job hunting, age discrimination, interviewing

I had a job interview earlier this week that has awakened some old memories and a bit of foreboding as far as this latest job hunt goes. I will get back to it in a moment; first the memory.

The first time I encountered age discrimination was almost thirty years ago when we really did not have a label for it. I was finishing my first BA (in biology) and was thinking about what my next step would be. I considered Med School but was a bit worried because my GPA (grade point average) was only a 3.0 or a B. A low B actually. The Med Schools were big on chemistry at the time. Having received a D in Organic the first time out, I took the class a second time to get a B which gave me an overall C. That, of course, would not have impressed a selection committee. However, that was not the factor which decided me against applying. I realized that I had neither the passion nor the temperament to be a good physician.

However, while I was still considering the possibility, my advisor noted that Med Schools at the time limited the number of people entering who were over the age of 25. I was outraged at the thought that, even if I had the grades to make the cut, I was over the hill at 27. My advisor told me that the committees looked for younger people who would spend 30 or 40 years in the field. And they would simply find someone with similar qualifications who was younger. In other words they would employ the same tactics they had used previously to ensure a limited number of women, blacks, and Jews were admitted.

I don't recall being aware again of any kind of discrimination until a few years ago. That doesn't mean I wasn't discriminated against. Just that I wasn't aware of it. I was interviewing for jobs as a paralegal. It was a long and frustrating job hunt; and I just couldn't seem to get my foot in the door. During the eight months of that job search I put in about three dozen applications and got maybe five interviews. One called me in for a second interview. However the constant refrain was they felt I was 'overqualified.' By this time I had two BA degrees, 2 MA degrees and was almost through with the work for an AA in Paralegal studies. It didn't matter how often I explained that I was changing career directions and had no experience as a Paralegal. It didn't matter how often I noted that my previous academic work would be an asset in what was a new field for me. I was over qualified. I didn't realize then what has become a dirty little not so secret fact that 'over qualified' simply means 'too old.' And I was only 52 at that time.

The interview earlier this week was for a seasonal part-time sales. I never expected to get the 'over qualified' routine in this interview. After all, I got my first sales job after my first Bachelor's and first Master's degrees were under my belt. I got my second such job with 2 Bachelors and 2 Masters degrees on my resume and my third with the addition of the Associates as well. My educational background was never an issue when I applied for sales jobs earlier.

However, this time it was almost the only topic of discussion. The interviewer could not believe I was serious about applying for this job. I didn't expect the job to last forever. I knew it was seasonal and all I expected was something to tide me over for the next couple of months while I kept looking for something permanent. I wonder if they were serious in asking me in for an interview and just wanted to meet this deranged person with all these qualifications who was silly enough to apply for such a piddling job. I think 'over qualified' was mentioned in almost every other sentence. I will say that she was very good. She made it sound so like a complement that I actually thanked her.

The only difference between this last sales job interview and the previous one was four years. I am now 58 instead of 54. And now I find myself in the quandary I have been in so often before. If I apply for jobs my education seems to fit me for I either never hear back or they want work experience I don't have because I was getting educated. If I apply for jobs that require no experience and minimal education I am told I am 'over qualified.' I don't know how to win this game. Does anybody??

fall, job hunting

We finally got our first frost on the roof tops this morning. It did not reach the flowers still blooming in our planter. The fall color is still disappointing. So many of the leaves are shriveled and going brown without showing much color. The wind has taken many leaves off trees.

I am diligently looking through the job boards but find them depressing. So many posts from agencies. I have never found the agencies helpful. In the several times I have tried going through an agency, only one has ever found me a job. By the time that job ran out, the person I started with originally had left and the new person seemed totally uninterested in working with me. I have noticed a large number of ads for either military, civilian with the military or reserve positions. I did that (U.S. Navy) thirty years ago and have no desire to go that route again. If the jobs are not connected to the military or agencies they are temporary, part-time and seasonal. Taking one of those jobs merely saps your energy and time diverting you from looking for something more permanent. I really need to define a new strategy. This is not working. I merely find more of the kinds of jobs that either don't do well, or don't like to do at all.

I almost applied for a seasonal, part time sales job. Two things stopped me. I would have had to agree to allowing the company to do a background check that almost sounded like one I went through in the Navy for a security clearance to handle classified materials. As if that wasn't enough, they also intended to check the applicant's information against some kind of government list. It sounded almost like the terrorist watch list but may not have been. Our government has so many of these watch lists I don't think anyone really knows what is on which list.

The second thing that stopped me was the question at the end. Did I understand the job description and did I want to do the job. Yes, I understood the description. But I really did not want to do that job. I am just panicking because I have about $700 to my name, nothing bringing in any more money, and nothing in the works to bring in any more income. I wonder how many people are out there stuck in jobs they really don't want but the thought of being without an income, however large or small, terrifies them.

reflections on graying hair

I decided to get my hair cut on the spur of the moment the other day. I haven't cut it for so long I can't remember when exactly I cut it, to the amusement of the beautician. It is so thin that keeping it up and out of the way has become a chore. It didn't even braid well. When I took off my sunglasses the tip of the ear piece pulled strands of hair out of the braid or out from under my wigs.

I was surprised, shocked almost at how gray my hair had become. The harsh lights of the salon showed that what I thought were isolated streaks by the bathroom lights at home were much more generalized salt and pepper. I was shocked more that I hadn't noticed the extent of the gray than by fact of the gray.

It may seem strange in a culture that encourages, almost demands, that one cover up the fact of graying hair that I was not bothered the fact that mine was graying. When I started wearing wigs my natural hair was close to the dark auburn I preferred in the wigs I bought. But a short while ago I had already decided to change the color from the dark auburn I have worn for many years to a salt and pepper. I wanted a color that more resembled my natural hair and I knew the auburn no longer did. I was pleasantly surprised to see in the harsh light of the salon that the salt and pepper I had chosen very closely matched my natural hair.

I like to blog-hop and one of my favorite blogs to visit is Time Goes By. Recently the discussion revolved around an e-mail response to what most saw as light hearted answers to the question of what elder bloggers don't do anymore. Most listed those things they stopped doing because they no longer valued doing them, no longer found the activities necessary or interesting, or took up time they wanted to spend on other activities.

I started wearing wigs so I could give up the all too frequent visits to the beauty shop. Especially since there was little that could be done with hair that was baby fine, fragile, given to frizzing at the thought of a perm, and thinning rapidly. With my hair, every day had become a bad hair day. I no longer wanted to spend time setting or curling my hair when it would lose the curl or frizz as soon as I stepped outside the door. I no longer wanted to spend my money on hair care products that simply don't work.

The e-mail evidently thought that the question of what elder bloggers gave up implied that they were withdrawing and losing interest in themselves, their appearance and those around them. Most especially their appearance. I think the correspondent was off base. I didn't give up on my appearance. I gave up on a routine and a mindset which did not work, never worked, and would never work. I no longer have bad hair days and I have more time and money for things I want to spend them on. I don't have to go to the beauty shop as often or spend as much time when I do go. I don't have to spend time setting or styling my hair. And if you add up what I used to spend on hair care products, perms, conditioners, appliances the wigs are vastly more economical.

weather, moods, changes

It has been cool and wet today; the kind of day when I just want to curl up and read, sleep, or watch TV. Instead I checked the job boards, dusted one of my many book cases, and cleaned out my strawberry plants. We brought them in with the cold weather and hope they will thrive inside over winter. Of the other plants we had only the begonias are still outside. Nothing seemed to do well outside this year. Our tomatoes were small and seemed to barely hang on. The rosemary and thyme was drowned by a long and unseasonable period of rain in September. Even the begonias are not as luxuriant as we have come to expect. The weather went between very dry and very wet, unseasonably hot or unseasonably cool.

The weather this year somewhat reflects my moods: generally discontented and adrift with short periods of optimism. I realize that for the last decade I have been looking for something and can't quite define it. Or rather part of it can be defined: I would like a job that pays enough to live on and leaves me enough time and energy to enjoy the life I am working to support. With only a couple of interludes, amounting to about two years, nothing has met that goal. So much of what I have done has paid so little, either because of low wages or few hours, that I couldn't make ends meet. For almost four years I either combined schooling and a job or combined two or more jobs. The schedules left me exhausted, depressed and bitchy as hell.

Another part, and probably not the only other part, is that I have been changing and things that once were important, interesting, or necessary are no longer. Ten years ago I was engaged in trying to write a dissertation and finish a Ph.D. in history. I still like to read history but am no longer interested in academic history. My brief foray into job hunting (about a year) in the history field was disappointing and I realized that the Ph.D. was a means to an end (an academic job.) When the end proved illusory the means became irrelevant. I haven't yet sorted out all the changes.

job hunting again, finally fall

I haven't posted anything lately because the job I started in July wasn't going very well and ended last Friday by mutual agreement. I will miss the money and the people I worked with but not much else. I had never worked in banking or as a teller so it was something new, but from now on it has gone into my "been there, done that, won't do it again" column. It was too fast paced, involved too many details and decisions that had to be made too quickly with the possibility for too many errors. No matter how hard I tried there was always something I missed or an error waiting. They said that mistakes were no problem because they could be corrected. Well (very long well), yes and no. Yes the mistakes could be corrected but too often it took the person who had to find the mistake too long to find and correct it during which that person and I were both off line. Needless to say the customers piled up. And those mistakes the customers found made for some very unhappy customers.

I did learn a number of things during the last three month, which made this a very stressful learning experience. Normally I consider learning experiences good; but, right now I am still unwinding. I did find out that I really, really hate being responsible in any way for other people's money. My accuracy has for the last several years been pretty good. Upwards of 98%. However, there are some jobs where that is simply not good enough. Think about it any way you like, in tellering it simply isn't good enough. If you handle 100 checks a day you will make a mistake of varying severity each day. If you are typing information into the system every 100 characters will include 2 mistakes. No matter how hard I tried I could not develop methods of checking that reduced the mistakes to a reasonable, for the job, level. And the stress of trying to improve simply ensured that I made more mistakes.

So, I am looking for a new job. Unfortunately, everything I see out there is more of what I have seen before: retail and other sales jobs which detest and have been trying to get away from for God only knows how long, medical for which I have no interest, training, experience or temperament, tellering for which I am not at all suited. All of the employment boards (Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, etc.) only provide more of the same. I haven't found one yet that gives me interesting leads.

Oh, well!!! On to a change of topic.

It has been a disappointing fall so far. When I came back east from Colorado many, many years ago, I looked forward to autumns with colors other than aspen gold. I did miss the bronzes, reds, rusts and other colors the trees in the midwest developed when the weather got colder. This year so many went from green to brown to bare in the blink of an eye. The colors that did appear were dim and somewhat washed out. So many trees couldn't decide what to do. Patches were bare while others had some fall color and yet others were still green. It was a pleasant surprise when I went out today to see them finally deciding to change. Perhaps the weather has simply been too warm. Last Friday, Saturday, and Sunday we had high 80s to 90, more suited to July and August than early October. Finally, yesterday we stayed in the 70s and last night dipped into the 40s. I am in a sweatshirt today. The trees seem to be rejoicing and so am I. I have been more than ready for fall.

9/11 reflections, free speech, and miscellany

If it had not been for our 'news' media, I would have given the anniversary of 9/11 barely a thought. Unfortunately, the wall-to-wall maudlin coverage made any kind of amnesia impossible. Don't get me wrong. I will always remember the date and what happened. It is one of the three dates in my life I will always remember what I was doing, where I was, and who was with me at the time. The other dates were JFK's assassination and the Challenger explosion. However, our reactions to the events politically, socially and individually are to my mind....excessive. Yes, I think excessive is exactly the word to describe the responses.

The year after I was working in an office and a young woman I worked with (young enough to have been my daughter) mentioned her fear, engendered and driven by 9/11 that her 3 year old daughter wouldn't have a chance to grow up but would be murdered by terrorists. Why was she so afraid? In this area the child had a better chance of dying in a traffic accident, a house fire, being hit by lightening, or in a flood or tornado than as a result of terrorism. Or by getting shot in a gang cross-fire. Others in the office expressed similar fears. I don't think any of them cared for my observation that the event and the responses to it marked an amazing lack of American backbone. That was putting my bewilderment and disgust rather baldly. However, it does reveal an inability to put the event into some kind of perspective and an inability to make reasonable assessments of risk.

Worse, our current federal government has encouraged this unreasoning attitude. In the name of security and the "War on Terror" we have seen our Constitution shredded, our executive branch deciding that the law is only advisory when it pertains to the executive branch while it is mandatory for everyone else. We have seen our President and his appointed officials and members of his party justify an unreasonable foreign policy, conduct a half-assed war that has cost more American lives that 9/11 itself, and drain our treasury of funds that could be put to much better use at home all in the name of security. I don't know about others but I DO NOT FEEL SAFER. In fact, I feel more threatened by those who claim to be protecting me. They can do anything by simply invoking 9/11 and we have let them get away with it. All we need to be cowed into unthinkingly acquiescing to more inroads on our freedom is a raised threat level or unsubstantiated stories of suspected terror plots.

Watching CNN today, I had an interesting epiphany on matters of free speech. Mainly, how much, as a history professor I knew used to say, it is honored in the breech than in the practice. On the one hand we have those who are protesting Columbia University's invitation to Mahmoud Ahmadinajad, President of Iran, to speak. I, for one, have no desire to hear him speak. I don't know what real power he wields in Iran or how much influence he really has with the religious leaders who seem to be the real architects of Iran's policies. I don't care that he is a 'holocaust denier' and thinks that Israel shouldn't exist. I don't think his opinion is particularly weighty. And I don't see any reason to get into a lather about his speaking to any audience.

We supposedly value free speech until of course it counters our deeply cherished opinions, beliefs or prejudices. Then all hell breaks loose. We have had episodes in our history when certain beliefs could not be published. The Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 18th century made it a crime to publish anything critical of the President and most officials of the federal government. The glaring exception was the Vice President, at the time one Thomas Jefferson who was on the outs with President Adams and most of his administration. In the South and many border states before 1860, any one who spoke or wrote against slavery risked their lives and in some cases lost those lives. During a large part of the 20th century the surest way to scuttle unpleasant ideas was to tar their proponents with the brush of 'Communism."

We have a long history of dealing with unpleasant people and ideas by innuendo, slur, insult. It is far easier, as so many of our so-called pundits have found, to use insult instead of intelligence, aggressive banter instead of argument, attack the person instead of the idea. If you don't like proposals for reforming medical care and its funding, all you have to do is raise the specter of 'socialized medicine.' And you don't even have to justify the label or present a coherent argument. If you don't like a foreign regime or leader all you have to do is charge that they support terrorism. The beauty of this tactic is you don't even have to specify the brand of terrorist or provide evidence. A terrorist, after all, is a terrorist, is a terrorist.

seasons, work, weather, projects

It has been almost three weeks since I have last put anything on this. I have been too frustrated, angry and depressed to write anything. In my last entry I thought I had turned a corner at work and was getting adjusted. But the last two weeks had me wondering if I was ever going to get to such a point. I could not even seem to handle the basics. Made too many mistakes and cost the others too much time correcting them. And they were mistakes I should have been past more than a month ago. I had a long talk with my supervisor and she made some suggestions I hope work out. I must change the mechanics, the routine I have been using. I am going to give it a try. It seems to have worked the last two days.

I finished my sister-in-law's quilt two weeks ago. I just haven't downloaded the pictures yet or I would have them on here. I still haven't given it to her. We seem to miss each other. I have moved my mother's great-grandmother's jacket to the front burner. Hope to finish it before the end of the year. I have four figures to finish and then I have to applique them onto the jacket.

I can already feel the change of seasons and see it in the trees. A few are beginning to turn color and others are getting that rusty tinge to the green as it mixes with orange, red, or yellow. However, the rain we have had lately and the high humidity is unsettling. It is almost a spring pattern and it doesn't fit with the sudden heat induced thunderstorms of summer. I hope it gets drier before snow comes or we will be buried.