Archive for the ‘jobs and unemployment’ Category

A pariah speaks

April 29, 2010Jon Brooks Comments Off

From Reddit’s IAmA section:

I am a Bill Collector, ask me anything.

Extracts:

Question:

I’ve had my share of ER bills and more than a few of them have gone unpaid. When the collection agency starts calling, I tried to politely explain that I just couldn’t pay because I didn’t have any money. I have lost my temper on a few occasions, particularly when a debt collector suggested I take out a loan to pay my unpaid medical bills. So my question is this: how much influence do you have over an individual’s credit rating? At what point does the uncollected bill start to effect my credit rating? If I start ranting and raving at you, do you just press a button that says I defaulted or didn’t pay or something like that?

read More »

Post-traumatic unemployment disorder

April 20, 2010Jon Brooks Comments Off

From the blog Tales From the Recently Laid Off:

Confessions of a former unemployed</strong>

Since I’ve been employed now via contract work I’ve been playing in pseudo-employed world. Having a job and feeling self-sufficient has been euphoric, but honestly there’s a post-traumatic unemployment disorder (PTUD) that’s become a part of me. I’ve talked to friends who’ve felt similarly after being laid off. It’s this late-night-in-your-head-never-leaving-nagging-voice that waits for the floor to disappear. When is it going to happen again. When I’m going to be left with nothing. It has nothing to do with the present and all with the past and while I struggle to regain fiscal confidence, I also struggle to regain personal confidence as well.

read More »

The wrong job

April 16, 2010Jon Brooks Comments Off

From the blog Laid Off in NYC, a post about taking a job out of desperation and then regretting it. The Silent Soul-Crusher: UNDERemployment I got a job back in June and since then, kind of fell off the blogging wagon. I thought, hey I’m employed now, it’s all good. Hah! Little did I know [...]

read More »

Good to go

April 16, 2010Jon Brooks Comments Off

Another entry from Reddit’s Ask Me Anything feature. I’ve been fired from 30 different companies and I’m not yet 25 Question: How do you get hired over and over again? Answer: I used to list only the most recent three and lie about the dates in which I was employed. Now, I site my side [...]

read More »

Why so glum?

April 15, 2010Jon Brooks Comments Off

Yesterday we referenced a Floyd Norris column in the New York Times called “Why So Glum? Numbers Point to a Recovery,” which discussed the persistence of gloom in the air despite an improving economic outlook. The American economy appears to be in a cyclical recovery that is gaining strength. Firms have begun to hire and [...]

read More »

Pretend Office

April 12, 2010Jon Brooks 5 Comments »

I guess some freelancers had a little too much time on their hands. From Phil Gyford’s website:

A few times over the past couple of years I’ve discussed with freelancing friends how we miss out on some of the aspects of working in a proper company: the Christmas lunch, the after-work drinks, the fire alarm tests. All that bonding. A couple of us thought that maybe we should start an email list to compensate in some way, although we weren’t quite sure what it would be for. Maybe we’d just send round stupid videos and fail to organise a get-together in December, but it might be fun. So I set up the Pretend Office mailing list with no expectations.

And a weird thing happened.

With no planning, we all started acting as if we were people in a real office. Almost immediately we began to adopt characters and send officious announcements. Soon we were referring to characters in the office who didn’t exist in real life. Meeting rooms were booked, couriers arrived, servers went down, timesheets were requested, and embarrassing emails were accidentally sent to everyone in the company.

read More »

Your dream job visualized

April 9, 2010Jon Brooks Comments Off

From the book How to Keep Your Cool if You Lose Your Job, via Recessionwire, a chart designed to help you visualize your current level of job satisfaction, or desired level if you’re unemployed.

read More »

Laying off the wrong person

April 8, 2010Jon Brooks Comments Off

The head of a management consulting firm writes on his Harvard Business Review blog that companies sometimes lay off relative underperformers simply because nobody understands exactly what they do. When the wrong person is fired, it hurts everyone involved — the person and his or her company. There’s a better way to solve this problem [...]

read More »

Wear your resume

April 8, 2010Jon Brooks 1 Comment »

Sounds like a piece of can-do advice from a job recruiter, but we mean it literally. Now you can print your resume on your tee-shirt. From damnIneedAjob.com: The shirt costs $25 (plus $3 shipping). Add three bucks if outside the continental United States. Upon submission of this form you will be directed to PayPals secure [...]

read More »

Tweaking the ole resume

April 7, 2010Jon Brooks Comments Off

From the LearnVest blog: Making the Most of a Thin Resume. When you’re short on experience, play up your strengths. The Problem: Recession or not, you’re job hunting. Trouble is, aside from some internships and a few part-time gigs, the work experience section of your resume is, well, thin. You know that you could nail [...]

read More »