My Unemployment Activities

My friend Cara writes a blog. It's better than mine, so you should probably read it.

I'm linking to it today because one of her posts and a conversation I had with a friend earlier this week popped in my head while I was walking home from the gym were the generation of this particular post. Just under a month ago, Cara wrote about the 5 stages of her severance, which almost perfectly matched the five stages of my unemployment from last year. Then the other day one of my fraternity brothers called looking for a little career advice. He has a solid job but it's getting kind of soul crushing and he wants out, but he's not sure how to handle a career change. Career change has pretty much been the story of my life the last couple of years (that and all the bars I loved in NYC closing one by one), so I think he called the right guy. I'm going to run through Cara's stages of severance/unemployment, how I went through them and maybe throw in a little advice along the way.

SHOCK
I definitely wasn't shocked when I got let go from my past job. My boss had pretty much told me it was probably coming for a week or two prior. He was trying to fight it, but I had a pretty good idea it was going to happen. We were a recruiting group that specialized in placing individuals with derivatives experience in large banks and hedge funds in New York City, and I was the new guy. Whether it was in January or December, my being let go was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

Advice: Keep your head on a swivel. Especially now. I don't think anybody's job is truly safe. And if things don't seem good, be proactive. I completely wasted those couple of weeks where it looked like I was probably going to be let go. I don't recommend it.

But even with all that, when you walk out of that office for the last time and know you're not going back the next day, it's very strange. And for me, having only been at the job for five months, there was definitely a sense of failure. I had taken a chance on a career that didn't match my background, and I went down in flames. So I was all set up for the next step:

SELF MEDICATION
Those first six weeks or so after I was out of my job were not so great. I went on a couple of interviews, but nothing was panning out, but the going out with no concern about when I had to get up the next day was kinda nice at the time. They hey jerk grow up moment was after spending my entire Saturday out in dark bars for friend's birthday parties, I took a cab home with a couple friends and only realized when I was getting out that I only had 2 dollars in my wallet. The next day I posted an apology on my friend's facebook, and quickly got the "that's nice, but you didn't take a cab home with me" response. Oops.

Advice: Some self medication is necessary, helpful even. But try and keep cognizant of who you're riding home with.

HANGOVER
Well this kinda goes with the self-medication thing.

Advice: A large glass of water and 3 aspirin before you go to sleep. A big bottle of Gatorade G2 and some sort of greasy breakfast sandwich (preferably bacon egg and cheese) in the morning.

HOPE
Oh Hope, you've almost become a cliche in the age of Obama, but you are an actual emotion. Everyone gets to a point where they are sure good things are coming their way any second now. I, for example, TURNED DOWN a job offer because I thought the owner of the company was a little sketchy and I wasn't sure about staying in recruiting. Turns out I was right, but I had to be swimming in a sea of Obama scented hopeitude to turn down a job offer. I had another potential offer that fell apart after I completely BOMBED a phone interview. But who cares! Something else was sure to come along! The birds were singing and the beer was flowing at the beer garden! No problems.

Advice: Now here's where I talk to the career changers. I fully support taking a chance and trying something different, but especially in this kind of job market, you've got to be ready to hear/read a lot of "We'll keep your resume on file" type responses. With things how they are, employers don't need to take a chance on somebody who looks good on paper but doesn't exactly match what they are looking for. But, stay in the hope phase as long as you can. Something good will happen eventually (I am generally an optimist), and hopefully for your sake it will happen before step 5.

FRUSTRATION
Hope's asshole of a brother that kicks you in the face when you least expect it or need it. I left the Hope stage when there was still some doubt as to whether our Hoperific President would actually be our President.

I had an interview at a legal publishing company for a account manager type position. The job would have basically been to travel to a bunch of law schools in the midwest, meeting with professors to make sure they were going to keep using the company's books and soliciting feedback on what the company could do better. I had some sales training from the recruiting job, I had the J.D. and would have loved to BS with professors all day. This job had everything I thought I wanted and the first interview went really well. Then another phone interview was coming and I wasn't going to bomb this one. I read up on how to prep for phone interviews and felt much more comfortable having the first one down.

And I was sure I nailed this one too. The conversation flowed well, I didn't babble or talk too fast like I did in the last one. I felt really good about this. And I've always been a good interviewer. Unless it's getting a girl I'm interested in to see that going on a date with me wouldn't be a completely fruitless endeavor, I'm usually pretty good at getting what I want out of a conversation.

But I didn't get it, I got the "we decided to go in another direction phone call." That was a total soul-crusher. I wasn't expecting it at all, but there it was.

Advice: It's really easy to feel sorry for yourself at this point. But try not to. Basically, my advice is don't be like me. I stopped going to the gym, started eating really bad food and worst of all, actually occasionally recorded The Bad Girls Club and watched it instead of looking for jobs. Please, for the sake of humanity, don't do this to yourself.

But I can't end this on a bad note, because in the end it all worked out. I have a job that might pay a little less than I was making before, and doesn't have some cool title or whatever. But it's a gig with cool people at a company that seems to recognize and elevate talent. Right now, that's all anybody can ask for.


I was going to write something about how good The Wire is and how you all need to watch it, but as soon as I publish this I'm going to watch the 3rd episode of The Duel 2. This means I have no standing to comment on television.