Things to do when you’re unemployed.
• Sleep.
• Get up.
• Go to the kitchen to make coffee.
• Remind yourself that the cereal goes in the fridge and the milk in the cupboard.
• Switch the milk and the cereal (just like yesterday) and pack a sandwich for your spouse.
• Kiss them goodbye and hope to God they have a day at work that doesn’t send them home talking about looking for a new job tomorrow.
• Sit on the couch finishing your coffee and wonder whether you’re just not awake enough or the Today Show is actually getting smarter.
• Decide you’re not awake enough.
• Haul your butt off the couch and wonder where you put your ‘job pile’ – an ever-growing stack of resumes, workforce brochures and job hunting tip sheets.
• Find it on the OTHER side of the couch.
• Go to the computer and check your e-mail for application replies. Find none whatsoever.
• Apply to five new job notices sent from a placement agency you’ve been working with since last July, who, in all that time has not placed you with one. single. job. But you NEVER KNOW.
• Call and e-mail your rep at the placement agency to find out whether your e-mails are actually making it through or if they’ve somehow been diverted to the Bermuda Triangle.
• Check Facebook.
• Get sucked into Farmville for 45 minutes.
• Spend 1.5 hours setting privacy controls on your photo albums, because HI POTENTIAL EMPLOYER – these photos of me at Salty’s Brunch Gorgefest 2010 aren’t really relevant to your current opening. Pretty sure.
• Google yourself. Find 15 accounts you signed up for and promptly forgot about years ago, because clearly, they were INCREDIBLY useful.
• Spend 30 minutes requesting passwords for those accounts, so you can spend 1.5 hours deleting them.
• Take a shower. At noon.
• Flip your hair over your face in the shower and braid it. Wonder if this is the most productive thing you’ll do all day.
• Read blogs about finding a job.
• Read articles about your job market.
• Get exactly the same career advice from all of them that you got out of your high school English class 18 years ago.
• Check your e-mail. Again.
• Read three boilerplate messages from three different human resources spambots, all of which contain the exact same response thanking you for your recent application, but which inform you they are pursuing other candidates whose skills more closely match their job requirements.
• Seriously consider writing back to ask whether they’d hire you to write better response letters.
• Review your resume. For the FOUR THOUSANDTH TIME.
• Do laundry. Iron shirts. Go grocery shopping.
• Debate whether things like ‘milk’ and ‘butter’ and ‘bread’ are actually necessities, or if you might really be able to get away with powdered milk and tortillas. God, you miss college.
• File all the bills your spouse paid.
• Make dinner.
• Watch crappy TV. Until midnight.
• Lie in bed wondering if this is at all what life was like in 1950.
• Wake up in 6.5 hours and do it all over again.
