Sunday, August 26, 2012

Insomniac rant #5: Mind active, body weary.

 
 
 
To say that it's been a rough summer for me would be the understatement of the year.  Right now according the clock at the lower right of this computer it's 0341hrs, I am wide awake with CNN on for background noise, two cats sleeping on a towel on the coffee table, and there's rain...the first soaking one since June, I think, going on outside.  Once again, I will very likely see the first light when dawn breaks in a few hours, but I can't get the old noodle to calm down and let the sandman have the floor.

The reason?  Well, I'll tell you...
 
A couple entries ago I told my readers that I was fired and was embracing unemployment.  Well, here we are 4-months to the day and guess what?  Still unemployed.  This is part of what has got my mind so twisted and active that is preventing me from getting a decent night's sleep.  I have been jobless in three distinct parts of this digital age that we are enjoying at the moment, dear reader and without equivocation I can tell you they all suck...balls. 
 
In 2003, when I was dismissed from an electrical supply warehouse, applications were still almost all paper-delivered, that is to say it was the traditional mode by which I had been employed since 1989 which was you got the app, filled it out with a pen, and handed it in.  In 2005, when I was laid off from the jail, it was still 60/40 paper I'd say.  Larger retailers and "big box" stores were where you'd see them, mostly.  I did not have access to a portable computer like the one I'm writing on now to fill out applications, and online applications were still so new...and complicated...to fill one out was rare. 
 
To get a response was rarer still. 
 
Now, in 2012, they are proliferating at a great rate.  Not only are you giving the tree hugger a smile with no superfluous pieces of paper stuck in equally superfluous folders stuffing warehouses, you are also supposed to feel like you are really contributing to the digital age.
 
Yeah right; my generation was promised a moon base and manned interplanetary travel and my mother's was promised flying cars.  It's 12 years into the 21st century and we haven't been back to the moon yet.  I digress, of course.
 
Anyway, then as now an online applcation consists of the same banal crap you'd get on a paper application: name, contact information, education, past jobs.  On a paper application, once that was done you signed the sheet, added a resume if you had one, then you turned it in and hoped for the best.  If you apply to one of the larger companies today...particularly large, "big box" retail outlets like Wal Mart, Lowe's, Home Depot and so on, they then decide to give you a "profile", which is basically a psychological test to see if you had the mental capacity to work there.
 
Or the capacity to hose it down with a tommy gun. Either way, you cease being a person needing a job to a inkblot that tells the reviewer if you were breast fed, or want to hurt baby ducks.
 
With all due respect to these companies, I hate the tests.  I started seeing them when I worked for the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office, where those who aspired to become by-God po-lice officers/deputies were required to take, and it made sense then because the liability of a whack-job cop on the force in custodial possession of a firearm and other deadly weapons.  In case you are wondering, I passed.
 
Yeah, I was shocked too...(rimshot).
 
Now you see them in the previously mentioned retail outlets, car lots, and even fast-food restaurants.  I have filled out a number of them to this date and after you read a question that has been restated for the fifth time, it makes you carzy, so it immediately sets you up for a non-call back.  In short, I feel that these tests have a noble intention that results in an unfair judgement about a person.
 
As each week goes by I feel as if I am on the edge of a breakthrough, yet it is never satisfied by the end of that week.  I'm turning 44 years old next month, and though I am nowhere near the end of my run in terms of being a viable worker, the clock is ticking. I could have hit the road and gone with a flip burger job, but I have to think beyond the quick-buck in a sense that my responsibilities are larger than they were when I was younger.  Something long-term and good paying is the goal, which narrows the field considerably in this economy.
 
Wow...a rant about unemployment made me a little groggy...it's working!  Plus it's 0430.  I need to go to bed.  G'night! 

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