I've been spending the last 4 months moping and depressed that every day I try to find a job in my field and every day I've faced some sort of rejection (no one returns my calls... no one acknowledges that I even submitted to their application process... etc.) I finished a Masters degree thinking there'd be jobs gallore just waiting for me and guess what... I get the old "over-qualified" cold shoulder instead.
In addition, my parents (and frankly, everyone I know who doesn't understand this phenomenon on a first person basis) have been bumming me on a daily basis by their attempts to tell me that this situation is all in my head and I'm just not trying to find anything. Yeah, right. YOU try getting in touch with potential employers who could give a rat's ass about you and don't even acknowledge your existence with a "thanks, but we've already found someone" response... let's see how many it takes before you're depressed as hell too.
Quite simply, Atlanta's job market sucks right now. All you people who keep moving here... GO THE FUCK BACK HOME! Turn around and just go back to where you came from... please. There's just not enough job expansion in this town for all of us.
To stave off the impending financial doom that I've found myself facing, I took a go-nowhere temp job the day that I walked out of the bank while sobbing (see Tina Fey story). It's a filing job. That's it. Not answering phones. Not entering data into a computer. Just filing. For the same pay that I was making when I temped back in 90-91 before I ever went to any college... and it's equal to what teenagers are getting at McDonalds (that ain't a joke). The first temp job I ever had was went I was 19 and it was also a miserable filing gig... I quit after the first week... like I was tempted to do this time. It's a group temp project (16 total) and none of us are allowed to talk the whole time. I was reprimanded the other day when three of us were told to, "Save the talking for your breaks." And there's no headphones allowed either. Just the silent shuffling of papers and the quiet deadening of our souls.
So we sit all day, day after day, sorting, alphabetizing, and filing the payroll records and job reviews (but we're not allowed to read them) for the local school system (the largest in the state of GA) and there's about 3 years worth of unfiled material for some reason. It seems unending. No one smiles... occasionally we forget our own names... on breaks, we all sit zombified and looking like we've come from the pit of despair... in the mornings, we each dread returning. Several have just simply not shown up again, but were immediately replaced by unwitting fresh faces ready for the soul-sucking operation.
I'd worked there for several shifts before it occurred to me that I should probably try to at least be part of some sort of conversations on those 15 minutes of breakroom bliss. The funny thing turned out to be that I'm not the only over-qualified, over-educated, under-used smarypants in the bunch. One of the guys in the group who has seemed like a kindered spirit from day one turns out to have his whole Juris Doctor degree complete... just waiting to pass the bar and can't get any law firm to hire him until then, and can't get a university to hire him without Ph.D. instead.
And then there's the girl who is filing along side me in a narrow little tomb turns out to be a fucking rocket scientist. Last summer she interned at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Cali. No shit. And apparently she was in the process of finishing her degree in Louisianna when Katrina interrupted. Now she has to wait until the next semester to get into a school here to finish up... and in the meantime, she's over-qualified for some jobs, and under-qualified on the degree side. So here the 3 of us sit in existential limbo... purgatory... too smart for our own good... too good for the only kind of job who'll have us: temping.
On the bright side, the job is only temporary. It's got to end sometime. And it's only a 3 minute drive from my house, so I don't have to face any of the shittiest traffic on record and I can come home for lunch to check my email. So there's that. And it's still not as bad as as the Del Taco job I had when I was 16. Still, the daily intimacy that I've had with papercuts and their sheer variety has led me to fantasize in those mute hours about the multitude of ways that I could kill my supervisor with merely the thin edge of a page and perhaps a well-crafted and well-placed paperclip shiv.
It also reminds me of the brilliance of Cindy Sherman.
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