After all the buildup from the other day, everyone has no doubt been hanging out on my site, refreshing the page every five seconds, waiting for my next post. How do I know? Because I’m watching… always, thanks to Google Analytics and an abundance of free time. Think of me like Big Unemployed Brother, who, [...]
Category Archives: Recession
The recession is over, but high unemployment remains
Friday, September 18, 2009
The Great Recession is over. At least that’s what everyone keeps telling me. The S&P 500 gained 15.2% from April to June for its best quarter since the fourth quarter of 1998. Retail sales rose 2.7% in August. Existing home sales rose 7.2% in July from a year earlier, to a two-year high. Happy days [...]
It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game
Saturday, September 12, 2009
My employer and I parted ways last October. I wasn’t blind-sided or steamrolled by the layoff, but the hit really cleaned my clock and rung my bell. The incident was unfortunate, though inevitable. With the failing economy, the company wasn’t getting the job done on either side of the ball. They were in search of [...]
Does one little unemployment blogger even stand a chance?
Friday, July 10, 2009
People lose their jobs everyday. It happens in good economic times and bad, in every city and town across the country. My day was eight months ago. Someone else’s was four months later or last week. Believe it or not someone was also hired on each of those days, maybe even at the exact moment [...]
Opening a store… the solution to my unemployment woes
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
The Great Recession is stopping me and millions of people from finding a job. We’ve all seen the unemployment numbers, and they aren’t good. But this doesn’t seem to be keeping entrepreneurial types from opening stores in Jackson Heights. Every time one closes – which seems to be often – another pops up within a [...]
The curse of unemployment
Friday, July 3, 2009
Looking for a job is sort of an all-or-nothing deal. Either you find one, or you don’t. I haven’t, for seven months. There’s some comfort to be had in knowing that the job market stinks. Companies continue to layoff employees, and those hiring receive millions of resumes, even for that freelance position scraping burnt gunk [...]
Recession Survival Fair – June 6
Friday, June 5, 2009
Unemployment doesn’t leave me huge amounts of free time. On the contrary, I tend to stay pretty damn busy. Even days with light schedules tend to fill up quickly with other activities that had been pushed down the to-do list. While I’ve been bored often – job sites don’t make for interesting reading – I [...]
Jobless and less and more, but also less
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
I wrote the following post for The Wall Street Journal blog “Laid Off And Looking” a little while back…
Getting Help After Multiple Layoffs
The piece discussed the Obama administration’s policy in Iraq and Afghanistan and the political and social repercussions in a nation fighting many battles at home and abroad. Or maybe it explored ways to [...]
Take my wife… but have her back by next week
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
I received a pretty awesome email last week… so awesome that I immediately forwarded it to wifey with the message, “I’ll file this under WTF.” She fainted from excitement; it seems this email marked the first step in fulfilling a lifelong dream. Her coworkers brought her back to consciousness with Ethel Merman tunes and smelling [...]
Layoff and the apartment that never was
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Wifey told me one evening last week that someone bought our apartment. She was scrolling through a real estate agent’s website while awaiting her next turn at Lexulous. I was sitting at the dining room table a few feet away, probably screwing around with Twitter. I asked what she was talking about, as I am [...]