Roomin' House Blues

One of the things unemployment does is make you reevaluate your priorities and your possessions.  I was already low income, so I had little in the way of expensive services or habits to cut off.  I had already almost eliminated by CD and video buying habits  I used to haunt  I have although large numbers of books and vinyl in storage.  In the near future I will be trying to sell many of these books on line, my original intention for many of them.  I have brought a batch of them  home to begin put them on line. I have also been going through my video collection (in my rooming house room) purging out all the mistakes, duplicates, and I'm tired of that already films. I have gotten together about 100 to 150 DVD and VHS to sell off, along with some games and x-box equipment I got from departing roommates. (I'm not a gamer.) This is a little bit to extend the unemployment funds without selling what I may find of use for film nights at c...

Sorry dear readers.  I got so into the trials and tribulations of unemployment that I have not written about it. After my day of temping that I wrote about I did a second strenuous day.  After that the weather, the holidays, a injury to my hand and ribs and all the efforts to actually find a job have kept me from doing all the writing I should. I have a sprained finger  buddy wrapped to another  and this slows down my typing.  Because of it, my sense of spacing with both hands in off  and I am making lots of typos that I have to correct.   But enough of my unofficial troubles.  On to my official one. Last Wednesday I went to a "Mature Workers Job Club" meeting.  The Work Source Department has an official Mature Workers Job Club, but this is an additional meeting, on weeks that Work Source does not have it's meetings, in the home of one of the "mature workers." The meeting was in...

We have entered an age of the automated job search, where most of our job search is done by computer, without the aid of human contact. We search job boards, Work Source office lists, online want ads and company web sites for jobs to apply for and apply not in person, over even over the phone, but by internet or email. In entering the application process  for a prospective employer we made be told that the application process will take fifteen minutes.  Then for a job that pays less than ten dollars an hour, we have filled out an online application, attached our resume and references, take a quiz as to our ethnic identity and gender, as though any restoration of equality was intended, fill check off proof ability to work in the United States, okay a credit check, fill out a questionnaire about every place we have lived in the last ten years, and then take a half hour personality test designed to ensure our suitability for the job, weed out quitters...