When I Grow Up (Part 1)

I've been spending the past week in an out of the local Unemployment Offices trying to get job counseling and hoping for some job training bucks (free money!) and let's just say that I've been in two meetings about all of this and I've skewed towards the median in those meetings. There were plenty of people much older than me, a few younger than me, and a few who are probably around the same age. There was one person there, a woman, who was noticeably younger than everyone else (I'd say in her early 30's) and I wanted to ask her what she was doing asking for job training as she looked to young to have her hopes and dreams crushed. From her application form (which I stole a glance at) it looks like she does a lot of Graphic Design and that probably explains that.

Today, I went to the Goodwill Center on Mission because it was also the city's main unemployment office and they have all sorts of computers set up. One of the things you can do there is run through a long, long program that helps you assess just what the hell you should be doing with your life.

Just as I finished (I won't get the results until next Tuesday), a very dignified woman in her late 50's also finished up and asked for help. So I'm thinking, why would somebody that old still need help figuring out what they need to do with their life? Shouldn't they have figured that out by now? I still don't but I'm not that old yet and I'm just a screw up. Her? She looked like she's had it figured out for awhile.

Then I started thinking about just what brought her to the Goodwill Center looking for career help because not only does she apparently need help but she is in the process of looking for this help so she could also do job training.

Remember those great Monster.com ads, the one's with a bunch of kids saying things like "I want to grow up to be in middle management?" Well, they should do that again except have one kid say;

"I want to have a long and successful career only to lose it because a bunch of assholes trash the economy so a bunch of 30 year old VPs use it as an excuse to lay me off because they can hire some 25 year old twerp for a lot less money than I make and also because they 'tweet' and I want to have to wind up in some Goodwill Center in some crappy section of San Francisco having to fill out a bunch of questions about what I want to do with my life because I'm told I have too much experience in my chosen field to be hired by anyone."