Some of us display a lack of empathy — we ask once too often about job prospects, or we introduce our friend to other people by saying, “Gina was a math teacher.” Others of us have empathy, but it’s an empathy out of Jane Austen’s “Emma” — we try to hook up former executives with entry-level jobs, or we invite out-of-work friends to dinner and then order a $120 bottle of wine.
Indeed, even certain words of encouragement can sometimes sound wrong to an ear attuned to a new frequency. Carmen Morales, an Orlando-based stand-up comic who collected unemployment for a year and a half five years ago, said: “People who say ‘Do what you love’ or ‘God has a plan for you’? It’s borderline insulting. Really, it was God’s plan for me to move back with my parents at age 30? I’d like to talk to God about this plan. ’Cause I’m not so sure.”
Ms. Morales said that, in the depths of her joblessness, her friends tendered that most complicated of all offerings, money. “I’m very prideful, so I didn’t take it,” she said. “But I think you should take it, just so people learn not to give their money away. Because once those people are unemployed, I’m not giving the money back! This is not a return on investment.”
The waves have only been made choppier by the fact that the country’s unemployment rate of 7.7 percent has been compounded by various recent and much-publicized examples of supposed early or temporary retirement — hello, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Steven Soderbergh, Leonardo DiCaprio and Pope Benedict. Is the preternaturally tanned gentleman who’s always at the gym at 3 p.m. a casualty of the work force, or has he simply embraced the elasticized waistband lifestyle? What did your friend who was recently let go from Pfizer mean when she said: “Call me! Anytime after 11 a.m. is usually safe.”?
For the last three years, Miki Yamashita juggled her work as an executive assistant at a top investment bank in Los Angeles with her career as an actress. Laid off in January as part of a companywide staff reduction, she decided she had enough savings to pursue acting and writing full time. However, Ms. Yamashita is now bombarded daily by recruiters wanting to place her at another bank. Moreover, she said, “My nonartist friends regularly ask me if I’m pounding the pavement looking for another ‘real’ job.”
Asked what advice she has gleaned from her experience, Ms. Yamashita said, “Don’t assume that, if at his last job your friend was a quality inspector at an anchovy canning facility, that he is combing Monster.com all day long looking for job openings wherever salty fish are jammed into containers. Maybe he wants to sell his burlap afghans on Etsy now.”
Since last summer, the lapses of decorum that are regularly dealt the jobless have been popping up on Gawker.com. The site has been running a series of letters from unemployed people called “Hello From the Underclass.” One correspondent wrote of how, during her online job searches, the targeted ads on her Web browser changed from helpful vocational prompts to diaper ads. Another individual, let go from a nonprofit organization, wrote, “I even had one person tell me that I was in a better position than they were in because I didn’t have to deal with the stress of the office.” It seems that when you live in a world in which friends stop calling you because they think you’re a downer, a world in which potential employers don’t even bother to let you know that the job you interviewed for has been filled, you encounter static in even the most unlikely instances. A former police officer pursuing a master’s degree wrote on Gawker.com: “And you know what doesn’t help? Being told it will get better.”
Henry Alford is a contributing writer to Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of “Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That? A Modern Guide to Manners.” Circa Now appears monthly.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/fashion/tricky-conversations-with-unemployed-acquaintances.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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