If you’re out of work, sometimes it helps to know what you could be missing. From the OddTodd site, home of yesterday’s Laid off cartoon, another regular feature: Friday’s Boss From Hell.

A few sample entries:

Team meeting

Our software team has regular meetings on Tuesdays from 11:00 am to noon. Our boss sends out the agenda about a half hour in advance. Sometimes he’d forget to send it, and sometimes he’d cancel but forget to send the cancellation. We tried to break him of both habits.

That Tuesday, we had a huge deadline. Quite often the meetings get canceled near deadlines — and even when not canceled, the whole staff doesn’t always show up because they’re meeting the deadline. I was working furiously, checking email every five minutes for the agenda. None came, and then I accidentally let 11:00 come and go. At 11:10, I ran to the meeting room. No one was there. I stopped by my boss’s office and said, “I guess the meeting was canceled because we’re on deadline.”

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More photos here

It’s been five months since we visited the web cartoon “Laid Off” by OddTodd. Here’s another installment called “Help Wanted.”

Click on the image to begin.

Laid Off: Help Wanted

Peter Schiff is the president of Euro Pacific Capital, a former adviser to Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, a libertarian financial pundit, and a current candidate for the Connecticut Senate seat held by the retiring Christopher Dodd.

He’s also a bit of a downer, as can be seen in his video blog from last week, in which he says the U.S. is in much worse shape than financially struggling Greece, that our sovereign debt should be downgraded, and that the dollar is due for an inevitable plunge.

Schiff often gets credit for being one of the prognosticators who called the 2008 financial collapse. However, the financial writer Eric Tyson blogged that many of Schiff’s predictions have been wrong, and that his clients have lost money. Schiff has responded to his critics–and there are more than one–in kind.

Last year in The American Spectator, Peter J. Wallison wrote about the political importance of determining causes of the financial crisis that blew up in 2008.

Two narratives seem to be forming to describe the underlying causes of the financial crisis. One, as outlined in a New York Times front-page story on Sunday, December 21, is that President Bush excessively promoted growth in home ownership without sufficiently regulating the banks and other mortgage lenders that made the bad loans. The result was a banking system suffused with junk mortgages, the continuing losses on which are dragging down the banks and the economy. The other narrative is that government policy over many years–particularly the use of the Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to distort the housing credit system– underlies the current crisis. The stakes in the competing narratives are high. The diagnosis determines the prescription. If the Times diagnosis prevails, the prescription is more regulation of the financial system; if instead government policy is to blame, the prescription is to terminate those government policies that distort mortgage lending.

Wallison argues for narrative #2: Fannie/Freddie causation.

There really isn’t any question of which approach is factually correct: right on the front page of the Times edition of December 21 is a chart that shows the growth of home ownership in the United States since 1990. In 1993 it was 63 percent; by the end of the Clinton administration it was 68 percent. The growth in the Bush administration was about 1 percent. The Times itself reported in 1999 that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were under pressure from the Clinton administration to increase lending to minorities and low-income home buyers–a policy that necessarily entailed higher risks. Can there really be a question, other than in the fevered imagination of the Times, where the push to reduce lending standards and boost home ownership came from?

The fact is that neither political party, and no administration, is blameless; the honest answer, as outlined below, is that government policy over many years caused this problem. The regulators, in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, were the enforcers of the reduced lending standards that were essential to the growth in home ownership and the housing bubble.

Last week, Barry Ritholtz, on his financial blog The Big Picture, debunked this notion, citing three main causes outside Fannie/Freddie: extremely low mortgage rates; unregulated subprime lenders, and ratings agency fraud.

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Just cuz you’re out of work doesn’t mean you have to be out of style. That’s the concept behind The Great ReDression, subtitled “Life on the Recession Runway.”

The Great ReDression is written by The ReDressionista, who profiles herself this way:

My father grew up in the Great Depression.

Imaginary job wardrobe

During the Seventies, my mother refused to let the economic crisis limit her designer intake. My mother passed down her thrifted Dior and shopping secrets to me: how to “fix” broken jewelry, how to upholster bar stools with mink coats, how to dress “one size fits all” and how like fine wine, clothes are better when marked “vintage.”

I learned the secrets of extreme shopping on an extreme budget.
After spending three years living in six cities and four countries, I know how to fill closet space with quality clothing on poverty wages. Quality clothing isn’t about brands. Like art, quality clothing is about craftsmanship; well-crafted goods can be found in the sale bin at Goodwill or on a sidewalk at the Vienna flea market.

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Two more from reCareered:

How Job Seekers Can Destroy Networking Goodwill By Cyber-Glomming

The glommer is someone who over-capitalizes your time, who overstays their welcome with you, who just won’t let you talk to others no matter how politely you try to leave.

Instead of building goodwill with you, job seekers who are glommers destroy it.

How likely are you to take the glommer’s call after a networking event? How likely are you to refer the glommer to your friends and contacts? Would you suspect the glommer would also glom onto them?…

The online glommer takes your willingness to help a little (or a lot) too far. An online glommer is someone who friends you on Facebook, and then tries to friend everyone in your company at the same time. You find out about it because 10 of your friends all ask you if you know this person who sent each of them a friend request – within a week’s time span. You can bet that some of those friends will end up asking why you referred that glommer to them.

Linkedin can be a haven for job seeker who are online glommers, and one found me last week…

Read rest of post here…

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From the job search blog reCareered, a list of the top employers hiring this week:

The hospitality, business services, retail, defense, health care, telecommunications, and banking verticals are the top industries currently hiring based on a survey of active job advertisements from the nations’ leading job boards…

Total Job Openings by direct advertisers (recruiters & staffing companies not included):

1. Pizza Hut
2. IBM
3. Blockbuster
4. Sears, Roebuck and Co.
5. U.S. Army
6. HCR ManorCare
7. AT&T
8. JPMorgan Chase
9. Petco
10. Kmart Corporation
11. UnitedHealth Group
12. Amedisys Home Health Services
13. Accenture
14. General Dynamics
15. T-Mobile
16. Raytheon
17. Gentiva Health Services
18. Verizon Wireless
19. Booz Allen
20. Deloitte
21. Snap-on Tools
22. PNC
23. Aflac
24. Genesis Healthcare
25. DaVita
26. Marriott
27. SAIC
28. Wells Fargo
29. Bank of America
30. Centra Healthcare Solutions
31. Hilton Hotels
32. Hgi Healthcare
33. Adventist Health System
34. Combined Insurance
35. RadioShack Sales
36. Fifth Third Bank
37. Kindred Healthcare
38. Aegis Therapies
39. InsphereIS
40. Quest Diagnostics

Full post here.

Who says reality TV shows are out of touch? Miss Pink Slip is a “34-year old formerly unemployed girl in Atlanta,” who writes about reality TV, the Super Bowl, Oscar nominations — pretty much anything in the entertainment world — and finds a way to connect it to the economy.

She poured her slightly snarky analysis this week onto ABC’s The Bachelor, lauding one bachelorette’s choice to choose job security over the guy:

Ali knew she’d rather have job security than her ass in the unemployment line. Can you imagine if she’d stayed and had Jake pick villainess Vienna Girardi in the end? The 25-year old Massachusetts-native would’ve gone nuts and probably knifed Vienna for stealing everything and leaving her a broken shell of a woman.

We all know well that a job is hard to come by. Men? They’re like trains. Just as one’s departing, another one arrives into the station.

If you’re against the health care bill now languishing/on life support in Congress, or the economic stimulus bill passed by Democrats, by all means send us your response to the following. And if it’s reasonably cogent, you’re due some equal time…

But this here Craigslist post, reproduced on Economists Do It With Models, is a pretty good rant in terms of rhetoric, and worth a look-see. It’s been reposted on several different web sites, and I dare say it’s about to go viral, but I haven’t seen it attributed to anyone but the anonymous Craigslist Chicago poster. (Wait a minute! Chicago…who do we know that’s good at debating from Chicago? Hmm…)

Again, opposing views welcome…

Hey you. You there in the Glenn Beck T-shirt headed off to the Tea Party Patriot rally.

Stop shouting for a moment, please, I want to explain to you why you’re so very angry.

You should be angry. You’re getting screwed.

I think you know that. But you don’t seem to know that it doesn’t have to be that way. You can stop it. You can stop it easily because the system that’s screwing you over can only keep screwing you over if you keep demanding that it do so.

So stop demanding that. Stop helping the system screw you over.

Look, you can go back to yelling at me in a minute, but just read this first.

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