Posted on 04/23/2006 7:49:45 AM PDT by SmithL
One of my readers is an underemployed 59-year-old man from among us here in the South Suburbs. Call him Harry. He works in information technology. Slowly and wearily, he says: "Once you get past 50, I swear, it gets tough, it gets really tough."
For instance, Harry applied for a job with a city of Chicago department that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He got an offer for some contract work. There were no benefits, but it was a paying job.
A woman from the city called him one Monday morning and wanted to know if he could start at midnight. Harry said he'd like to give his current employer a week's notice. That wasn't good enough. The job was gone. The caller told him: "This is a brave new world. Learn to live with it."
(Excerpt) Read more at starnewspapers.com ...
nope during the summer I worked the jobs... during the year donated plasma twice a week and lab jobs. Some "jobs" were for academic credit as well. Never owned a car in college (that sucked, especially on dates), lived with 3 others in off campus apartments, and went to the store for out of date food at a discount. I ate Macaroni and Cheese for weeks at a time and went to the Department of Agriculture for discount meats. Basically scrounged, but had a good time studying and participating in college activities when they were free (plenty) and used student discounts for other recreation.
The more you post to me, the more I'd like you to hear what I heard from an old mentor of mine when I'd whine... "excuses are like a-holes, everybody's got one son." deal with it and move on, nobody wants to hear your problems, cause everybody's got problems. What makes you so frickin special. Honestly, it was the best help, I never got.
From your e-mail, I'd like to tell you that if your kid is so "debilitated" due to low blood sugar, she needs to get worked up for an insulinoma. Otherwise your just making excuses for your kid and he/she needs to basically learn to work. Sounds like you've got all your excuses about life not being fair, can't even get a loan, too hard for your baby to work cause she's weak, college is too expensive, the moon is in the 7th house and Jupiter aligns with Mars... whatever.
E-mail me in 4 years. I've got even money that
#1. your kid won't finish college in 6 years,
#2. It'll be because he/she's got some physical/psychological excuse
#3 Engineering is hard work (depending on the type) so she's got an excuse to fail that as well.
#4 You'll try to find a reason for everybody not seeing how special your kid is and why they're all cold, evil, and ignorant of her special needs and talents.
That's why we've got "geniuses" driving cabs, cleaning toilets, and ranting against "the man" for keeping him down. My suggestion, have her major in something really useless like Psychology, Journalism, Education, English Lit, Women's Studies, Liberal Education, Art, Interior Design, and that way she'll always have an excuse for how come she isn't finding life fair.
My question to you is, How do "poor" people in our country find a way to send their kids to college and succeed? I'll let you in on the secret......
hard work... which of course you've ruled out because of...... (insert your excuse here)
I wasn't trying to denigrate anybody. I was simply making the point that there are those YOUNGER than 59 (heck, younger than 45, even) who also fall into several "gray areas" with regards to downsizing, layoffs, etc.
My own experience is simply one.
When you stop to consider the age group being discussed (40-ish and above) the most glaring reason for their unemployment is curiously left uncovered in the article or in some of the responses: these are a) the most expensive employees (in terms of salary, retirement benefits, etc) to keep, and b) these are also the same employees that more or less BUILT the businesses that are laying them off in droves (there is no loyalty in the boardroom), and c) many of them expected their employment to last forever at their current levels of salary and benefits (many neglected to update their skills and resumes to suit difefrent business climates).
If I could afford to, I would seriously consider hiring people in this age category precisely because there is no substitute for experience and many of the skills they possess (known as institutional knowledge). But there would have to be some trade-offs, and herein lies the rub: many emplpoyers WOULD hire them, but not at the salaries and levels of benefits they've become accustomed to. The economics of the modern workplace dictates this, to a large extent.
Regardless, perhaps if some of the people who fall into this category would stop playing victim, take control of their own lives, and apply that experience and those skills in a productive way for their own benefit, they just might help themselves.
Very likely it is a bastardized version of Calvinism - poverty, illness and other misfortunes are punishment for sins and the key sign of being chosen for eternal damnation.
How do you know?
Because I spent many, many years around such people, and I certainly know about living it, for better or worse. When bad things happen to most people, it is a transient condition and they climb out of whatever hole they find themselves in. A very big fraction of those who find themselves perpetually in a hole are so for myriad of reasons mostly under their control.
This has generally been a feature of poverty: few that genuinely put effort into it stay in poverty, and for those that do stay in poverty, you do not have to be around them very long to know why. This makes it a self-selecting population. Those who claim it is beyond their control or not their fault are precisely the people who find themselves in that situation because they refuse to accept any responsibility for it. All the people that did take responsibility no longer count as "hard luck cases".
A lot of people claim they have no choice in life in the same sense that Katrina victims who refused to eat MREs for aesthetic reasons had no choice but to go hungry. People routinely and improperly conflate not liking their choices with not having choices.
Selling crack is a free market thing.
I'm hoping to break into the illegal alien market.
They can use their untaxed income to buy my untaxed crack.
But but but, Ben Stein just told me, on Rush's show, about what a shortage of workers there was! Que paso?
bttt
Harry said he'd like to give his current employer a week's notice.
There aren't many employers left who are worthy of getting ANY notice. Thank God I'm retired and don't have to put up with it anymore. Employers today deserve no more than the treatment they give employees. Loyalty is a two way street. Any employer who demands that you compromise your integrity in order to get a job they're offering doesn't deserve you or any other loyal employee.
Ahh, business etchics. By any chance were you around here on the day Ken Lay dropped dead? There were quite a few people who were on the thread all day saying that he really wasn't such a bad guy and they couldn't see what all the fuss was about.
One young woman programmer was hired at the place I work at. She was 6 months pregnant when hired. After 2 months, mostly spent in learning how things worked, she goes on maternity leave for 6 months (with benefits). She returns, is immediately pregnant again, goes on maternity leave again. Then quits to spend time with her kids once maternity leave is up. She essentially milked the system
ping
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