Adventures in Unemployment: Day 2

Day # 2: The Job of the Unemployed

It’s amazing the things you find to do when you’re unemployed. Yes, it’s true that job searching should be your full time job when you don’t have one. But, let’s be honest how often do you employed people slack off at your jobs? Be honest now. We’ll all see you on Facebook. So the truth is unemployed people do the same thing—we take breaks, but instead of doing semi-constructive things like checking our e-mail or updating our twitter (and since doing those things is part of what our job as unemployed people entails), we find other—more interesting—things to do.

For instance, yesterday my roommate [Brick]—who is more underemployed than actually unemployed—decided to see how long he could go without changing out of what he slept in the night before. Turns out he can go all day. He even took the trash out in his boxers.

I’ve tried similar forms of entertainment ranging from trying to construct a workout plan that involves no dumbbells or barbells and can be done from the confines of my room to researching any random question that comes up during the day. Today’s questions included: How much of “Almost Famous” is actually based on Cameron Crowe? (A lot it turns out) What’s the highest scoring word in Scrabble? (Oxyphenbutazone) Who is Jim Whitaker? (First American to climb Mt. Everest) How many air miles is it from Memphis to Tampa Bay? (approximately 668). This is a very small sampling of all the questions we confront during a single day. While it’s interesting and will undoubtedly makes us real contenders on Jeopardy one day, it gets old after a while.

Another factor that compounds all of these things is that as an unemployed person you tend to stay up later. I think this is mostly because you feel like you did nothing during the day and thus you have the energy to continue doing nothing for even longer. This is when things really get odd. This is how you end up watching “Cold Mountain” or “The Notebook” with your roommate at 3 AM and falling asleep together on the futon (Not that this has ever actually happened—cough).

In short, I think being unemployed is a mental state, one that you have to fight to get out of. You have to wake up every morning and be conscious of doing something productive. If I understand the work world correctly (which I probably don’t) it seems like the exact opposite of the unemployment world. When you go to work, you wake up in a dazed state shower, shave, and get dressed, then you drive to work where you may or may not be conscious of actually doing something productive. Instead what you are conscious of while you’re at work is the fact that you are slacking off. You are keenly aware of the fact that you’re on Facebook because you know that you aren’t supposed to be, and you derive enjoyment out of reading blogs or tweeting or doing whatever you do while you’re at work that isn’t work related. That excel sheet that took you 20 minutes to fill out and email to your boss was just a blip on the radar screen, but that comment you left on Jimmy’s photo—now, that was a good time. For the unemployed all of those things are still enjoyable, but they become completely overshadowed by hearing back from a potential employer or finding a cool job, or writing a great cover letter.

It’s a fight to be productive, so that hopefully--one day--someone can pay me to find ways of being unproductive. Don’t you love America?

Now of course this isn’t always true, I know I will love and work hard at whatever job I do eventually find, but that doesn’t mean I won’t sneak a game of Facebook Scrabble in like the rest of you.

In fact, it turns out I might even have a prospect or two after some of this effort I’ve put forth. A local paper contacted me today and might give me a shot at some freelance stuff around town (and by stuff I mean covering the minutes of government meetings in Germantown and Collierville—compelling stuff). But regardless, it seems like the job of the unemployed is really about the effort. Not getting yourself too stressed out over every unanswered Monster.com Job you apply to, enjoying the freedom to play zombie-killing video games for a couple of hours, but mostly having the stick-to-itiveness to put yourself out there everyday, so that hopefully somebody, somewhere will take notice.