then along came Tippi.

I was in our computer room one night when I heard a car honk its horn right outside our house. I opened the front door to see what was going on. My wife had been on an errand, and as she was driving down our street, she saw a calico cat in the middle of the street trying to lick whatever remained inside of a Styrofoam cup. "I was afraid she would get run over!" Jane said. The cat seemed to be starving. She used to be owned by some neighbors from across the street, but they moved away and left the cat behind. So, obviously, we took pity on it and started to feed it. It was cautious at first, but after it realized that we were nice people giving away free food, she started to hang around our door. If she wasn't around when we'd go outside, we just had to call and she she would come bounding from across the street right to us.

So one night we decided to take her in, too. We kept her in our master bedroom, and the next day while I was at work my wife and daughter took her to the vet's to be checked out. While at the vet, she began to express milk. Tippi was a mom.

They found four kittens hiding in the bushes across the street. They were all well fed, but Tippi was nothing but fur and bones. When the family was reunited, my wife said that Tippi literally hugged each of her kittens.

No, we didn't keep all of the kittens. We eventually managed to find homes for most of them.

We used to have two litter boxes side-by-side in the downstairs hall bathroom. I got tired of that, and built a 2-story cat box holder that allowed us to stack two boxes on top of one another. I probably should patent it.

Did I mention we have a dog?

Options for employment

There exists, on video, footage of me pretending to be a security guard. It was filmed for a skit shown at an annual  awards ceremony where I used to work. Not only that, but I once portrayed a greasy haired Barney Fife-style copier repair guy complete with pocket protector and floppy disc in the pocket of my white shirt with rolled-up arms. This, too, is on video.

There were many times when I would drive past one of the vacant security guard stations where I used to work and imagine myself in an official-looking security guard outfit, complete with metal-looking badge, waving at cars as they drove past, saying things like "How are you today?" or "Have a nice day!" or "Shouldn't you be wearing pants? Oh, sorry sir! Another meeting of the board?"

Oh, I'm just kidding... Keep your shirt on. Please.

Now that I am looking for another job, I find that there's an entire universe of options open to me. Right now and for the near future I am attempting to find employment doing something similar to what I have done in the past. I can write. I can edit. I can proofread. I can manage people. I can sing and I can dance. I can be so many things. However, my time is not unlimited. Bills have to be paid, and at some point this job search must end and I will have to either find something in the neighborhood of what I have done in the past, or else branch out and do something completely different.

Which brings me back to the videos.

Perhaps I am destined to be a security guard for a major corporation. If so, I want a real metal badge. And an official-looking hat. And a belt I can hang things on, like mace, cell phones and my lunch bag. Some days I will be friendly and simply wave and smile at you as you come and go, while other days I may stop every car that comes by and lecture each driver about something completely irrelevant that is bothering me that day. Star Trek and Dr. Who will be among my favorite subjects for discussion.

Perhaps I am destined to repair copiers or printers. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it, and before you smirk I'll bet that it's a great job requiring lots of skill and patience. When you are using company equipment to print your resume, the latest recipe you found on the Internet or that book you've been writing when you should have been working, you rely upon your copier repair guy (or gal) to keep your copier copying or printer printing. I can see it now. The printer has died.  A crowd of people stand around it not knowing what to do,  and I suddenly arrive with my metal toolbox and floppy disc to save the day, complete with an aura of golden light bathing my face and the singing of a choir of angels. Yes, you can clap. That's enough now. I have to turn off my flashlight and tape deck and get to work.

But those are not my only options. Look around you and you will see my dilemma. Everywhere you look, someone is working and doing something that you do not understand. Many are parked in large trucks outside of your local 7-Eleven. Many are driving down the highway like maniacs, eager to force you off the road. Yet they're working and getting a paycheck.

Many employed people look up at you with curiosity as you walk by their offices and stop to stare at them blankly through the windows. What do these mysterious people in their offices do all day long? Today, I tried to find out. I took a walk in downtown McKinney, opened an office door and walked in. A secretary looked up at me and said, "Can I help you?" I said, "Yes, I'm looking for a job." She said, "Sir, this is a law office. We do not allow soliciting here. What you're doing is considered soliciting." So I apologized and left.

But it puzzles me. A law office that doesn't allow soliciting.

How do they get any work done?