Then share your misery with the rest of the group.
I am: one as a direct result of the
What? Did you think I was going to write the R-word? You fool, that would summon Voldemort!
and one that is indirect.
Here’s the direct way. Freelance writing work is getting hard to come by. Many of my usual contacts are very skittish about any avoidable expenses, so assignments have been few and far between all this year.
The indirect way is this. For health insurance, I work as a relay operator, mostly for the health insurance, but the money doesn’t hurt. Our company was bought out last year by another, which, being significantly less evil than the previous owners, installed software to block calls coming in from Nigeria and Ghana. This has resulted in an 75-percent drop in call volume, whiich in turn is going to result in our call center layin goff 150 of the 200 operators, which will probably include me, which I wouldn’t care nearly so much about if it weren’t for the drying up of freelance work.
So that’s my
nope, still not gonna write the R word. What, you want Sauron on our asses? Get real!
ach, I’ve been bitching all over this board about job woes. I lost my last one and can’t seem to find anything since, and everywhere I actually get an interview, the interviewers (many of whom obviously have no experience with interviewing) tell me that they got 300+ applicants for one position. Holy motherf***ing christ… with odds like that, how does anyone ever get hired??
My husband’s a freelance writer. He gets his insurance through me, lucky man, so he doesn’t (so far) have to do anything else. His work’s been drying up on him a bit too. Fortunately, we find that’s mostly cyclical and he’ll get some of it back.
I just got my massive 3% raise (for the 400th year in a row), which means I’m not keeping up with inflation, especially considering that my portion of my health care benefits increases every year. My company is outsourcing work to India, which in some weird way actually increased my workload, so I am doing significantly more work. Management makes weekly proclamations about “merging processes” with the other parts of this very large multinational corporation to be more efficient, so we will be getting smaller soon, I expect. I’m not likely to lose my job though. Someone’s got to churn out this stuff.
Things have been slow for a while and keep getting slower. IMO I think this will continue until we strt producing more goods here and stop buying cheap stuff from China.
Gas prices are affecting so many other things down the line.
FWIW, I work in freight forwarding, export. We are incredibly busy. The major ocean carriers are running out of equipment. It’s not unheard of to wait a month for space on a vessel. So, whatever we are producing (or not) there is a heck of a lot of stuff of some sort being exported. Imports, not so much.
I’m already semi-retired so the job situation isn’t really an issue. For me, it’s gas prices. I realize that we pay much less compared to the rest of the world, but it’s still what – 35% more than last year? 30% more than the year before?
Food too – $3.50 for a loaf of bread?
I was surprised though, to hear laid-off workers from Pella Windows in Story City (they closed) say that they haven’t had any problem finding good jobs. Maybe ya’ll should move to Iowa.
Can’t buy a house. Prices are still too high (as people desperately try to get their negative equity back) and affordable loans for lower middle class are nonexistent.
State job–no raise again this year. I’m losing money against inflation.
Can’t switch jobs–the number of applicants per job, as someone mentioned above, is hundreds for each opening.
Can’t save money–the price of essentials keeps increasing at a phenomenal rate.
Can’t earn more money–freelance business is flatlining, for much the reasons as Skald.
Can’t spend less–I’m already living bare bones, eating meatless &c.
No, I’m not at all pessimistic about the future, why do you ask?
I am slowly being hit by the dreaded R word. I know I haven’t even begun to feel the full impact of it yet and I can see it coming this way at full speed.
The cost of transportation just went up by almost 9% and my portion of my health insurance costs went up 16% this year. (By this year I mean 2008.) The cost of everything else is going up as well and I am sure I will be getting my standard 3% raise in June. I am looking to get a new job so I don’t have to stay in the one I have but I don’t dare leave without finding something else first because jobs appear to be getting more and more scarce every day.
It could certainly be a lot worse though. With some very basic sacrifices I am able to keep my standard of living the same for now, though whether I will be able to say the same this time next year remains to be seen.
I’ve tightened my belt about as much as it will tighten. No cable TV, no cell phone bill (I do prepaid.) Next will be doing without things like $12 a month Tivo or gasp $50 a month Internet. I’d like to think I get much more than $50 of value out of the Internet though.
That’s been in the news a lot lately. Basically, the people in India and China are eating more bread and there are fewer wheat farmers producing, but some of the people here (Alberta) who had gotten out of it are getting back into it again now that the price has gone up.
This is the beginning of my fourth week of being unemployed. Not getting any call backs for interviews and burning through my savings as slowly as possible. Yeah, the future looks grim.
Jobs are hard t come by. I’m in one now, but it’s an intern position and I may or may not get hired on at full time. I don’t know if I’ll get hired on. I’m a little bit of a square peg in a round hole. The job isn’t quite for me, but it’ll be hell to find another one out there. My 20 year old car can’t stay together and running good forever. When it goes, I’m about sunk.
Strangely enough, according to my W-2 2007 was my best year ever, income-wise. After only 24 years in foodservice, I finally cracked $20K. (Woo. Hoo.) Of course, a big part of that is that I switched over to the catering/convention side of things, which meant a ton of overtime. Plus a share of the gratuities.
Well. It’s not like I haven’t noticed, but I’m actually pretty lucky. This year my husband and I made enough money, together, to actually owe taxes. And I started investing, which I’m told is a good thing. I am not a stranger to economic suffering, but truthfully… things are really better than they ever have been for us. I was covering my basic expenses just working part-time, am now working full-time and will have money to save for various anticipated expenses, and am expecting a huge promotion and monetary increase within the next few months.
The one thing sucking me dry is the gas prices. I’ve seen all my prices go up, but I commute 2 hours a day roundtrip and it adds up fast. I think there is no better time for me to experience a r… um, economic slowdown. I am not a homeowner, I have excellent medical coverage, and I do not have large amounts of credit card debt or a ton of money invested for retirement. If anything it gives me a tremendous opportunity to observe the hardships people face now and do everything I can to offset those same things happening to me in the future.
In a perverse way, I’m benefitting from more job security than a girl could hope for living and working in Michigan. I work in debt counseling, and by the end of the year will probably be a bankruptcy counselor. You cannot fathom the way our call volume has increased even over the past couple of months. It is staggering. We hire ten new people a month, and we still can’t keep up.
It is really tragic, I was just reading an interesting op-ed piece in the NY Times about how the middle class are beginning to feel the pain that working class folks have always felt. I get a million calls a day from all sorts of people feeling the crunch, losing their homes, watching their credit ratings plummet… it is never, never far from my mind. I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping we stay afloat.
I’d like to think I get much more than $50 of value out of the Internet though.