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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
We were both professionals. Now I'm sweeping up popcorn, my husband is selling motorcycles, and our house is on the block. There are a lot of us these days.
Sep 26, 2003 | Several months ago, my husband and I received two rebate checks simply for having children, all part of the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003, an economy-stimulating incentive. Congress approved this quickie tax cut so we'd all go out and buy Pottery Barn lamps and Gap boot-cut trousers and then presumably the economy, and we, would be saved. Instead, I cashed the checks, paid off some bills, and then tucked my dignity under my arm and went to file for food stamps.
The Department of Transitional Assistance is maybe a mile from my house. It's in the basement of a nondescript brick building in a college neighborhood, seated next to an independent movie theater and a funky coffee shop. It's a well-trafficked area for the people of my demographic, the post-hip Suburban parent. I kept my head bowed low walking in and hustled down the flight of stairs. I didn't want any of my neighbors to see me.
To apply for food stamps, one needs to fill out a form and show four consecutive pay stubs, mortgage or rental payments, utility bills, home insurance costs, phone bills -- the flotsam of daily life. I brought my paperwork neatly filed in a manila envelope, shoved at the bottom of a backpack, next to my cellphone and a wallet full of maxed-out credit cards. I wrote my name down on a slip of paper and sat on a plastic chair next to a 60-something woman wearing glittery, plastic high heels, a frayed knitted skirt and an unfortunate tube top. Nearby an agitated woman in her mid-40s stood clutching a rolling luggage cart with both hands, muttered about filing a complaint with the governor for not being comped a bus pass to medical school. I wondered if I had turned off my cellphone. Was it immoral to even own a cellphone and still be applying for food stamps? Such is the current dichotomy of our lives.
In my 8-year-old daughter's backpack last night was a notice from the school's volunteer committee asking parents to help teach art this year. The committee is new, formed to bridge the gap left by the extreme budget cuts made by our town this spring. Included in the cuts were art education, both enrichment and remedial instruction, and all counseling services, as well as drastically reduced time spent in the gymnasium, at the computers, and in the library. The principal is asking us, the parents, to step in as much as possible. I'm signing up to be a lunch lady at the cafeteria on the days my 3-year-old is in preschool and eyeing the "wish list" request for supplies from her teachers. I've been told they need pencils.
According to numbers released by the Federal Reserve in August, there are approximately 9 million people currently unemployed in the United States. My husband and I are lucky to not be among them. InvestorWords.com, which calls itself a leading Web-based glossary for financial terms of art, defines our condition as underemployment, "a situation in which a worker is employed, but not in the desired capacity, whether in terms of compensation, hours, or level of skill and experience. While not technically unemployed, the underemployed are often competing for available jobs." My husband, Andrew, and I, motorcycle salesperson and movie-house concession bitch, respectively, embody all the features of the definition.
Before his current inability to be employed in his "desired capability," Andrew worked at a software start-up. Prior to my scraping gum off the bottoms of chairs and reheating popcorn, I was a Web writer for a multimedia dot-com corporation. It's been like this for 16 months, the two of us struggling to make ends meet, to emotionally and financially support ourselves and our two young children while battling self-pity and overwhelming panic.
For me, being "underemployed" has been a wake-up call of enormous proportions. I have a college degree, I've been in the corporate world, I don't frighten people away with hideous personal hygiene or dubious philosophical rants, but it seems my work skills are just outdated enough to put me at the end of every interviewing queue. In the early '90s, I paid my way through college by temping for consulting companies, generating experience in what was quaintly referred to as "desktop publishing." This was back when knowing computer applications was considered being highly skilled, before everyone and his mother could produce prefab presentation/newsletter/annual-report templates with each new installation of MS Office software. I stopped temping after college, had my children, and during their naptimes wrote articles for a media Web site, employing then-hip "Buffy" references as roguish punctuation. It wasn't a huge career, but it was writing and it let me be home with the babies while still contributing to our household finances. Then there was a merger and 90 percent of the media conglomerate's Web sites were folded up, and I suddenly found myself without a job. Andrew was an executive making a six-figure income. It wasn't how we planned it; when we met during our college years, he was going to run a theater company or a progressive newspaper and I was going to write arch screenplays, but hey, being financially comfortable worked, too. We bought a house in a Boston suburb and while we lived with cat-damaged couches and 10-year-old cars, we also bought mochaccinos and Indian takeout whenever we damn well wanted.
When Andrew's company went bankrupt, it quickly hit us that I had to get a bona fide job. At first I applied only to temp agencies, sure that Andrew would quickly land on his feet. But out of the dozen or more agencies I contacted, I was called in for one interview. After the typing and spreadsheet tests, I was told my computer proficiency was only passable and I should think about updating my skills.
I created five versions of my résumé, each weighted with a set of skills that I hoped would help eclipse the empty years since I had been in a "real" office setting. I applied for anything that I could conceivably do, despite my lack of recent experience and relevant expertise.
My second interview was for a position as an e-book proofreader at a large publishing company. Though the work appeared to involve air traffic controller-like information management, it offered glorious full-time hours for a finite three months, at which point, I naively believed, I would be needed back home. I left the interview sure I had cinched it and sent a glowing thank-you note. I never heard from them. I was told by a mutual contact, months later, that they had instead hired a brilliant 25-year-old who left after one month to follow her boyfriend's band.
The third interview was the one that got away: consumer care specialist for a toy company. What could surpass answering customer e-mails from home in my sweats at 11 a.m. as well as getting to try out boutique board games? I practically crawled into the interviewer's lap like a retriever puppy; I was so desperate and eager, I was sure that no one was going to hire me. There were Aunt Bea-like candidates coming out of the woodwork for this job; sturdy, dependable, smartly ironed women who could take customers by the virtual hand and project studied warmth while all I wanted was to get back to my old, vain, lazy life -- and it emanated from me like a cloud.
My fourth interview was at the local second-run movie house. It was the only place in town with a Help Wanted sign in the window, and I had been responding to newspaper and online ads for four fruitless months. I was given an application to fill out, which I attempted to do in the lobby while a profusely sweating woman, apparently not an employee, repeatedly muttered at me, "You fucking little motherfucker," as she tried to pry the movie posters from their cases. The interview consisted of my writing down the same reference numbers twice, then fumbling through an apology. I was hired on the spot.
