Down the Up Escalator

by Barbara Garson

  “In July somebody called me from an agency and said, ‘Hi, I saw your résumé on Monster.’ He said, ‘Our agency has a client. I’d like you to come in and talk to a colleague who’ll be your friend on the inside.’ I filled out a long form online, then went there and finished up on their computer.” Someone named Mark told Elaine about a job involving accounts payable and took her payroll information.

  “Then he didn’t get back to me, and I said, ‘Okay, I’m not surprised.’ Then all of a sudden he called. He said, ‘Hi, this is Mark.’ I said, ‘Who?’ He said, ‘Ah, how soon they forget.’ This time he said, ‘I have something lined up with an advertising company, and I want to send you the job description.’ ”

  Several potential permanent jobs later, “Mark called and asked, ‘Are you interested in doing some temping?’ I said, ‘Why, of course.’ He said they needed some people to work on problem invoices downtown at M—— [another company whose name you’d know].

  “I said, ‘Great, I always have fun getting lost way down there. And by the way, what happened to L—— [the last full-time job Elaine was told she was up for]?’ He said, ‘Oh, they passed.’ Then he said, ‘This one is business casual, and it will last two weeks.’ I had just bought some nice corporate-looking clothes, so fine. He sent four of us women up there on Friday.”

  The four temps had a longish wait before they met the woman they were supposed to report to. “She was very, I don’t know, standoffish. So was the woman who was supposed to be giving us the work. The regular workers were very quiet, almost like robots. The girl who was supposed to help me with something, I complimented her on her bracelet, and it was almost like she was afraid to talk.”

  Elaine told of being moved from task to task—“Kathy has something for you to do on Excel” or “Okay, just continue with the purchase orders”—until quitting time.

  “I stopped in her office to see if they had signed my time sheet, and she says, ‘Oh, I won’t need you girls on Monday.’ ”

  “All four of you?” I asked.

  “Yes, apparently, we all did such a good job. So we called Mark, and he said, ‘Yeah, I heard.’ So I went to pick up my check from the agency.”

  “How much did they pay you?” I asked.

  “They paid me thirteen an hour. I think they paid the others less because one of the women said to me, ‘I’m going to check with my agency; this is only eleven an hour.’ ”

  I assumed that the experience had been frustrating. So I was surprised when Elaine said, “You know it was nice to be sitting in an office. To know that I still know how to walk into an office and sit down and turn on the computer. It was nice.”

  Elaine had had one other bit of work. “I have a friend who works for a doctor, and her colleague was going to be out for a funeral. I happened to have an interview with an agency in the afternoon, but I worked in the morning for several hours, and the doctor handed me the cash.”

  That was all the paid work that anyone had to report.

  Feldman, who’d been the most depressed at the first get-together, skipped this one because his new girlfriend was visiting from out of town. She wasn’t unemployed and she hadn’t moved in with him, so she didn’t bring the dowry of a second unemployment check that he’d wished for. Still, I assumed I’d find him a little less depressed when we got together.

  But Gerri, Kevin, and Elaine, the members who’d thought of their Pink Slip Club as a way to make the most of a few free days or weeks, had grown more sober. By now they understood that this bout of unemployment was different from others they’d lived through.

  Elaine remembered when a publishing conglomerate she’d worked for in past years went under. “I was talking to the woman in HR who handled benefits, and I said, ‘You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to continue with accounts payable but in television.’ I thought of that because we had a cable office in San Francisco. My boss didn’t want anything to do with television, because it was totally different from accounts payable in publishing. So I was the liaison. Then I met all the girls from that S.F. office when they came to New York. They liked to tell me all the things they were seeing around the city.

  “I only just mentioned that to the HR woman, and she said, ‘A friend of mine just started working at HR at [the original channel of Elaine’s now huge broadcasting network].’ She said, ‘When you’re ready, give me your résumé, and I’ll fax it to her.’ I got the résumé ready in the office while I was still working; I sent it two days later, and I got the job. I loved that I didn’t have to ask my exboss if I could use him as a reference. What I love about that job is the way it just came to me.”

  “I guess that’s what you have to do now,” I said. “Just talk, talk, talk to everyone.”

  “But who doesn’t know ten people who are looking?” Kevin said.

  “Exactly,” Gerri said, seconding him.

  Elaine is the one who least needed the advice to talk to people. “My dentist has my résumé; he wanted a hard copy. My chiropractor has my résumé. My friend Linda that I’ve known for a hundred years, she has it on her computer at work.”

  “I also had my last job fall in my lap,” Gerri said. Her first job out of college was at an insurance company. After a brief stint her whole department was transferred to Florida. But living in New York is a great deal of what Gerri’s life is about. Fortunately, she didn’t have to consider the move. “My new job materialized before my last day on the old job.”

  “You were perfect for it,” Kevin said.

  “It was perfect timing,” Gerri countered modestly. “I wasn’t ever unemployed like for a minute.”

  “And now you have so much experience,” I said. There couldn’t be a better match for that insurance liquidating job, I was thinking. But I didn’t want to jinx it by saying anything.

  “But there are just so many people unemployed now,” Gerri said.

  “And we are not young.” Kevin sounded his leitmotif.

  Resentment rather than resignation was Elaine’s fallback emotion. She had begun to notice how insensitive some of her friends are to the feelings of the jobless.

  “Yesterday I went to stand out with, you know, my friend Rosalie, who does that kitten-rescue thing in front of the bank on Hudson Street. Well, she complained about her Pilates class, and I said that I liked Bonnie’s class. She says”—here Elaine shifts into a gloriously callow whine—“ ‘Well, I can’t take that because I work full-time.’ ”

  “People like to complain,” said Kevin. “I’m unemployed, but I still have my health.”

  “That little bit of work was such a nice break,” Elaine said, shifting moods, “that I actually went out and bought myself another little jacket to wear with a black dress. I have several black blazers, but I wanted a colorful one that you could put over a black dress so you wouldn’t have to wear a suit for interviews. A lot of people are doing that—a plain dress with a colorful jacket. I don’t like suits at all.”

  Kevin and Elaine itemized Elaine’s wardrobe until Kevin concluded, “So you’re ready for short-term jobs and you’re ready for interviews and you’re ready for a full-time job when that comes around.”

  Elaine was indeed ready. I mentioned that I had interviewed a couple of wealthy people who panicked when the market dropped because they had to “dip into capital.” Then they remembered those shares they got from Grandpa at the wedding, or some gold in a vault, or a brokerage account they thought they’d closed out …

  “Those people should hire me as a personal assistant. I’d keep track of things,” Elaine volunteered.

  “I think a lot of people like that do have personal assistants,” Gerri said.

  “Handlers!” Elaine remembered the word. Many of the personalities she used to pay had handlers.

  “I have two résumés,” Gerri said. “One for straight insurance and one to get into the nonprofit world.” Gerri’s second résumé had been inspired by a listing for a six-month job as an “event planner” for an educationa
l system. Gerri had done that sort of thing on a fairly large scale for the civic organization. So she’d translated her volunteer experience into résumé terms and applied.

  “There are some people that say ‘Change your résumé,’ ” Elaine declared. “I’ve already had people make sure my résumé looks like it should. The only way I could change it would be to totally lie and say I’ve done things that I haven’t done. And that would be stupid.”

  It’s possible that Elaine would have liked one of her friends to argue that changing one’s résumé is not necessarily stupid. If I said it, she would surely have snapped at me. But with or without an enhanced résumé, Elaine is amazingly open to new careers.

  ————

  “There’s a little place on Seventy-second Street that will convert a vinyl record to a CD,” she said. “They have a machine and there’s an old man who sits there and they have some wild classical music that’s playing so loud that I can hardly hear when I’m in there. I’ve come in and the old man is behind the desk and I’m standing there with a vinyl record in my hand and nobody asks, ‘What do you want?’ I’m not sure they even have a cash register.

  “And I’ve often thought, maybe I’ll walk in there someday and say, ‘By the way, do you need anybody to help?’ I like the place; I’m good at organizing. When I was working, a lot of people came to my desk because I was always happy to help them or to find someone who had that information. Everyone knew my name. When I called and said, ‘Hi, this is Elaine,’ they didn’t have to ask my account number.”

  “So you think that store needs to get a little organized?” Kevin said.

  “I don’t know, maybe they like it that way. But just go in and if nothing else, ask people if they need help when they walk in. If they want to pay me a little something, that’s okay, but just to go in and do something.”

  I asked Kevin if he was applying for jobs other than magazine editor. After all, that field had been declining even before the recession.

  “Yes. Ideally, I would love to work for an arts organization, a museum. I know that I can live comfortably on less than I was making, and for something that I personally love and enjoy, it would be a good trade-off, as opposed to working on something that is just a paycheck. But I also know that the arts and that sector have taken a big hit too. The Metropolitan Museum with its huge budget has just laid off people. The big auction houses cut their staffs. So I’m not expecting what I was just describing for myself to happen quickly or easily. It would be a kind of dream job.”

  Gerri harked back to her dream job in events planning. “If I did it for six months, then I would have ‘corporate experience.’ ”

  “Did they ever get back to you?” Kevin asked.

  “No, but they took four months to get back to me on this one,” meaning the liquidator. “And once you’re in the university system for six months, then …” She drifted off.

  Elaine’s far-ranging what-ifs made her all the more ready to seize the moment, and Kevin, as he mentioned, could live on his savings. But I began to worry about the way unemployment was incapacitating Gerri. Sixteen months earlier I’d said, offhandedly, that I’d like to talk to that office mate who took her out to dinner the day she lost her job. Gerri dialed her friend on the spot, made a useful introduction, and handed me the phone to firm up the appointment. Her special strain of “levelheadedness” consists in focusing clearly on the here and now and attending to the tasks necessary to move things one step forward. It wasn’t a good sign for Gerri to be dwelling on a can’t-do-anything-about-it matter. And besides, do people get back to you about a six-month job three months later?

  Unlikely.

  Autumn Equinox 2010

  If a straight thinker like Gerri can’t contemplate her prospects logically, maybe the prospects are too disturbing to face with mere logic.

  Other people in her church must have been feeling the same way, for the coven decided to add a “prosperity ritual” to the fall equinox ceremony. Kevin was to be the special facilitator. Though it was a closed ceremony, he invited a couple of sympathetic outsiders, including me and Feldman’s new sweetheart, to the sunset event in Central Park.

  We welcomed the four winds and other divine powers as usual. But the special honoree was the goddess Fortuna. First, though, we gave small gifts to appease her sister Nemesis so that she wouldn’t counteract the benefits that Fortuna might grant.

  Kevin had printed enlarged $100 bills for us to burn. He’d also dug up a money chant written by the very Benjamin Franklin whose face appears on those bills. The words came from a drinking song in a play Franklin co-wrote. A coven member created a tune, and we circled around the burning money pyre singing:

  Then let us get money like bees lay in honey.

  We’ll build us new hives and we’ll store each cell.

  The sight of our treasure shall yield us great pleasure.

  We’ll count it and chink it and jingle it well.

  So our multifaceted forefather didn’t do everything well. After a few choruses the group spontaneously abandoned the Franklin chant and shifted into:

  They say the best things in life are free

  Well, you can tell that to the birds and bees

  And they bellowed out versions of the song’s various titles:

  “I need money!” “I want money!” “Just give me money!”

  Then a witch with a good voice sang:

  Won’t somebody buy me a Mercedes-Benz

  My friends all have Jaguars, I must make amends.

  Our individual communications with the goddess were private, of course. But toward the end of the ceremony everyone was given a chance to say what he would do with the wealth that Fortuna was going to bestow.

  One woman said she’d build an animal shelter with a special section for small horses. Feldman was going to build a kung fu studio with an attached garage large enough to store all the motorcycles he’d buy. Gerri said she would bring her aunt from South Carolina to live in New York. Kevin told us that the Whitney Museum was planning to build an annex downtown. “Yes, right in our neighborhood,” he said, nodding to me. “Well, there’s going to be a Kevin M. Graham Room in that building.” I wish I’d heard Elaine’s prosperity plan, but she celebrated the equinox with another congregation.

  And On It Goes

  I like a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But between the spring and the fall rituals that should book-end this tale, the four members of the Pink Slip Club had morphed into “the long-term unemployed.” They didn’t retire, and they didn’t find jobs. Their stories just dragged on.

  I waited a decent couple of weeks after the ceremony to phone Gerri about her job interview with the liquidator. “The people in the office seemed to relate to each other in a good way,” she reported. “Having nice people to work with is very important.”

  “So, um, what happened? Did they …?”

  “It took them four months to get to me,” she said. “Maybe they’ll get back to me.”

  I visited Feldman soon after his new girlfriend left town. She’d filled his freezer with casseroles so he knew where his next meal was coming from. As for work, “I had two weeks of employment since this began—around March last year. One week I made $600, the other week something less. It was like $50 more than my unemployment, that’s after taxes.”

  His most immediate source of insecurity was his unemployment insurance.

  “The pressure is high right now because in five weeks I’m going to become a 99er.” That was the term for people who had used up their full ninety-nine weeks of extended unemployment benefits. Actually, it was ninety-three weeks in New York at that point because the state had a lower rate of unemployment than other parts of the country. Though this had started as a financial crisis, the rapid recovery on Wall Street brought the state’s employment rate up. The unemployment extension was in the news because the 2010 congressional elections were coming up and there was a lot of acrimonious debate about stimuli like un
employment benefits versus deficit cutting through austerity.

  “Right now there’s a Democratic majority, and they’re not doing anything about extending benefits,” Feldman said. “In November there could be a Republican majority. That’s just when the 99ers will be coming on in full swing because that’s when people started getting laid off—November of two years ago.

  “If this country doesn’t get it together, they’re going to storm the White House,” Feldman predicted. “It will probably turn into anarchy, and then it will turn into martial law, and the government will be forced to, you know, use their own military against their own people. That would be sad because they have much better weapons than the people.”

  “It’s funny, but I don’t hear any rumblings of things like that,” I said.

  “Maybe they turn down the publicity on them. I don’t even watch the news anymore. Most of the news is propaganda.”

  I felt certain that I would detect hints of a movement to storm the White House for unemployment benefits. The only thing then scheduled for D.C. was a march for moderation organized by two comedians. Admittedly, a group of loosely organized 99ers had demonstrated in front of the unemployment office on Varick Street in Manhattan in November 2010. They handed out a leaflet calling for unemployment benefits extensions and for a federal jobs program like those the Roosevelt administration created in the 1930s. As part of planned civil disobedience, they briefly blocked traffic. Four of about twenty demonstrators were arrested, handcuffed, and held about ninety minutes before being released. Their spokesmen urged other 99ers to take up the protest with or without civil disobedience. It got minimal media coverage, but eventually veterans of this and other barely noticed protests would heed an online call and come together at a square in downtown Manhattan to become the Occupy Wall Street movement. So maybe Feldman had a better sense of the national mood than I did.