Welcome to the Working Week, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

January 10, 2009 Martha Thomases 16 Comments

Today is the last day of the first full week of 2009.  It’s been revelatory.

Before the New Year, I wasn’t trying very hard to find a new job.  My resume needed work, and I didn’t think anyone would be hiring until after the holidays.  Starting Monday, January 5, I had no excuse.  I had to get serious.

This is so discouraging.

The unemployment rate is the highest it’s been since the early 1940s, when we fought a World War to lower it.  Now, we’ve got two wars going, and unemployment is still going up. We’re going to need a better way to bring it down.

Obama is, in my opinion, saying a lot of the right things.  We need to invest in this country, both to provide jobs and to improve the quality of American lives for the next century.  We need our roads and bridges rebuilt.  We need more schools for students of all ages.  We need renewable energy sources.

This is all well and good, but what’s in it for me?

Here’s the thing.  When I was a girl, I wanted to be a poet, or a cowgirl.  Neither of those career paths was appropriate, either because I lived in the wrong century or lacked the relevant talents, or both.  For a while, I wanted to be crusading leftist attorney, like Zalman King in The Young Lawyers, but then I found out that the law was not just arguing about important political issues but rather a lot of boring, thankless work like writing contracts, and I didn’t want to do that anymore.

My next ambition was to be a writer.  I wanted to put words together in new and exciting ways that revealed new insights into the human soul.  That’s the one that stuck.

For more than 30 years, I’ve been a professional writer.  Luckily, it’s something in demand by all kinds of professions, and gets more valuable as school standards get lower.  I tell stories.  I make people laugh.  Sometimes, I persuade them to see a different point of view.  That’s why they pay me the big bucks.

My resume is full of good things I’ve done, things that entertained the world (writing for magazines like the National Lampoon and Spy) and things that made people think (promoting the Get Set Club with the Ms. Foundation for Women) and things that made people a lot of money (publicizing the death of Superman and his subsequent marriage).  I should be a hot property.

Where is the love?

It’s tough to put yourself on the line, looking for a job.  You have to put on professional clothes that usually involve at least one element that’s uncomfortable (a necktie, for example, or pantyhose).  You have to put a smile on your face and act confident.  You have to pretend you don’t really need the job, but you’re so interested that you’ll make changes to your life to accommodate the needs of your prospective employer.  You have to wave away the suggestion that you might want your nights and weekends for your family or your friends, because you’ll be so wrapped up in your new job that you won’t want to do anything with them anymore.

Unemployment is high, so employers can lowball their offers.  They can hire two people to each work a 60 hour week (no overtime because you’re salaried, and no comp time because that would show you weren’t dedicated to the company) instead of three people to work the more humane (and legal) 40 hours.

Don’t get me wrong.  I want a job.  I want the routine to structure my days.  I want the satisfaction that comes from accomplishing something by working with motivated people.  I want health insurance.

Mostly, I want to be part of this team that Obama’s putting together to make things better.  They don’t seem to want an entertainment publicist, but I could totally make their case to congress.  Who needs lobbyists when you can have the Spin Queen?
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Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, will happily send her resume to any prospective employers who might be reading this.