Posted on by David Drucker

Fear and Loathing on Main Street

It’s no secret that I’ve been search­ing for a job (or a con­tract, I’m not picky at the moment) for a while now. I’ve had lots of first inter­views, near­ly as many sec­ond inter­views, and even a few third inter­views. Noth­ing has con­nect­ed yet. For one rea­son or anoth­er, the oppor­tu­ni­ty has not borne fruit.  Up until now, I was expect­ing it to be just a mat­ter of time, patience and per­se­ver­ance. This morn­ing, I’m not so sure.

Up until now, I thought that the dis­as­trous down­ward mar­ket spi­ral in the US (and now in Asia and Europe) would­n’t have a direct impact on us, at least not for a while, and that we would be able to get to safe­ty before the shock wave hit the Cana­di­an econ­o­my. How­ev­er, this morn­ing I got an email from a com­pa­ny I was sup­posed to be inter­view­ing with this after­noon. They are US-based com­pa­ny, so that should be a clue. They can­celed the inter­view, and the rea­son is that they are sus­pend­ing all new con­tracts until fur­ther notice.  So it’s been a rough day, as Pam also got word that she did­n’t get a con­tract that she was bid­ding on.

While I’m try­ing not to dwell on doom and gloom sce­nar­ios, I have to admit that I’m get­ting pret­ty ner­vous, not want­i­ng to be pound­ing the pave­ment for job in a reces­sion with high unem­ploy­ment after hav­ing been out of work for sev­er­al months already.  As some­one who always tries to antic­i­pate the worst (Hey, we left the US part­ly because I saw a melt-down like this on the hori­zon), I’m deter­mined to be real­is­tic and always look ahead, but some­times real­ism and pes­simism look awful­ly similar.

5 Replies to “Fear and Loathing on Main Street”

  1. Stay pos­i­tive, David. As some­one who is also look­ing for work, I know well how you feel. Fin­gers crossed! 🙂

  2. You will get through this. Notwith­stand­ing that Cana­da is feel­ing the effects of the melt­down to our south, I still believe your oppor­tu­ni­ties are bet­ter here for now.

    I just real­ized, I’m call­ing Cana­da the land of oppor­tu­ni­ty, com­pared to the USA. Wow. Times have changed. Hope­ful­ly, Oba­ma can do SOMETHING about this trainwreck.

  3. Would you feel it tacky if we tried to do some social media cam­paign­ing for you — if OK, is there a page with your resume that we can link to and tweet/facebook post that our bril­liant charm­ing friend is look­ing for work?

    P.S. It sucks and is ABSURD that some­one with your expe­ri­ence and per­son­al­i­ty should be hav­ing a dif­fi­cult time find­ing work.

  4. Thanks, guys (I’d say ‘my friends’, but that sounds too much like John McCain these days).

    Mon­i­ca, I have to admit that your idea does have a cer­tain chutz­pah attrac­tion to it. Maybe we can talk about this in terms of an ad cam­paign. I’m kind of amazed myself that it’s tak­en this long for me to con­nect with some­thing, but maybe it will take more than a resume and tra­di­tion­al net­work­ing to make this happen.

  5. I’ve seen peo­ple spon­sor the http://www.helpareporter.com/ email newslet­ter “Bob Bob­son is spon­sor­ing this edi­tion. Bob Bob­son is a Media Spe­cial­ist with exper­tise in…” Now that’s chutz­pah. You don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to do that. Per­haps we can just Tweet etc. 🙂

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