To all the imaginary readers I’ve loved before

I’m sorry for abandoning you, imaginary readers, but someone actually ignored the lacy quality of my resume and HIRED me. (Just so you know, my resume is not doily-esque because I’m lazy, or incompetent, or socially inept. It’s got a macrame thing going because I make a bad ox tethered to a splintered yoke. Ironically, I was born in the Year of the Ox. Don’t hate me because I find the Chinese horoscope invalid. Or because I call it the Chinese horoscope.)

So, we’ve established that blogging is for the unemployed. Or narcissists. Or diarists. Are diarists necessarily narcissists? Discuss. I don’t have time to consider it. I work now. I can’t tell you where or with whom because I need the tatted, tattered veil of anonymity, and I’ve already revealed way too much with the Year of the Ox reference.

My tenure with this employer already feels, well, tenuous because I can sense workplace dysfunction the way that kid sees dead people. And I run afoul of workplace dysfunction no matter how Stockholm Syndrome I go. Somehow, the workplace always senses me sensing it being dysfunctional and it looks to kill me like a good lawn poison goes for a weed. (Please, New Yorker, block that metaphor! I need readers I can no longer blog to!)

Anyway, this much I want to share with you in the short time between getting home from work and hitting the Ambien: Capers Funnye. President Obama’s cousin. Rabbi. Subject of a New York Times Sunday Magazine profile. And Best Name Ever. I told my mother that if she had the presence of mind to name my brother Capers, all our lives would have been different. (Shout out to the brother formerly not named Capers!) Please, all of you imaginary readers, honor my loss by bestowing this honorific on children, fish, plants, even weeds. As for this dysfunction-sensitive weed, she will most likely, in the not so distant future, have plenty of time to blog her imaginaries once again.

Snowflakes made ugly

I have a second interview for a job next week, which nowadays is as special as a Yeti sighting. I’m very grateful and would like to thank God, my mother and the Academy. Well maybe just Mom, who has been infinitely patient and gets HBO.

Interviewing is one of the few activities that you don’t get better at with practice. That’s because interviews are like snowflakes. All basically the same, yet all different.

My career path has meandered. A lot. As a result, I have been interviewed dozens upon dozens of times over the course of nearly 25 years for positions in several different sectors. What strikes me is how little the  job seeking process has changed.

I now send resumes by e-mail and complete applications online and sometimes, although not often in my field, a computer processes my application. That’s it for new and improved. The interview has not evolved. I show up today–as I did in 1985 and 1993 and 2000–and either one person or a group of people asks me a bunch of questions, and no one leaves with a reliable sense of whether I will be a good fit for the job or the client or the supervisor or the workplace.

Can’t the rat race build a better mousetrap? Can’t it at least make some simple reforms? For example, can’t interviewers stop asking me yes/no questions that have only one right answer (“Do you work well under pressure?”), or questions that can’t be answered honestly (“Why did you leave your last job?”)? Can’t they stop asking me to “Name a time when (elaborate scenario here)”? I can’t. And I can’t make shit up on the spot. Is that they what ? Someone who can make shit up on the spot?

And how old do I have to be before they stop handing me applications that ask where I went to high school? Is this McDonalds? And what’s the research behind three references? Can my sweet mother who has HBO be one of them if she changes the way she answers her phone for a week?

Livin’ the vida broka

Stuff Unemployed People Like is one of dozens upon dozens of what the New York Times calls “recession blogs.”

As an unemployed person, I vote for podcasts. They’re mostly free and the public radio-y ones give you opportunities to kill time without feeling guilty. Today I learned about the banking system, thanks to This American Life.

It’s now raining men

It is only fitting that if the Unsocialworker has time on her hands, she makes anticrafts.  I was surprised, therefore, that it took me so long to discover the Anticraft, a website where you can find a pattern to crochet a penis and one to knit a condom.

Austin City limits

A few months ago I applied for a job at the VA in Austin, Texas. Austin clearly has enough social workers in its neck of the woods; after sending an application that weighed about a pound, I didn’t even merit a rejection letter. 

According to Austin’s website, it was 70 degrees and sunny there today. Austin puts its weather on its home page. The city I live in doesn’t dare. It doesn’t even have the courage to show a picture taken in the winter, which I don’t understand because winter can be made attractive, even though it usually isn’t.

This is what my hometown does say on the subject of weather: “Actually, our climate is perfect for all of the things that really matter.”

Take that, Austin. When your residents decide to do something that matters, they’ll have to do it here where the sun doesn’t shine.

Take an unsocialworker to unpaid work day

Once a week I volunteer at a neighborhood clinic that provides medical, dental and mental health care to people who can’t afford insurance but don’t qualify for Medicaid. After many months of unemployment, I’m trying to keep my skills from getting rusty. Also, I need to be reminded that getting dressed can involve more than putting a sweatshirt over what I wore to bed. 

I’ve never found volunteering to be the transformative experience it’s billed as, but then again I usually volunteer at points in my life when I need whatever services I’m offering. 

However, what never gets old about volunteering is that although you’re in the workplace, your life is still essentially your own. It’s like being a grandparent or aunt, as opposed to being a parent. Hand the job back after an hour or two with its diaper on backward. You’ll be warmly thanked and asked to return when it’s convenient.

No fish, no foul

I’m an unemployed social worker who lives alone in an apartment with a lease that stipulates “no pets,” and that includes fish, so my brother got me this blog. I would have fed a fish to death, anyway.