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I got my attitude adjustments when I was a child

When was that ... last year. You DON"T have the life experience to have put a lifetime into a career and then after 25 years+ have to start over ...

Not refering to you BUT some other person was saying pretty close to the same thing you did ... Duh I gotta job ... I bake cakes you should try that.

First of all ... who said I didn't ... Second ... people laid off in high tech have MANY years invested in education and in their careers, they are NOT just going to drop all of that at the first sign of trouble. By time they had realized that high tech was NOT rebounding like it always did before ... it was too late. They had lost most, if not all of their saving trying to hold on.

BTW ... throw away jobs don't count because the laid off high tech worker is NOT eligible for them. I know cause I tried

Ok...let me respond to all this.
I am 36 years old...not some teen ager. I spent 7 years in the US Army, got out after leaving a combat arms unit and going to some REMF outfit, started my life over. I am in High Tech. When I was laid off I was making $82,000 a year. When I realized right away I was not going to get a job quickly, I went and got 2 jobs working alternating shifts on 2 diffrent help desks + a job on the weekends in construction. You said people had lost everything trying to hold on. Hold on for what...some life line???

The bottom line is this...people in this country live in debt when it is not necessary.They live like what they see on the TV. I have an idiot who works for me who makes $40,000 a year...he drives a $46,000 car!!! Just because someone will loan you the money doesn't mean you should borrow it!! Why are people spending their retirement to live when they get laid off??? Oh I know why.....becaue they are too GOOD to work 80+ hours a week until their network of contacts gets rolling and they get back to where they should be!!!!! I just don't get these excuses....maybe that's because I was always taught that excuses are like a$$h&l#@ everybody's got one!!!

A new friend of mine and former Freeper was a programmer who had worked his way up from an electronic tech. His company folded about two years ago. He has five kids, two in college. He had been going back to school and finally gotten a BS in computer science. He tried like crazy to find something in tech, then realized he couldn't hold out any longer as unemployment was close to running out.

At forty nine, he couldn't get anyone to talk to him in the building trades. He continued to lower his sights until he got to retail. He had to make up a false life story and get someone to lie for him before a local shoe store would hire him.

His kids transferred to state colleges and are working hard to pay their own way. His wife has two part time jobs, scheduled around his day off and the availability of the older kids to watch the younger one. As he puts it, he's going bankrupt at a much slower pace now.

Our town will re-assess next year and our RE taxes will go through the roof again. I don't know where he's going to get the extra cash and don't know if he'll be able to sell his house since there are so many middle-aged guys out of work who will soon be forced to bail out of their property, which will cause the already slumping market to drop even further.

Some of the people on this thread seem to think that's a wonderful story. I tell you, that guy is permanently pissed.
He's a former freeper because of one of these type threads.

Funny though, I offered him a loan and he wouldn't take it. Old fashioned pride. I've hired him to do stuff here and there but he's always suspicious that it's charity. No charity from me, but my wife and kids do have a ton of new shoes. Women like shoes.

By time they had realized that high tech was NOT rebounding like it always did before ... it was too late. They had lost most, if not all of their saving trying to hold on.

This can make sense for middle aged workers, and we should all be very concerned and sympathetic and as helpful as we can be for those people. But for a 62 year old to spend all his severance and retirement fund unrealistically "trying to hold on" is just nuts.

There was a WSJ article on this guy last week with more financial details. The bottom line was that he had around $25,000 in severance pay and $13,000 in a retirement fund. Common sense should have told him that his chances for getting a comparable again anytime soon or ever, were very very small. Having royally screwed up his finances by RENTING all these years, he could still have improved his dire situation by ditching the house quickly, and paying cash for a little home in a semi-rural area (you can get a decent mobile home or similar size regular home on an acre or so for $20,000 in many areas, and the taxes are next to nothing in those areas). Then he and his wife would have a home that nobody could kick them out of, and with their meager retirement fund plus social security (he has to have a decent SS income, as he's worked in good jobs for 36+ years), they could afford health insurance, food, heat, a modest used vehicle, and a very few "extras". Of course he threw this security out the window when he spent his entire severance package on RENT!, AFTER it was clear that he was in a desperate predicament.