THE THINGS YOU GOTTA DO

This is the sort of “I never thought I’d see the day” thing that happens to you when you suddenly find yourself unemployed…

The other day, I received a letter from the New York State Department of Labor informing me that I was to report to their offices in downtown Brooklyn for a job-hunting session. By law, I had to attend. If I didn’t, I’d jeopardize my unemployment payments. I went.

Initially, the process seemed as grim as I’d dreaded. After making my way through the metal detectors, I was directed to a small windowless waiting room with walls painted in a queasy, institutional pinkish-beige. About thirty of my fellow Brooklynites sat in school-kid chairs, the kind with desks attached, reading, dozing, fussing with cell phones, chatting. As in a subway car, it was a perfect urban cross-section, a polyglot of people from wildly different walks of life—except all of us had unemployment in common. I was asked if I had brought my résumé (I had) and told to fill out a form. One middle-aged man in a necktie was carefully filling out his using a pen and a bottle of Wite-Out. “EQUAL OPPORTUNITY is THE LAW,” read a sign on a wall. I braced myself for an afternoon wasted in bureaucratic holding-room purgatory.

Maybe 45 minutes later, my name was called. A jovial young fellow introduced himself as Doug, my labor services representative, and led me out of the holding room to his cubicle. It was decorated with framed covers of Beatles and Cyndi Lauper records. Doug explained that his duty was make sure I had all the tools needed to find a job. He was, to my pleasant surprise, knowledgeable, courteous, and authentically helpful. He clued me in to an excellent job-search website, Indeed.com. He informed me that there would be no federal tax on the first $2,400 of my unemployment benefits, and that the Obama Stimulus Plan would cover 65 percent of my COBRA premiums for nine months—facts I hadn’t picked up anywhere else. He said I was welcome to use their resource rooms at any time, and gave me his phone number and e-mail address, and encouraged me to pester him with questions. This government bureaucrat was… doing his job well.

I asked Doug how other people he’d met with had been doing in their searches. It depended on their field, he said. People in fields like mine—journalism—were having a much harder time. But sometimes you learn to make a change. “Take me,” he said. “I studied anthropology, and now I’m here.”

—Lawrence Levi