Waiting On The Call...

The last interview I had went well. So, of course, I didn't get the job. It's the way of the Unemployed Warrior, really. A week went by and the other interview was going to happen. I didn't have a good feeling about it, mostly because it was a phone interview. I hate phone interviews. I don't even like talking on the phone. I'd never even had a phone interview before and I knew before it even happened that I would hate being on a phone interview.

So it came. Five people who's names I tried to scribble down futilely were all talking to me on a speaker phone in some obviously drafty room. I couldn't make out words they were saying. They were asking me questions I couldn't understand. I went outside of typical job-hunter mentality and followed my previously stated edict: The Truth.

They thanked me for my time and that was that. "Fuck..." was what I said when I sat back in my chair following the call. The dog trotted in the room and I knew it was time to go hang out with her, or, let's be real here...she needed to go outside to relieve herself.

Let's just call it a day.

----

Three and a half weeks later. Phone rings. They ask for me. "Hi!" I said, "This is me..."

It's a lady who's name I don't catch. She's in Human Resources. They want to meet me in person.

"Wow, okay..."

She asks what time and day is good for me. She says they'll see me then and we both hang up.

"Fuuuuuuuuck...."

So I'm in a similar situation to before. I'm looking for things to wear. I realize that the people I will be meeting in person for my interview really have no link whatsoever to the people that interviewed me at the interview-that-went-really-well-but-didn't-pan-out-for-whatever-reason and that I can just wear the same thing I'd worn before.

I shaved off my beard. It still hurts to do it.

I go and meet them. I'm sticking to my plan. If I don't know something, I don't know it. If I do, I talk about it. They will like me for me or they won't like me for me, but they will have some opinion of me by the time this thing is over.

I stutter and stammer several times and make jokes at my own expense. They assure me I'm doing fine. The five person panel read from a set of questions that are slightly altered versions of the same questions and I quickly think of ways to answer the same questions in a slightly different manner.

I tell the main guy the building is really interesting on the way back to the elevators and we talk about that. He tells me it was really nice to meet me and that they'd be in touch.

I feel horrible about how it went. I sit in my car for ten minutes out in the parking lot and feel like I'm going to puke.

----

September 16th. Two days later.

Around 10:30 a.m., the phone rings. They want to talk to me.

It takes a second to figure out who it is, and I hear another voice on the line. I'm being conferenced in.

I realize that I want to talk to them, too.

"Hey, I've got some good news..."

I'm standing in the laundry room, looking out the back door at the propane tank..

"...We want to offer you the position, you know, ...if you want it..."

I can't talk.

"...You there?"

"Yes! Yes, I'm here... Yes, Yes, I am definitely, I mean, I definitely want the position. Yes, I'll take it. I do!"

They're laughing, I'm laughing.

I can't wipe the smile off my face.

My wife is sitting on the couch looking up at me with her eyebrows raised and a big stupid grin on her face. I have a big stupid grin on my face.

They tell me some stuff about how much I'll make and what the official title is and when I start and I go over all it with them one more time to make sure all of this is real.

They assure me it is. I assure them that I'm very excited and they assure me that they are as well.

We hang up.

My wife jumps up and hugs me and we jump up and down turning in a circle like we just won the World Series, Super Bowl, Family Double Dare, Donkey Kong Final Board and the fuckin' lottery all at once.

"I got a fucking job." is what I told my wife.

"I know!", she said.

"I got a fucking job!"

----

I got a fucking job.

GUEST POST: Unemployed Year-In-Review

EDITOR'S NOTE: Another guest post, from another friend of U.F. that has been out of work, this time for exactly a year yesterday. Please take a second to comment if you dig it. Thanks.

Today was a bad day. For a lot of reasons, actually.

Mainly, it was a day I had been dreading for a week or so now. Sept. 3, 2009 is the one-year anniversary of what has become, in retrospect, the worst day of my life.

Only 365 days and about 12 hours ago, my cell phone rang at what I'll guess was 8:30 a.m. This was odd for a number of reasons, the foremost being that sportswriters, as a general rule, don't like to be awake before noon. I'd been called at 11 a.m. before, and I was fine with that. Reasonable people, I assume, will have been up for at least three hours by this point. But 8-freaking-30? This is the civilian equivalent of being called at 4 a.m., I think.

On the other end of the call was the editor for the smaller paper that technically employed me, even if I did split my time more or less down the middle between it and its much-larger affiliate newspaper. There was something odd about his tone of voice, but given my inexperience with the time of day, I figured I just didn't know what people sound like before The Price is Right ends.

"(My name), it's (his name).. uhhh," he started, "There's something going on. I need you to come into the office as soon as possible."

My first thought was that "as soon as possible" could only refer to a time that was much closer to lunchtime (I promise that I will soon stop making references to how early this call came, but I cannot impress upon you enough that it was very jarring). I grudgingly drove to the office without showering and it only dawned on me that this might be The Day as I was about halfway there. That made the back end of the ride seem like forever, you understand.

When I arrived at the office, the editor that called me was nowhere to be found, so I dicked around on the internet for close to an hour before the paper's EIC poked his head in the sports office and said with a sigh, "Oh, (editor) hasn't talked to you?" My life didn't flash before my eyes as I followed him into his office, and I didn't feel my whole body tighten when I saw that a second person, another higher-up within the editorial department, waiting in the office.

I don't recall what was said in that office, except that I just muttered "Yup" a lot throughout the five minutes or so it took them to explain that I was out on my ass and then make me sign some papers to this effect (what indignity!). I don't remember much else except that, like everyone else that's been laid off the past two years or whatever, "it has nothing to do with performance." In my case, I knew that much was true since I'd been nominated for and won a number of New England Press Association awards (and indeed some more came in after I got laid off, and I heard through the grapevine that this was much to the embarrassment of the editor who called me that morning/decided I'd get the axe, which was a bright spot this year for sure). These awards, however, offered no consolation.

Neither did the woman to whom I was whisked, whose company the newspaper had hired just for this occasion (and probably cost about half my annual salary for a day's work). She was, I'd guess, in her late 60s or early 70s, and seemed nice enough as she explained that everyone I knew would understand my plight and that it was okay for me to be angry. I remember exactly what I said to her, with what I think was disaffected nonchalance: "I want to punch you in the fucking face right now." To her infinite credit, she took it in stride. I imagine she got that response a lot.

I made a number of calls on the ride home, to my girlfriend at the time, to my parents, to my now-ex-coworkers. None of them had much to say to me other than, "Oh, that blows."

I kind of can't believe it's been a year since that sunny, doom-filled morning. I don't feel like a different person now, or anything like that. I just feel as empty as the days that have rolled past with an irritating lack of speed under a microscope, while the weeks and months have positively flown by. I got sick of playing XBOX every day at least nine months ago, and yet here I am. I've sent out literally hundreds of resumes and heard back on a percentage that's right below the Mendoza Line. Actual interviews? One in 20. Maybe. As it happens, people that hire other people are assholes.

But as I reached this first birthday of the shitty part of my post-college life, something that was too cruel to be coincidence happened: for the first time since college, my checking account is below $100. My "generous" severance checks stopped arriving at my house just two weeks after I stopped arriving at work. My unemployment payments ran out four months ago. My various part-time jobs as a hockey writer have, understandably, not paid very well in the hot summer months. In stark contrast to the ice on which hockey is played, it was my liquidity that started melting away come June.

I don't know for sure when I'll get my next paycheck from anyone. I don't know what I'll do for food and gas when that $100 dwindles to $0 sometime next week. I don't know anything. Except that this has been the worst year of my life in a goddamn runaway. And also that, while I thought writing this would be cathartic, it has, instead, just made me feel worse.

Blah.

Anyone even notice we haven't been updating?

Thought the Wednesday's guest post was very good and chock-full of tips and tricks for the newly Unemployed person that I'd leave it up on top an extra day. As for myself, I've working on some actual projects that might make me some money! So I might miss a day or two occasionally. The whole "posting everyday" thing was a little ambitious, anyway, without me giving up my actual identity and all the juicy details. Which ain't gonna happen.

If you did notice we were not updating yesterday, give us a comment and let us know. Otherwise we'll start thinking that no one cares, and hell, we might just abandon the site. So if you like what you've seen so far, let our anonymous keesters know it. Not only are we out of work but we're attention starved and crave your feedback as much as we do our unemployment checks.

We'll be back soon! Make sure to follow us on Twitter and RSS!

-U.F.