The cartoon below comes from renowned illustrator and Breadline friend Ross MacDonald. “I did this for Kiplinger’s, the personal-finance magazine, in 2001,” Ross says. “Back when I did it I was being over-the-top ironic, but now it reads as practical advice.”
Illustration © 2001 Ross MacDonald
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
Schiffman, of Charleston, South Carolina, was an IT executive at the Tokyo office of Lehman Brothers. He says he voluntarily resigned his job in January 2008 “under the assumption that it was time to come home, and that finding another job in finance back in the U.S. would be a far simpler and less stressful process that it has proven to be.” He has been unemployed ever since his return to America.
How do you cope with getting up every morning? What motivates you?
What motivates me to get up in the morning? Often my wife, more recently my dog, Akira, and occasionally, nothing. My wife and I are fortunate in that we have a home, a car, and savings. Our anxieties do not stem from the day-to-day survival issues that many less fortunate are forced to face, but from the feeling that life has irrevocably changed.
How do you cope with getting to sleep at night–or getting any sleep, period?
Going to sleep is a complicated proposition. I’ve become accustomed to waking up at 2 a.m. to keep a watchful eye on my ceiling until 4:00 or 5:00, when the action up there usually subsides.
Give an example of the sorts of changes or cutbacks you’ve had to make in the way you live your life.
After years of working in software-engineering management, I am trying to climb back into the trenches and have been spending my time programming and learning about off-line video editing. The double-whammy of the culture shock of returning to the U.S. after having lived overseas for the past ten years, and to the worst recession since the fall of the Roman Empire, continues to be overwhelming.
Share with us some of your recession gallows humor.
My wife and I joke that once we have watched every syndicated rerun of Law & Order, our lives will lose the only purpose or meaning it currently has.
What, if anything, gives you hope that the future holds better things?
Since my background has been more involved in finance than many, I’m often asked of my opinion of prospects for the short- and medium-term U.S. economic future. Although I believe that much of the “stimulus plan” is a measure of triage to prevent rioting and that we are simply only slightly slowing a locomotive that is still going to reach the same unwanted destination, I try to remain optimistic and generally repeat the slight less gloomy predictions of television spokespeople. There are moments when the “We’re all in this together” Titanic-like sense of camaraderie is warming, until I consider the real implications–that my profession and probably my lifestyle of the past ten years will no longer exist as I knew it.
It’s a truism that in hard times people seek out movies as diversions from their despair—musicals, comedies, romances. In the weeks since I lost my job, I’ve been getting into the apocalypse. It wasn’t a conscious decision. The first book I read after getting laid off, Cormac McCarthy’s soul-crushing The Road, I picked up only at a friend’s insistence, and it just took off from there. But I suppose there’s some succor in reminding myself that my situation could be a lot worse.
Take the characters in Five—the first-ever post-atomic-disaster movie, made in 1951. A pregnant woman emerges from an X-ray chamber in a California hospital to discover a nuclear attack has apparently wiped out everybody on Earth except her unborn child and three men, one of whom—a shifty misanthrope with an intimidating accent—wants to repopulate the planet his way. Or 1962’s Panic in Year Zero!, in which mild-mannered Ray Milland becomes a thieving survivalist who barks orders at his family after America’s biggest cities are leveled. Or the three adaptations of the novel I Am Legend—1964’s The Last Man on Earth, with Vincent Price, 1971’s The Omega Man, with Charlton Heston, and the 2007 version with Will Smith—whose cheesiness can’t quite undermine the horror of a world where a man-made virus has nearly eradicated humanity and vampiric survivors rule the night.
The Netflix discs come and go daily. I’m looking forward to revisiting the Doomsday movies of my youth: The Road Warrior, especially, and maybe even The Day After. I could always watch La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys again. I hear the TV series Jericho was pretty good. And even my two-year-old can watch WALL*E with me. Who knew the End Times could be so life-affirming?
—Lawrence Levi
When I decided to set up a recession-themed blog, “The Breadline” was the very first title that popped in my head. For once in my life, I thought I’d go with my gut rather than agonize over coming up with something cleverer. So I went online and discovered that the domain name thebreadline.com, with no hyphen, was available for sale via BuyDomains.com, a subsidiary of a company called NameMedia, Inc., in Waltham, Massachusetts. I left a message with BuyDomains announcing my interest in purchasing thebreadline.com.
Very quickly, I was contacted by a nice woman from BuyDomains.com named Maureen who told me that the address could be mine for the peculiarly specific price of $3,188—more than ten times what I was prepared to pay, and an especially ridiculous sum for a cash-strapped blog about cash-strapped people. I asked if this price was at all negotiable—into, say, the realm of the sane. Maureen politely explained that these numbers aren’t randomly picked out of a hat, but based on a carefully calibrated set of valuating factors and algorithms. The fact that “the breadline” is a familiar figure of speech, and that the domain I wanted is a dot com rather than a less desirous dot net or dot tv, meant that I was firmly in four-digit territory. The best Maureen could do, and only if I acted fast, was $2,500. In no way was that going to happen.
But I was stubborn in my wish to stick to the site name The Breadline, some way or other. I subsequently learned that the less typographically mellifluous the-breadline.com was available for a tiny fraction of its fancier, unhyphenated sibling. So, in the spirit of recession and tight budgets, the-breadline.com it is. Meanwhile, we eagerly await a super-fancy, Flash-enabled, widget-encrusted site called thebreadline.com, hyphen-free and bankrolled by a prosperous multinational corporation.
—David Kamp
Tapan, of New York City, was the online managing editor of National Geographic Green Guide. She was laid off last December.
How do you cope with getting up every morning? What motivates you?
My two-year-old is what enables me to get out of bed every morning. Actually, she sort of requires that I get up every morning–so I hardly feel like I have much of a choice. If I did, I’d probably opt to stay in pajamas and watch bad television all day, sulking about how I used to be a hot employable commodity, and now I’m just an unemployed wannabe yogi.
How do you cope with getting to sleep at night–or getting any sleep, period?
In a word: Ambien. It’s not pretty but it helps. Sure, I’m concerned about addiction and dependency–but I believe in short-term relief, and know that I’d be a far more miserable person if I wasn’t getting my zzzzs every night.
Give an example of the sorts of changes or cutbacks you’ve had to make in the way you live your life.
We’ve given up our coveted Manhattan parking space, our twice-monthly cleaning lady, and have reduced our daughter’s day care to twice a week. But surprisingly, there haven’t been quite as many changes as I originally thought. It’s funny how you always manage to survive with what you have.
Share with us some of your recession gallows humor.
A good friend suggested that I refer to this as funemployment, which is my favorite thing to say to people who look upon me with pity-filled eyes. I often say that I believed in the whole “everything happens for a reason” line until this unfortunate thing happened to me. (I guess that’s not funny per se, but sometimes the sarcasm makes people laugh.)
What, if anything, gives you hope that the future holds better things?
Obama gives me hope. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t see him as a messiah or able to do the impossible, but I just think that if anyone else was in office during this shitstorm, I’d be in much worse shape. At least now there’s legitimate reason to think the future might actually get better.
