This week, the wife and I officially achieve ZINK status—zero income, no kids.

I am more than halfway through the fourth year of my search for regular/steady employment. I have always taken longer than most folks to land a job—but it’s never taken this long before.

Meanwhile, I recently lost the one regular freelance client I had. They had become increasingly slow to pay me, until I finally had to draw the line and refuse to do any more work for them until I had been paid at least half of what they owed me. The next day, they conveniently let me go, ostensibly because of other changes in the organization. (I did finally receive all that they owed me—but it took another ten days, by which time three of the invoices were four or more weeks old.)

This week, my wife’s unemployment benefits ran out.

We’ve actually reached this point before—but, on those occasions, another tier of extended benefits became available, and thus we got another reprieve.

This time, things are different; benefits are exhausted.

The wife has started doing some handyman-type stuff, but it’s not anything she’s being paid for—or, if she is, our bank account isn’t seeing any of it. I’ve got a number of applications out there, but that’s never been any guarantee of work. Yet she feels as though what she’s doing is a job—never mind that there’s no real paycheck involved.

The problems I’ve been running into in my search are:

(1) Potential employers who don’t even acknowledge receipt of applications
I understand that job postings are going to result in a flood of applications, but there must be some way to acknowledge all the folks who made the time to send you their resumes and whatever additional application materials you asked for. Even a form-letter e-mail would be fine—something along the lines of “Thank you for your application. Due to the volume of applications we have received, we will be unable to respond to everyone who applied. If you have not heard from us by [date], you can safely assume we have decided to go with another applicant.”

(2) Potential employers who determine I am lacking experience in some key area
On one level, this is perfectly reasonable. You don’t want to hire somebody who isn’t capable of doing the job you are hiring them for. On another level, if someone otherwise qualifies for the job, wouldn’t that one area in which they lack experience provide you with the perfect opportunity to train them to do the job—minus the bad habits they might have learned doing it elsewhere?

(3) Potential employers who determine that I am “overqualified” for the job
The more I think about this, the more bogus an excuse it seems to be. As I mentioned in another post, certainly you could have determined this from looking at my resume—in which case, why you called me in for the interview is a rather puzzling. Either way, if I’m bringing in knowledge and experience beyond what you consider necessary for the job, wouldn’t that mean you’d be getting a real bargain by hiring me?

(4) Potential employers who post jobs, but don’t mention the name of their company
I don’t know about you, but I like to know who I’m dealing with before I even consider sending someone my personal information. For all I know, the listing could have been posted by a scam artist. Or maybe the job is exactly what I’ve been looking for—but the company isn’t one I’d want to work for, operates in a field I have no interest in, or the commute would be too much. I have no way of determining this if you won’t tell me who you are.

I recently made an exception to my policy of not applying for jobs when I don’t know who the company is, because it would have been something of a dream job for me. I managed to get a phone interview, and, when I mentioned that I almost didn’t apply because the name of the company wasn’t in the ad, I was kind of shocked by the response. The guy running the place didn’t put the name of the company in the ad because he didn’t want to deal with all the applications, especially from the “morons” who clearly didn’t have a clue as to what they were doing (and he’d had some of those anyway). I actually consider myself lucky that I didn’t get called back for an in-person interview (even though I’d been told I’d at least get a callback), not least of all because they amount of money they were offering for the work seemed kind of skimpy.

Consequently, though I know plenty of folks who will praise my talents to the skies, more work is not forthcoming.

Unless something changes—pronto—we have zero—zero—money coming in. We’ve already been unable to pay our property taxes with what’s been coming in (I’ve emptied my HSA and IRA to keep up with taxes and a few other bills so far); within the next week, we will be unable to afford groceries and gasoline, not to mention the outstanding bills remaining after the ones I have just paid.

In what remains of this week, I will expand my job search to include retail and other jobs outside my field. But even this is no guarantee; I did the same thing in 2009-10—with no success.

In the words of Roseanne, “Well, middle class was fun…”

(July 17/18, 2012)