Unemployment

I'm not sure why anyone would think otherwise, but make no bones about it...being unemployed sucks.

Wait...I take that back...being unemployed doesn't necessarily suck. There's plenty of free time. I recently discovered that a local channel shows old shows from my childhood in the afternoon, like "Emergency!" and "Dragnet" -- not the black & white one but the color version with Harry Morgan where Joe Friday keeps saying that all the kids are hopped up on drugs. Were I a stoner, I would be in total nirvanna.

Plus, it's almost fall. The weather is really nice and I can take advantage of the kids being in school to take long walks in the woods and find myself. I'm the catch and release sort, so when I do occassionally find myself, I just look for a minute and then let me go free.

Not having a standing income and having to try to find work is what sucks.

I hate looking for work. Part of the reason that I've spent my adult life working a series of jobs I didn't particularly like is because I hate looking for work.

Being a writer as well as a business professional gives me the chance to apply for both working stiff office jobs and freelance writing work at the same time. Basically, I have double the amount of people that can judge me and reject me.

Luckily, thanks to my early days as a writer I'm so used to being rejected that it almost doesn't register. I can tell from the first sentence that I'm looking at a rejection e-mail or letter and I stop reading at that point. A friend recently said, "But what if they tell you what you did wrong."

What I learned a long time ago is that if someone thinks that you suck or that your work sucks, they aren't going to tell you anything that you don't already know. The reason that they think you suck is based on their own perception. Either it was just their opinion or your work really did suck...and I know that I'm self aware enough to have probably already known that when I submitted. Reading the letter where they reaffirm it for me doesn't do any good.
There are times where they say that you suck and your tempted to say, "What the hell are you talking about? That was at least better than average!" or "My qualifications were exactly what you said that you were looking for!" The problem is that your opinion really doesn't matter. I've hired people before and I know that the opinions of the people that I didn't hire were pretty inconsequential to me. No sense railing at someone that couldn't care less about what you're upset about.

Originally, I wasn't planning on including a chapter in my forthcoming book "My Boss is an Idiot...Now What?" on searching for work but this is making me rethink that. After all, that idiot that you interview with today could be your idiot boss tomorrow. I'm fairly certain that my own idiocy as a boss started right from that first phone interview.

I'm going to add that to my chapter outline right after I get done checking Indeed.com and Media Bistro for the fourth time in the last hour.

After all, it's been a full 12 hours since the last time that anyone has told me that I suck.