The employment thing

As you longtimers are aware, I have had minimal necessary personal expenses for many months now, and I had a gig that provided me some small income, only to have it suddenly yanked out from under me at the beginning of May. I had an even smaller gig for a few weeks afterwards, but our whole free-meat arrangement then died on the vine and since my mini-gig had depended on it, I was left with basically nothing. Once in a while something hits from Substack, but most of my paid subscribers are yearlies, so I can’t look forward to significant income more than a few times a year at this point. (This is not a complaint, merely a summary of the situation. If I would GIVE YOU MORE WORTHWHILE CONTENT, my Substack situation would probably improve a lot. I’m aware of this. Don’t worry about it.)

So it goes without saying that I have to find a job. In the meantime I’ve done sporadic looking-into what I might need to do in order to get food assistance. I was dismayed to learn yesterday that there is a work requirement, and then a second one added on top of that for able-bodied adults without dependents. I mean, given my current situation of not owing rent (my half of the utilities comes out to $120 a month), if I had a job then I wouldn’t need food aid in the first fucking place.

I wish it were as simple as “I want a job, so now I am getting one.” I keep telling people that we do not GET a job, we are GIVEN one, which is entirely out of our hands. As any well-qualified candidate with zero personal-history issues who gets stuck in an economic recession or in an ill-fitting local job market would quite unhappily tell you. And I am not even that sort of candidate. I’m worse.

I’ve said several times that I wanted to explain all this. If you’re curious, have a read.

Education: I graduated high school in 1992, when a high-school diploma still carried some job-market currency. Nowadays it doesn’t; if you don’t have a bachelor’s degree then nobody paying a living wage really wants a look at you EXCEPT for the sorts of soul-sucking occupations where they have to pay you a sort-of-livable wage just to get warm bodies in the door to apply for the job. Contact center work, for instance.

Unfortunately for me, I had a 2.0 grade-point average in high school: in other words, a C average. That’ll get you into community college on a Pell grant but no one told me that at the time, so I ended up joining the Army and training into what would turn out to be dead-end work now being replaced by electronic media. And then I didn’t stay in long enough to get my GI Bill. It was an honorable discharge, but it was too early.

I’ve had a little bit of other training too — in the aforementioned contact-center work. It was a free class and I wanted something recent in the education section of my résumé. (And it worked, and then I got stressed the fuck out and quit. More on that below.) And I currently am enrolled in a specialized proofreading course, but I am paranoid I won’t pass the midterm and final, and I’m afraid of the work being replaced by AI. Anyway, it’ll be a while before I’m even earning from that even if I finished it right now. Good times.

I did attempt college. I completed one quarter and made dean’s list. Personal shit (long story I won’t get into here) dragged me down and I dropped out of the next quarter, then tried again. Then I got pregnant and realized I didn’t know anyone I would trust to even watch my kid and I could not afford daycare, so I dropped out again. And there I stand. One of the good things Biden did in office means my loan is no longer in default (that’s a whole ‘nother long story I’ll not get into here), but I’ve told myself I won’t be trying again unless I know what to major in, which I didn’t last time. I know. I know. Moving on now.

Mental issues: I am not following social-media trends on this, but I strongly suspect I’m autistic at mimimum and possibly also have ADHD. I base this not on said social-media trends but on what people have told me about my behavior as a small child, and on my own analysis of various interpersonal conflicts I’ve had over the course of my life. I also tend towards anxiety and depression which influence my behavior in various interesting ways; sometimes I catch on to what’s happening early enough to avoid disaster, but usually not. Getting treated with brain drugs is not an option. I tried that with my depression and it really messed me up. I hear the ADHD drugs are just as bad, if not worse, if they don’t get you on an appropriate one right away. Plus, my ability to continue medication treatment would depend greatly on my ability to retain healthcare coverage, and Trump wants to cut Medicaid. Brain drugs are not something you can just quit cold turkey. So I’m stuck. So I do dumb things like put off work until my client or employer gets pissed off, or put off job-hunting until I’m on the brink of starvation, because the whole thing freaks me out because I’m afraid of screwing up.

It doesn’t help that when I was first starting out in the working world, I made some really dumb mistakes that got me into a lot of trouble, and to this day I can’t stand the idea of letting people down, so I avoid work that would put me into a position of responsibility because on some deep level I am 100% certain I will fuck it all up and get fired anyway. I can’t seem to shake this, either. And being fiftysomething and not wanting to be a supervisor or manager marks you in the eyes of HR as being not worth the time and effort.

Also, I have what my ex-monster-in-law used to call “authority issues,” I hate being interrupted when I get into a groove with whatever I’m currently doing, I don’t understand or like people’s stupid head games in social interactions, and I hate hate HATE being scapegoated for ridiculous corporate policies I had no say in. If I must be employed by someone else, I’d probably be happiest in some kind of low-level tech or hands-on thing where I never had to interact with the public at all. It took me far, far too long to figure this out, and now I’ve got too many points against me. I can’t seem to even get a housekeeping gig at this point. This despite making it as far as the interview for housekeeping gigs three fucking times in a year and a half.

Also… I’m slow, especially when I’m first starting out with a new thing. In my experience, the people around me don’t have the patience to let me figure out what I’m doing and therefore speed up. We’re not talking six months down the road they’re mad at me for still being slow, in other words. We’re talking about in the first week they’re jumping on my ass for not being as fast as the longtimers. A particularly fucked-up example of this was when I got a temp seasonal job in production the month after I had COVID: my stress response was completely dysregulated, a fact I only learned when I had two major near-fainting episodes two days in a row at that new job. We’re talking paramedics called the first day. They’re lucky I didn’t puke all over their peanut butter. Client and I mutually agreed I wouldn’t work out for the job, and no hard feelings (okay, a few: he still was all over my butt before that happened for not being as fast as he was on DAY ONE), but the temp agency dropped me with zero explanation. I hadn’t even been after a production job, and they knew it. (More on that below.)

Physical issues: I am female, upper-middle-aged (lower-old-aged), homely, and fat. I am less fat than I was a year ago, but being a fatass is not a protected civil-rights category and, up against a pretty and slender younger woman with the exact same qualifications, I will lose every time. It’s women’s job to be environmental decor, y’know, since only men’s opinions of virtually anything ever COUNT for anything. As for the age and the femaleness, most if not all states have at-will employment policies, and you have to be able to document that you were refused or fired for a protected category to even have standing to sue. As long as they don’t tell you why they are refusing you, they can refuse you. They literally would rather hire a felony parolee with a rape history TO WORK WITH THE PUBLIC than hire me.

I have had other issues ongoing too. Until last fall, when I got my monthly it would be massively heavy for the first two or three days and required me to have easy access to a restroom. I almost had a sweet hospital parking valet gig that paid tips until, among other reasons, I realized that I was very likely to bleed on the fancy leather seats of someone’s expensive SUV. And warehouse jobs, which pay pretty well for no experience, were a no-go for similar reasons. Nobody seems to understand that bleeding through one’s britches is an undesirable outcome and will interpret your need for frequent duckings-into the restroom as laziness and work avoidance. I don’t have that problem anymore… a day late and a dollar short, for reasons I’ll get into further along here.

I also have issues with footwear. You would not think this would be a problem in the workplace if all you’ve ever had are jobs that let you wear sneakers to work. A lot of the jobs with a high female concentration expect to see employees in dress shoes. I haven’t been able to wear dress shoes since I was in my twenties. Some of it was the weight gain, but not all; I’ve had problems with swelling since I was eighteen, and I was not fat then. Plus my feet are wide. That alone wouldn’t have been as much of a problem, but wide AND swollen means my size-six feet (I measured… they’re still a six) have to go into size-nine shoes. In sneakers, that doesn’t matter. In dress shoes it looks ridiculous and I’m liable to wind up with blisters (I’m diabetic, by the way). And then everyone would see the swelling, too, since it goes up into my ankles and just above. Yuck. No thank you. (I sleep with my feet propped and it helps a lot, but the swelling never totally goes away.) This has also meant I’ve had trouble properly fitting into steel- or composite-toe work boots, which also got in the way of some aforementioned warehouse work. To try to find specialty safety boots would have cost me more than I could spare. (Amazon gives you a footwear allowance at hire, but it only goes so far.)

Transportation: This has been probably the single greatest factor in my spotty employment history. I didn’t get my license until I was twenty-three. I had been able to walk everywhere and get to work in the Army and it was a jolt to realize the civilian world was not similarly accommodating. The United States has shit public transportation outside of a few major cities, and municipalities insist on placing residential zoning too far from the zoning where the jobs are; there is some housing near workplaces, but it’s too expensive for what those workplaces pay. So the people who can least afford personal transportation that would get them to work safely are the ones who need it the most. Explain this to me like I’m fucking five.

Twice in my life, someone’s given me a car. Both times I ended up losing the car because I couldn’t keep up with necessary expenses related to it. The second time was when I moved out here to NorCal and didn’t trust my aging Sonata to make the trip nor myself to be able to afford its insurance and upkeep once we were here, and I’d have had to pass smog-testing too. And I needed the two grand in starting-out money much more than I needed expenses I couldn’t pay for.

But it was a trap. I was told I would owe no money for my lodging since I was offering on-demand dogsitting in exchange for it, and then a few months after I got here my housemate lost her health-insurance subsidy. My share is still only $120 a month, but right now it might as well be on the moon. I was also told I could walk to town but in practice, it takes me between forty and forty-five minutes to walk to Walmart from here, and we already tried Walmart as an employer and all they would offer me was an overnight job and then suddenly I had to dogsit and the dogs would not let me sleep. The meat gig after that took up two days of my week where I could not have been available for anything else and I wasted months I could have been looking because I thought it would be long-term, only to lose it in the end because the people I was helping were lunatics. And everything else in town is farther away from Walmart and much more time walking. The one employer who had an opening in that same area of town recently has either not made a hiring decision or has not chosen me. I now have a bicycle, but I don’t know how far I can range on it yet. It’s going to take some time to get in better condition if it turns out I can’t go very far at all. And that’s if nothing else breaks on the bike. I had to put money into it to get it roadworthy at all, and I’m still waiting for some parts.

Literally, someone could give me a brand-new Toyota with zero problems right fucking now and it would do me absolutely no good unless they also paid my related expenses. They wouldn’t. Pipe dream.

I have a possible out, but I’d need money to even get it started and then I’d need a ride to go pick up the car. It would mean I had to go back to gig food delivery, which was the reason I could make it on my own at all after walking out of my daughter’s father’s house four years ago. I would also have to pick up rideshare, because gig food delivery is temperamental and also lower pay, and I’d probably have to go to Eureka south of me or Grant’s Pass or Medford north of me to come out ahead. And I’m not sure I would.

Social media: I have every reason to believe I’ve been overlooked for employment because someone at HR looks up a candidate’s social media. If this is happening, it is most likely happening because I know what a woman is and I care about the preservation of women’s spaces and women’s resources FOR women. If that’s not the reason, I also swear a lot and am brusque about certain other political issues. I’ve been told my entire working life that a good employee keeps business and personal life separate. Apparently, employers don’t have to follow that rule.

Other issues…

I only speak one language. Especially in NorCal, much more so than had been true in Ohio, this is a liability. I don’t MIND this; I’m not a racist asshole offended by the existence of other kinds of people, and I come from an ethnicity where we were all speaking French two generations ago, right here in the U.S. of A. But it is a problem for me in a vocational sense. I am making an effort to learn Spanish with free resources, but of course it’ll never be enough.

I mentioned a few sections ago that a temp agency had placed me in production when I wasn’t even looking for production. In fact, I had been put on their radar when I took the free contact-center class. They were supposed to find me something in that vein. I accepted the production job they offered instead because one, I needed the money and two, I was excited to work for a local business. I should have turned it down and insisted on something more desk-jobby. My bad.

But it was like that. The temp agencies were the absolute fucking worst because they put on airs like they were going to help you further your career, then they would stick you in something completely fucking random that had nothing to do with what you were best capable of doing. And you would think they’d want a better match because that means you’re going to stick around and actually do well, but no. It has nothing to do with you and everything to do with that fee they get to skim off your wages on payday.

I mean, I get it. We all have bills to pay. But when we treat a profession like a money extraction machine, the quality of our work goes way the fuck down and a lot of people get hurt.

They were prone to dropping me suddenly, too. There are now gig temp agencies where you choose your own shifts, and my first job with one of those was at FedEx Supply Chain in Groveport, and FESC suddenly decided they didn’t want us anymore and dropped the whole contract. Another agency sent me out to a job only to tell me, as I was in the parking lot getting ready to go in for my first shift, that I wasn’t needed there anymore. Thanks?

There were times I was the one did the dropping. Another agency gave me the wrong clock-in code and then gave me shit for “not showing up” after I’d already spent half my workday picking and packing — I found out on lunch break. Nope. You’re on your own. Good luck with that. I did get the pay sorted out, but I couldn’t trust them anymore. Another agency sent me to a site where there was literally no parking. Cars crammed bumper-to-bumper and even along the edge margins. No spaces at all. I couldn’t risk parking in an adjacent parking lot because I couldn’t be assured I wouldn’t be towed. I gave up and left in disgust. And every time you do something like that you wind up with a permanent black mark and become that much less employable.

Even with a permanent gig, the risk for mismatch was never zero. I find I cannot work with people who won’t communicate timely, who leave me hanging out to dry in unusual situations and then jump my ass for not solving the problem the way they would have, which I couldn’t even ask about because they were “unavailable”… I thought I was getting paid to do a job, not to cover up someone else’s inadequacies. And the customers are no help. You set up an organized system to deal with specific situations, and the customer wants to go completely off-manual and ask you to do things you literally are not equipped to do because some asshole told them the customer is always right when we all know that’s not true. This is not even me having a bad attitude about it. It’s just facts. Nobody knows everything, and having money to spend does not automatically make you smarter or more right. You can learn to cope with that fact, or you can keep ruining people’s day for nothing. I don’t make the rules.

If the job’s got too many moving parts and I am expected to juggle them all properly too soon, that’s a no-go too. I can learn it over time, but I must be allowed to make mistakes and not fear job loss over it. Most employers these days prefer the hiring approach of “throw it at the wall and see what sticks.” That doesn’t work for me.

AND… I was out of the workforce far too long. Even if my work history had been stellar for the first part of it, prior to having my daughter, I have too much of a gap now. And I wasn’t stellar. Mostly due to transportation issues, I did a lot of job-hopping and sudden quits. And it’s so, so hard to get back to something regular now with all this other shit going on. And no, you can’t point out that you spent that gap as an at-home mother because no, employers don’t see that as “picking up skills that translate to the workforce.” That’s bullshit. If you are currently a stay-at-home mom, they’re lying to you. Get a job before you can’t anymore. Your kids will cope.

Self-employment?

Sure. Good point. Why don’t I just work for myself? Well… You can see I’m trying that a little bit. I’ve already made this piece way too long but, in a nutshell, (1) I have no idea what in the world I can do for regular, consistent, adequate pay. I try putting out feelers, and I might as well be talking to a wall. And even when someone gives me an idea, if I then start doing whatever was suggested, no one’s interested. (2) You will recall my suspicion that I have ADHD. I have to set up a consistent routine for a new thing and then keep at it long enough to establish a habit. If I am not sure what I’m doing, I can’t set up the routine. If I don’t set up the routine, I lose track of time and crash and burn. (3) You need money to start most businesses. You especially need money to start the lucrative ones. (4) Regulations. Shit, I could bake cookies in L’s kitchen and make local money if I wanted, but I’d have to fork out money to meet legal standards for a cottage bakery. Nope. I’m tapped. Plus I live with three dogs and we can’t keep them out of the kitchen. And anyway, given my own experiences with health damage from shit food, I kind of don’t want to run a business where I am similarly injuring other people. It makes me sad to realize, because I still love baking, but nobody’s going to pay the premium for keto chocolate chip cookies. Maybe if I were back in Columbus. It won’t happen here. And I’m not sure those would fit under cottage-baking regulations anyway. They’re more perishable.

Most of what I’m able to do and would be willing to do is luxury shit, and we’re going into a bad economy. There will still be rich bastards who thrive off impoverishing everyone else, but there will be more of us trying to sell to them which will drive prices down. The middle class doesn’t give a shit about keeping people employed, so they’re no solution and they’re shrinking as a group anyway. I’m honestly not sure how this is going to go in the long run.

Plus, part of success in self-employment has to do with networking. Remember what I said about social media? Support of troonery is a big problem in the creative fields too, particularly with visual artists — one area in which I could potentially excel. Even trying to network with gender-critical artists is fraught because you get assholes sneaking in who sabotage you. They honestly just want me to starve and die. They want that for all of us. They’re dangerously close to getting what they want, too. My housemate and my neighbor are both published authors and they can’t get speaking gigs anymore. They’re not as poor as I am, but it ain’t by much.

Even if that weren’t in play, my longtime social issues mean that most people don’t give a shit what I have to say; they find me offensive regardless. I routinely run into people who’ve blocked me and I have no idea why. (There are various ways to tell you’re blocked.) People act friendly to me, sometimes even offer collaboration, and then ghost me. (One reason I never found work at Dad’s was that a cousin of mine chatted me up about possible paid art collaboration and then I never heard from her again. We had no fight. She was just gone.) So, I mean, it’s possible I could make a living as a writer? But even when I do push myself into writing (more on THAT in a bit), my reach is near zero and responses are hostile a lot more often than warranted. Yes. Blocking and ghosting are hostile behaviors. Glad we could sort that out.

And finally, I’m my own worst enemy. You would think that on the rare occasion someone offers me an opportunity, I would jump on it and kick its ass and come out financially ahead. Nope. I fuck it up. I lost an editing and transcribing gig because I kept putting it off, and I lost out on being paid to be in an anthology because try as I might, I could not figure out how to write my piece. Doing stuff on-demand is pretty much a No. If I made a self-employment gig work, I’d have to offer a thing and then have people want to buy it. They don’t. So I’m kind of stuck.

Sigh.

So. If you slogged through all that, you have some inkling now why I am so frustrated and how much one issue feeds into another and makes the whole mess worse.

I have had two different people suggest vocational rehab. The main problem with that is they won’t take their mission seriously (while I was homeless, I saw how helpful the “help” really is… they are just padding résumés, they do not communicate timely with you, and they don’t know what to do with you if your situation isn’t on-script) and then will try to band-aid all my shit and then throw me into a job that I can’t get to and wouldn’t work out with even if I could. There is no government benefit for transportation unless you’re physically disabled or it’s Medicaid getting you to doctor’s appointments. I am able-bodied and I can’t get doctor’s appointments next to work five fucking days a week. There’s nothing else. I’m tapped.

I have another possibility but I have about five percent confidence that it is actually going to happen. If it did, it would absolutely save my ass because I would then be able to leverage my income into positioning myself better careerwise, but it has to start, and I don’t even have an ETA for that. And it’s not likely to start before I run out of money. And I need a job for food stamps, so that’ll basically be it.

I haven’t given up. I’m just dealing with a lot of mental stuckness, and while things seem to be easing up a bit, it’s probably too late to make any real difference. But I’ll keep you updated on how it’s going.

Hopefully in much shorter posts. Sorry about that.