Approaching 23 months off work...

On Wednesday I will be marking 23 months unemployed.

I have detained frustration after frustration in this volume and I have run out of words to describe how bad it sucks to not have a job.  There are the legal reasons, and the monetary reasons, of course, but when it boils down to it really...I'm bored out of my ever-lovin' skull.

I often wonder what will be the biggest adjustment I will have to make when I am hired again.  Most likely it will be getting myself set back on a regular schedule.  Right now I go to sleep when I want, get up when I want, and rarely leave the house.  I don't have a vehicle and I don't have money for bus fare so I really can't do much "ground pounding" on the job hunt, so I have to rely on the very medium that you are reading this on to find work.  I can tell you with little fear of contradiction that job searching and networking over the internet does not work as well as you might think for a number of reasons.

Chief among them is that your last job could mean an infinite number of different jobs to the search engines.  My last job was called "case manager" and when you apply to national search engines and you put in case manager and you do NOT have a degree, your options for employment are somewhat less that someone who has a degree, so the whole myth that having had four years of practical hands on experience is meaningless if you don't have the education, and thereby you are verboten to work in that position.

In the nearly two years that I have been off work there has been two major roadblock initiated by the federal government that give potential employers yet another, government-backed reasons NOT to hire people. The first is the affordable care act, which in the only red state to go for President Obama's opponent in less than two minutes in 2012.  In the case of the ACA known of course by the more colloquial name of "Obamacare", the increased premiums that the employers have to pay now basically box out the job hunter because they don't want to take on the extra money assignment they have to pay.  

The next is the President's idea to boost the minimum wage to $10.15/hr.  Now granted, if I were working now I would be all for that but since I am not, it's not too hard to figure out that doing something like that is going to be another excuse for employers to either downsize the newer employees they have hired since the beginning of Obama's first terms or, stick with what they have and ride things out.  Either way, it means there are more roadblocks the prospective job hunter has to clear in order to get working again.  

You try and keep positive and keep thinking that you will get the call to come to work but it rarely does.  I know I'm not the only one but at the same time you feel like you are on the island or, in a more morbid sense, you are tied to the rack and the pendulum blade is slowly inching itself closer.  The thing is, thisa could change in the next hour or it won't.

The NOT knowing is the worst part..