Friday, Jul 25, 2008
What goes around comes around -- laid-off dot-commers are discovering anew the joys of apathy.
Feb 26, 2001 | John Rackerby's golf game has been improving. When he's not on the green, he can be found riding his bike on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, Calif., or meeting up with his friends to enjoy a beer and hot dog at an early-afternoon weekday barbecue. He plays a lot of guitar, and he recently spent a month in Europe just hanging out with old friends.
Three months ago, he was working 60 hours a week, spending nights and weekends slaving over HTML code as the art director of a now all-but-defunct start-up called MyEvents.com. But he was laid off in November, and hasn't been much bothered about working since. "I don't feel that optimistic about jobs, about the current work climate, so I'm not worrying about it too much." He laughs: "In fact, I'm even thinking about taking a bartending job and still having my days free, since I'm getting so used to hanging out. My golf game is getting better and I don't want to stop that."
You could call John a slacker. But he's far from the just-out-of-college temp slave that director Richard Linklater made famous in the early 1990s in the film "Slacker." The new slackers are the recovering workaholics of the dot-com industry. It doesn't matter whether they were laid off or quit their jobs of their own volition; they are now rediscovering the joys of life beyond the monitor: the wonders of "Magnum P.I." reruns, the thrill of going dancing on school nights, the restorative luxury of spending half the day in bed.
Go into any cafe in San Francisco on a weekday or head to a bar on a Sunday night, and you'll see them in droves. As the dot-com industry collapses, they're not scrambling for their next job. Instead, they're just reveling in doing nothing.
"My excuse for not looking for another job is that my career has turned me into a zombie, and I need to fill myself up with art and experience: real life vs. bad business model," says Ann Robson, who worked as a Web designer for three failing dot-coms in the space of 13 months before losing her last job, at ComedyWorld, in January. "From my experience I feel this is all meaningless nonsense, and I think my time is better wasted when I am the one wasting it."
Robson describes herself as "basically a housewife now." She busies herself painting the kitchen, doing laundry and volunteering her Web skills to a Berkeley community radio station these days. She's also planning a six-week vacation to Mexico. "Most of us have saved money because we were in such high demand that all we did last year was work, and work for a high wage. So we can take off as much time as we want," she explains.
Everyone loved to hate the grungy, cafe-dwelling slackers of the early '90s who, midrecession, felt unmotivated and disillusioned about their job prospects when their career options looked like the mailroom or pulling lattes. When the same kids turned into stock-optioned dot-commers working 80-hour weeks, they became a new kind of cultural whipping boy, at fault for gentrification and the stock market bubble. Hate them when they don't work. Hate them when they strive and work too much. So why work?
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