I pit people who think they are too good to work!

The BBQ Pit
1

I was listening to a story about bankruptcy on NPR a few days ago, and they were using as this one family as an example of a typical American family who gets into trouble. I was with them until they stated that the husband was out of work for a year. No other information. This has been gnawing at me. A YEAR? The story was presented in a way in which we the listeners were meant to feel sorry for these people for having run up $40,000 in credit card bills that they can’t pay back, it seems. I need more info. How the heck can anyone be out of work a whole year? Are there places in America where you can’t get at least a fast food job or deliver the newspaper? Was he staying at home to provide child care because there was no job that paid as much as that would have cost? I could see that, but they didn’t say it in the story. I was left with the impression of someone who had lost a good job and didn’t want to take anything he considered beneath him, even if he went over his head in debt.

I haven’t been without SOME kind of job for more than two weeks since I was sixteen years old. If I have rent to make or bills to pay, I will by god be out there flipping burgers or shoveling out stables or whatever I can damned well get, so long as I have the health to manage it. The idea of somebody sitting around and living off unemployment and credit that they write off later for a year while they look for a job that is good enough for their lily-white hands and over-inflated egos pisses me off. Bring back the debtor’s prison for these people, I say. :mad:

2

I’ve lived in a place where I competed with PhDs for entry level clerical work and where there was a wait list to start work telemarketing. Took a while to get a job there. Then we moved to a place where I walked in the door of the temp agency the second day we were in town and they’d me called back with a position before I could make it back from the interview to our accommodation. I’ve seen great job markets and really crappy job markets and yes, there are really crappy job markets out there. I’ve watched Dad work for less than welfare paid because someone got him a job and how could he turn it down, even though it was working with chemicals that made his sensitive skin peel horribly and left him depressed and in pain.

A burger job is a job, yes, but if someone is established in a career-job type lifestyle with a family to support, settling for a burger job is still going to turn their world upside down. Plus there’s the whole thing about applying for entry level food on the table jobs only to be turned down as overqualified. Without a good bit more information about this man and his family’s situation, I’m afraid I’m just not able to get with your pitting here. Maybe he’s a lazy SOB, maybe he’s had terrible luck. I dunno. I don’t really care to pass judgment. Now that I’m stable and established (for the moment! We had layoffs last year so you never know) all I can think is there but for the grace of fortune go I.

3

Well, I don’t have any more details on this man’s story than you do, so let’s postulate. I will use “you” in the universal sense in this example, because not everyone has your commendable work ethic.

If you worked your ass off to get a university degree or two, that would allow you to work in a highly specialized field and get paid lots of money, and you were downsized, wouldn’t you feel that working for $5/hr at McDonald’s or bagging groceries was incredibly beneath you? Wouldn’t you be right? Wouldn’t you be trying like mad to get more work in your same field of expertise, or a related one? I’m just trying to provide an example of someone’s mindset. Some people do strive to get to a place in life where low-paying drudgery is something other people do. It doesn’t make him any better or worse than anybody else. He’s perfectly qualified to do something far out of the realm of the common worker and can’t bring himself to go there.

However, I’m not defending him. Going $40,000 in debt on your credit card is an unbelievably stupid thing to do. I have no sympathy for anybody who is that irresponsible.

4

Looking for work is a full time job. It’s not like this guy knew in advance he was going to be out of work for a year - so perhaps he was looking for all this time. You don’t know how many resumes he sent out or how many interviews he went to.

As for the credit card debt - I’d be interested in knowing what it consisted of. Expensive dinners are one thing - medical bills quite another.

5

Look, I am not pitting this guy specifically. If you read my OP, you will see that I also said ‘I need more information’. All I am saying is that the story was badly presented, and I know there ARE people who think they are too good to work menial jobs, and I pit them. I don’t give a flying fig about how hard they worked for their degrees and so on. Living off welfare and racking up credit card bills that you don’t pay back is oh-so-horrible when poor black people do it because they don’t want to work. I fail to see a difference when it’s someone white and middle class. If you can’t find any kind of work, fine. If the only work you can get pays less than it would cost you to take it, because you are providing child care or something, fine. If you think the world owes you a living because you are special, I pit thee to the sloths circle of Hell.

6

My dad was without a salaried job for a year once (he did work one job that paid commission, but satellite dishes–those big ones in the 80’s–were not huge sellers and he wasn’t making much). Dad is a hard worker, and he looked for other work, often. We did have to go on food stamps (hard on my dad’s pride, but his pride was less important to him than we were). In that time, he was forced to turn down two or three fast food jobs. Not because they were beneath him–but because taking those jobs would have cut our benefits and actually put us deeper in the hole than we already were.

After all the weeks and months spent looking for jobs, he vowed he’d never again automatically assume that any man who didn’t have a job simply didn’t want one.

7

Not to mention incredibly beneath your ability to pay off the debt incurred from that much education?

I dunno. How much of it was unpaid student loan debt?

8

It’s the credit availability that got that family into trouble. If they didn’t have the cards to fall back on (stupid as it was), chances are he would have taken any one of those crummy jobs.

It’s a catch 22 – “I won’t be out of work forever, and I’ll be able to pay off this debt – but I have to get a good job in order to do that.”

My youngest son maxed out his cards while he was trying to make a go of it in Arizona a few years back. Used them to pay moving expenses, car payments, and rent while he was looking for work and between jobs. He’ll be paying on those forever. Doesn’t take long to spend 40K if that’s what the family was doing.

9

Have you ever actually applied for a job flipping burgers or shovelling stables when your resume shows warehouse management or computer programming?

How long will you be with us, Frank?
Absolutely not a minute longer than I have to be.

Not even when one is collecting unemployment is one required to take a job far below ones qualifications, and there is good reason for that. Pride is not the good reason.

10

I was out of work for six months immediately after graduating college. Nobody on earth was more interseted in finding a job than me, I must have sent out thousands of resumes, but I was in a crappy college town with a glut of cheap labor and almost no industry outside of the service sector. After I found a job, it was a minimum wage service job and at one point I was working three of those to keep my head out of the water. Anyway, I eventually moved and after moving I was getting great jobs left and right. Living in a thriving area can make a huge difference.

However, I join you on your pit. I have a friend who has been whittling away a hefty but still limited inhertence (think around 100k) for years. Instead of using that money as a downpayment on a house, or to make a movie (his dream) or take one helluva trip around the world, he’s been pissing it away on (expensive big city) rent and crap like sodas- for years on end. He’ll tell you he is living cheaply, but he doesn’t seem to take any special budget measures. Yeah, it’s good not to be buying big screen TVs left and right. But it’s also good not to spend your weekends at expensive city bars and specialty grocery stores. He’ll tell you he is looking for a job, but often that means “I surfed around Craig’s List for an hour and gave up.” I even told him my secret job-getting advice (which, when followed, netted me three offers and my boyfriend five offers by the end of a week). He’s still yet to give it a shot.

But, oh, yeah, he’s trying. He doesn’t understand that it takes more than applying to the one or two jobs that appeal to you most, and then waiting for a month until you are sure that you havn’t heard back from them and then getting mopey about it
. It takes more than showing up at a job fair for an hour without a tie on. It takes more than moaning “I should get a job” to make it happen.

He also doesn’t seem to understand the idea of the career ladder. He’s contantly saying “Oh, I applied for a job doing XYZ, but I’m not really sure if I want to work night shift…” He only applies to the jobs that appeal to him the most, and often these are out of his range because he actually has nearly nothing on his resume (he worked one minimum wage job for a while, but left on bad terms). He doesn’t understand that you have to work a crappy job to get a good one, and it’s not personal rejection when he doesn’t get hired for the Dream Jobs, it’s the fact that they have know way to know shit-all about him or his work ethic. And that there are great things to learn and get on your resume from even the crappiest jobs. He’s said he “shouldn’t have to” work retail or low-level clerical jobs. Uh-huh.

Anyway, here is the kicker. He finally got a temp job in his dream field as a production assistant on a film shoot. He went to film school and knows that PA is a shitty job but also everyone’s first step into the film industry.

So he does nothing but bitch. He got put on nightwatch for a few night, which he feels he “shouldn’t have to do” (uh, who does he think will do it then? The DP?) and (this is amazing) his mom is “totally outraged”. And he’s telling this to his friends, that have been doing stuff like working on the docks in Oakland for years to pay the rent. He’s upset that he’s “not learning much” and “would like to get out of PA work” because it “doesn’t pay well”. He said he tries to do a “good job” though and not complain too much because everyone on the production is stressed. He doesn’t understand the concept of doing a good job because he’s getting $100 a day and a per diem and he signed up to do a, you know, job. On and on he’ll go about his "mixed experience’ and how “disappointed” he is and it’s like STFU it’s work not summercamp and you havn’t worked in two years and you have a chance any one of us would love to have and I have to go to my shitty as job shuffling paperwork for some crappy company in a field I couldn’t care less about tomorrow.

It just makes me sad because he’s a good friend and a few years from now it’s gonna hit him as “goddamn, that was a helluva lot of money. I could have used that to improve my life any number of ways, and I could have done something amazing with it and really used it to improve my life and give myself chances that most people never get. But instead I chose to spend it to allow me to spend my early twenties moping in my room eating overpriced gourmet frozen pizzas and moaning “I need to get a life”. And now I’m thirty years old and I’ve never had a real job and I’m going to have to move to Daly City and work at Taco Bell because I’ve finally run myself in to the ground
.”

11

My First Pitting! :smiley:

(indirectly, that I know of)

12

Credit availability combined with the willingness of Congress to knuckle under to the credit card lobbyists and change how credit card debt is treated under bankruptcy law. Classic example of an industry taking no responsibility for its own practices.

13

It’s not the credit availability that got him into trouble, it’s his inability to control his spending that got him into trouble.

I was unemployed for two years. 24 months almost exactly to the day. During that time we averaged $32,000 a year in living expenses INCLUDING mortgage. That for two adults, a 12 year old and a 4 year old (at the time).

Unemployment benefits were provided to me for 13 weeks out of that 2 year priod totalling around $3,000.

So we consumed $29,000 per year including mortgage.

We could have reduced that amount, but we chose to keep some of our little enjoyments (I smoke, but don’t drink and have lunch once a week with friends) so we could have reduced that by a couple of grand a year.

During that two year period I applied (on average) for around 5-8 jobs per week. During the period of paid unemployment I was required (by law) to apply for on average 1 job a day over each 2 week period during the 13 weeks. So all in all I applied for around 500 jobs.

I still have 124 cover letters in a folder on my PC. Some of them reused as the job I was applying for was essentially the same role, but in different companies. Each one was personalised, but I didn’t keep those that were too long in the past.

During that time I interviewed maybe a dozen times. 3 or 4 times for 2nd interviews. I finally landed a job nearly 12 months ago. Interestingly for a job I applied for some 12 months previously which fell through, but when a new opportunity came up they called me back for a 3rd interview which I nailed.

What did I apply for? Mainly things in the IT industry. 20 years of experience and significant achievements meant that I could cover almost any management position with the exception of architecture. If needed I could cut code in a couple of languages, run your testing, execute your testing, run your project or programs of work, work with your business as a BA, etc, etc.

What else did I apply for? Bank tellers, trainers (I am also a certified Workplace Trainer and Assesser), any office drudgery, or things in the office space. I am not capable of working as a labourer as essentially I am unfit for sustained heavy work, but I did apply for gardeners and outside workers although I was hoping I wouldn’t get any callbacks.

I asked about burger flippers and bagboys, but was basically told, too expensive. In Australia they would have to pay an adult wage whereas if you’re under 18, you get a different wage structure, so most of those jobs are retained by the young and us older people don’t get a look in.

How many people were interested in a 40ish year old man, who has a wealth of experience in IT but is willing to do other types of work? None. Not a single callback came for any role OTHER than senior IT.

So, certainly in the area I live, it was very possible to go for a significant period of time without being employed.

We were lucky in that we had savings and we were able to live for 2 years without having to resort to credit, but we were damned lucky to have planned for such occassions.

Someone without savings would have severely struggled. Those mentioned in the OP maybe should have struggled a little bit more rather than spend $40K on credit. Maybe (as someone else mentioned) they thought they’d be back in full employment in time to pay off the debt.

I don’t believe they should be able to bankrupt it all, but once employed again, should be required to pay it back. Why should the credit companies suffer because these people didn’t struggle hard enough?

14

Well?! :wink:

15

That’s very nice for you, but many folks are already locked into mortgage/property tax situations/car loans/prior credit debt that involve considerably higher living expenses than that. How soon do they have to give up their homes and/or cars after losing a job to satisfy you?

Taking a job at minimum wage probably means that you a) lose your Unemployment and b) earn less than Unemployment paid. PLUS it takes away precious daytime hours when you could be most effectively job hunting. Not even taking into account what several posters have mentioned - that minimum wage jobs are unlikely to be offered to a well-educated adult who obviously will be gone as soon as he or she gets a job in his or her professional field.

Yes, I suppose there are a few professionals who would refuse to take a service job, but I think most people in that situation simply can’t afford to take one, even assuming they could get it. The working poor in the U.S. (and that certainly includes anyone on a minimum wage job!) have it even worse than the ultra-poor, because their jobs, pathetically though they may pay, disqualify them for assistance that would potentially be available. This is not a good country in which to be badly off - there are a lot of people who seem to consider it a moral failing or something.

16

No. The day I feel that honest work of any kind is “beneath” me is the day I hope someone comes along to put me out of my snobbish misery.

17

Ah, but what do you do if you have no other way to cover your bills? I went into credit card debt (not 40K, it was just me, after all) when I was basically unemployed* for almost a year and a half. It was the first time since I was 16 that I wasn’t working full time. I even worked full time during summers starting when I was 13.

Took me a year and a half of living like a monk after I DID find a good job to pay it off. There comes a time when you have to decide, “Self, do I want to pay off what I can for damn near the rest of my life, or just work out a bare-minimum schedule to get it all paid off as soon as humanly possible?”.

-Joe, has sympathy

*whatever odd jobs, under the table jobs, and temp work I could find

18

Well, when they can no longer afford them is a good start. When I couldn’t find work, I moved out of my already-falling down shack in to a slumlord apartment in a bad part of town with a stranger. It sucked. But saving even $100 a month on rent means a lot- you can get by on $100 a month for food. A bag of rice and a bag of beans costs $20.00 at Costco and have 3,000 servings. Potatoes can be found at a buck for ten pounds. I just thought back to my great grandma, who learned 1,000 ways to cook cabbage during the great depression. I had to stop buying my buspass and minimize travel to save on the $2.00 bus trips. Even if you are locked in on car payments, not driving can save hundreds of insurance, repairs and gas. Most of our ancestors gave up their homes, their families, their world’s to come to here in hopes that they could find a better job. Why should any one of us be too good to make sacrifices to make o ur lives better.

It was hard times. I lost weight. I got depressed. I did a lot of crappy, sketchy things to make money. Ever been stuck in an empty hotel on Christmas day? There are some previous pit posts that attest to how fucking grumpy I was (and I admit I was an ass about it back then and I should have handled things differently)- and I wasn’t even flat broke, I was trying not to eat in to a small inherence I had because I knew I could make that money work for me instead of spending it within a year on living expenses while I was broke.

The point is, I worked pretty darn hard to make sure going broke was a temporary situation. I thank god every day that I did, because now I am joining the Peace Corps, something you can’t do with significant debt. That time period could have ruined my life, but now it’s all just a bad dream…

19

I think you do need more information. They could have been living in a far outlying suburban area, and thus be isolated from job markets. They could be in a depressed rural area. They could have lost their means of transportation, which extremely limits your job prospects.

I’ve been out of work and had employers tell me that they would not even interview me for jobs for which I was over-qualified because they felt I would quit as soon as I found something better. How the hell are you supposed to support yourself in the meantime? Luckily I have skills that temp agencies can use, and I live in a city and have a car.

20

THIRTY SEVEN???!!?!?!

-Joe, so going to hell…