The thing about jobs

I'm not one to dwell on tough times, but I can't ignore them either.

Yesterday, after nearly five months searching for full-time employment, I went to a temp agency to drop off my resume. Three girls were working inside the little office, all about my age. Humility is certainly in order when your minimum wage employment depends on the whims of 20-something women who spend the afternoons chatting American Idol and berating tardy workers twice their age over the phone.

I spent at least 30 minutes filling out a plethora of paperwork, of which only one page of was looked at during my interview. In the paperwork, I was asked about frequency of personal drug use (separate questions --with all the slang equivalencies-- for cocaine, marijuana, prescription drugs and don't forget, crystal meth) the likelihood of me roughing up co-workers, the possibility of me committing workers compensation fraud, the chance of me skipping work on a routine basis etc. etc. etc.

When I finished the first eight pages of questionnaires and surveys, I turned them in, only to receive the next battery of exams, this time a poorly disguised ethics quiz. Only somewhat ironically, the ethics test was given via palm pilot glued securely to a giant piece of acrylic plastic so as to discourage stuffing the thing in one's purse. Better proof would be: if you don't return the Palm, you fail the test.

The ethics portion drilled me over drug use, desire to steal and posession of slovenly traits. Again, I never saw the Palm pilot results analyzed, similar to all the other useless data they were attempting to collect on me. If anyone is actually dumb enough to admit to their drug addictions or voilatile tempers on job applications, this agency wouldn't know anyway because they barely take a gander at the paperwork...

The interview for Assistant to the Administrative Assistant (aka warehouse clerk) was brief, if uneventful. After concluding that my experience in other fields, university degree and bilingualism could, hopefully, substitute for the year of clerical work desired by the employer for a position entailing light manual labor, I was ushered into another room for 30 more minutes of--you guessed it-- MORE PAPERWORK.

If anything, the experience was a sad one. That securing employment requires the destruction of no less than 10 trees. That a hiring company would need to inquire about potential employees' drug use, violent character flaws and poor work ethic, and worse yet, expect someone to be stupid enough to answer affirmatively. That the sign-in sheet in the office was full of names and under the column marked "type of work desired" almost everyone had scribbled in all caps, "ANY." That the woman in front of me in line was orally padding her resume, shouting through the window with some desperation, "I once packed boxes for Wilson Farms!"

I am an intelligent, college-educated person. I can't get a job as a receptionist because I'm "over-qualified." Not even the grocery store has called me in for an interview. My mother got laid off last week from her nursing job of 20-some years. 100,000 Americans lost their jobs in just this week alone.

These are hard times and the desperation is palpable.

Tomorrow I have a formal interview to be the Assistant to the Assistant aka Warehouse Clerk. I have mixed feelings about it, but driving 30 miles to pack boxes and count inventory for $12/hour might be about as good as it gets.