Yesterday we got out of the house and “blew the stink off” as my mother-in-law would say. We took a short road trip to St. Louis and had lunch a Red Robin, one of our favorite burger places. They have the best Freckled (strawberry) lemonade. Afterwards we stopped at a Krispy Kreme for a dozen doughnuts.
The ride down and back was delightful. We talked about our fears and worries regarding our current situation. We also talked about friends and family, the right, abortion, the prison system, and life in general. It was a great day. We really needed to get out of the routine here and do something just for us.
And as a bonus this morning’s breakfast was delicious!
For some time now I have noticed that when I downloaded my e-mail I was seeing higher counts in the status bar than I was new messages in my inbox. When I first noticed the problem, one of my mail accounts was claiming to download 61 messages more than I was actually getting.
I am not sure when these phantom message headers appeared, or what may have caused them. I have managed to rid myself of them ( for now ) and I wanted to share the steps in case some one else is having the same issue.
Some background:
My next step was to move the ~/Library/Caches/Mail folder to my desktop. This didn’t work either.
Finally I logged into the control panel for my account at my ISP and deleted the mail account from the server ( after downloading all the mail there first, of course ). Then I re-created the account on the server.
This steps seems to have worked. When I get my mail the status bar numbers match the instances of new mail in my inbox. Personally I think that an aborted or failed mail retrieval attempt left these headers on the ISP server somehow. Deleting the account there, with a seemingly empty inbox, got rid of problem when nothing done on my machine worked.
After almost three weeks of unemployment, uncertainty, and fear about the future, we got some good news yesterday. One of the companies that Michele had applied to responded with a request for a phone interview.
Together we have responded to dozens of openings in three major markets and until yesterday we had heard nothing in return. It was disheartening to say the least. In my case I’ve sent out nearly 75 resumes to companies large and small in Raleigh, Tampa, and Chicago. In many of these cases the position requirements read like my resume, as if the job was tailor made for me. Getting no replies whatsoever was starting to really scare me. How could I not get any responses?
Metaphysically I understand that each lifetime is about gaining knowledge through experience. That we determine the lessons we need before starting the life, and if an anticipated direction or opportunity isn’t happening it just means it isn’t part of the lesson. In other words, the only reason for me not to have heard from all these contacts I’ve made is that none of them is the right next step for me. Easy to understand and accept in the abstract, very difficult to live with in reality.
So Michele’s good news is a ray of sunshine in an otherwise dark and gloomy landscape. We are trying very hard not to put too much pressure on this single event, or anticipate a future beyond it. Instead we are happy to have confirmation that there is a future, and that our patience with ourselves is starting to pay off.
It has been eighteen days since I was last employed. Eighteen days of emotional highs and lows, eighteen days of struggling to make sense of it all. This morning as I realize yet another day has gone by without a job prospect, I find myself wondering about the connection between my self image and my job.
As a child I was always told that I needed to study hard and get good grades so I could go to college and get a good job. If I didn’t I’d end up “pumping gas” at the local gas station. And somewhere along the way I bought the whole career path idea. The one that states you have to have a direction to your career or you aren’t successful. As a member of the information technology industry I always thought I’d be a programmer, and then an analyst, next a project leader, and finally a manager of some sort.
And so, in my career to date, I have been a programmer, and an analyst, and a project leader, and several other titles as well. But no matter what the title, I’ve always associated who I was with what I was called at work.
“I’m a programmer.”
“I’m a team leader for a large OO project.”
This is fine when you have a title. Viewing yourself, or worse, equating yourself, with your job title sucks when you haven’t got a job. You are left with saying, to yourself if nobody else:
“I’m unemployed.”
I think there is a huge fallacy in imprinting our young people with the idea that they are only as good as their job. I know better than to think I’m only as good as my job and I still have a brutally hard time letting myself off the hook when I don’t have a job. When we tie self worth and happiness to some thing as capricious and vague as a job we give up our right to self determination. And we doom ourselves to never feeling happy enough, or content enough.
It has only been as the result of several very painful end-of-job situations that I’ve come to see that it is more important for me to focus on who I am, regardless of my employment. That my relationship with my wife and friends shouldn’t change just because my status as a worker has changed. And yet, thanks to years of conditioning in school and as a young, eager to please employee, I find myself in the depths of depression because a place I hated working for no longer wants me.
Staying focused on who I am and what will take care of me is so very hard when all the imprinted impulses I have are telling me I should panic, and grovel, and sacrifice to get another job so I can have my identity returned. The idea that my identity was somehow owned by the employer is absurd, and yet not being employed has left me feeling lost and apart from myself.
( I suspect, but do not know from personal experience, that this “loss of identity” crises is what destroys so many people who retire only to wither away and die. )
I know in my head that I am not my job. That the sum of who I am is far larger than any title or position. But in my heart it is hard to feel left out of the mainstream, to feel apart from everyone I know who has a job.
From here on out I’m not going to answer the question, “who are you?” by saying I’m a programmer, or I’m a object-oriented application architect. Instead I am going to respond,
“I’m Mark. Human being at large.”
[Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says] “He wanted to log in everywhere but was limited to the phone numbers on his list.” Masters of Deception by Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner
[Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?] Nothing but air there!
[What is the last thing you watched on TV?] Law and Order rerun.
[With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?] Birds singing outside the open window.
[When did you last step outside?] Around 4 pm to get the mail.
[Before you came to this website, what did you look at?] flaunt.net
[What are you wearing?] tee-shirt, sweats and socks.
[Did you dream last night?] If I did, I don’t remember any of it.
[When did you last laugh?] Earlier today at my wife who was being cute.
[What is on the walls of the room you are in?] Ugly wallpaper, a calendar of Thomas Kinkade paintings, and a digital thermometer.
[Seen anything weird lately?] No, not really.
[What do you think of this quiz?] I always like things that don’t require me to compose original content :)
[What is the last movie you saw?] My House in Umbra. (excellent, 4.5 out of 5)
[If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?] This house and our car.
[Tell me something about you that I don’t know:] I can juggle.
[If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?] I would eliminate all money and concepts of ownership.
[Do you like to dance?] Only when no one is watching. :)
[George Bush:] The scariest man in the world today.
[Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?] Amy Susan
[Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?] Daniel George
[Would you ever consider living abroad?] Absolutely. But only for a couple of years.
One of the hidden benefits of losing your job is the potential for losing your house as well. With no income the race between a new income source and the end of your savings account is underway. ( Since I was most recently independently employed, I am not eligible for unemployment compensation. )
We have enough on hand to last a “while”, and we can sell our stocks to generate a slight extension to that “while.” But our employment search must bear fruit soon or we’ll be in real trouble.
So last week we put an ad in the newspaper, and bought a couple of “For Sale” signs and a big black marker. One of the signs came with an info tube attachment. The flyer in the tube pointed us to a web site were we could create our own house listing for free. Once the listing was completed we could print brochures and stick them in the tube.
The newspaper ad has generated some calls, but none serious enough to schedule a showing. The brochures keep disappearing from tube ( 32 in 4 days ) and some calls are coming from them as well.
We have had one serious call, from a realtor, that has put us in a bit of a tailspin. You see we spent the morning talking about seriously searching for ways to stay here rather than sell the house and move. No sooner had we finished that conversation when the phone rang. Now we have to decide how to handle a showing and potential offer.
On the one hand we want to be able to sell our home if we need to move, but on the other hand we don’t want to have to deal with the showings and stress of trying to sell if we are going to stay. Having a realtor call with a potential buyer who wants a showing just brings home the fact that our lives are really in turmoil now.
Do we stay or do we go? Should I start my own business? Should that business be here or elsewhere? Should I take the first thing to come along, or wait for the “right” job? Do we sell the house ourselves or through a realtor? Do we move ourselves or hire it done? Is basing your future on winning the lottery as bad an idea as it sounds?
Life goes on and on.
04/04/04 at 4:04:04. How cool is this?
The family of web sites that I maintain have been updated with Jay Allen’s excellent MT-Blacklist plugin. While I haven’t suffered from the flood of comment spam other sites have dealt with, I am getting more and more junk in my blogs comments. Now I can spend my time on other things besides deleting spam from my comments.
I recently downloaded iTunes PlayStats. Maybe not the most significant piece of software inhabiting my PowerBook, but fun nonetheless.
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While this isn’t by any means scientific, I have been using the responses to my resume campaign as a way to measure the loss of civility in our society. Once upon a time, when you sent your resume to a company, you could expect to receive a letter in response. At the very least the human resources department would acknowledge receipt of your mail, and would indicate how long they would keep it on hand.
Oh, how times have changed. In the past two weeks I have sent roughly 50 resumes to companies across the country. Some of these were sent as e-mail attachments, others through job posting boards. All had an individualized cover letter tailored for the particular position in question. Other than a few automatically generated “we’ve received your mail, do not reply to this e-mail” responses, I’ve heard nothing back from any of the companies.
I understand that in these litigious times, companies take the path of least action so as to limit their legal exposure. But I think it is a sad statement indeed that fear of legal action should keep civility out of our society. I wish there was some pre-agreed upon way for me to indicate to them that I am responding to their offer of a job opening in good faith. That I am not playing legal roulette, hoping that they’ll blunder and leave themselves open to legal action.
As politicians use more and more wedge issues to separate us into smaller ( and therefore less influential ) blocks of people, and as the news media frightens us daily with fear based reporting, we have become less trusting of each other. Our lives are centered around “us versus them” thinking, and we dare not be friendly with “them.”
The loss of civility that comes with the fear of others is apparent every where in our society today. You see it on the highways, in supermarkets, and at little league games. We all feel trapped and helpless in some way or another, and we take those feelings out on strangers; because strangers have done it to us.
When did we become a nation of people obsessed with getting even? Why is it considered okay, expected even, to take out our frustrations on innocent bystanders? Until we as a society stop reacting to feeling afraid, feeling fear, with anger towards others, we will not regain any of the civility we’ve lost.
And without civility, we we lose that which we call civilization.