- You are middle-aged, homeless and broke.
- ???
- You buy business cards and a pre-paid cellphone.
- Success!
Please fill in step #2.
Jackson has a homeless shelter, Matt’s House, where homeless women can live teporarily. It’s my understanding that this address can be used on job applications.
I don’t think a telephone number is crucial on a job application at a burger joint. There are still people in this state who don’t have a telephone, yet have jobs. It’s a plus to have one, but not a deal-breaker if you don’t.
Honestly I would probably find the nearest homeless shelter and live there for a while. I would put my resume on headhunter sites like monster.com with the shelter or a local hotel as my address and see if I could use the shelter’s line for my phone number. If not I would find a number off of a payphone and use that. I would also fill out applications for every single McDonalds/BK/Wendy’s etc in walking distance of the shelter. I have lots of customer service experience and I used to manage a Pizza Hut in college so I have no doubt that with that experience and my sparkling personality I could find a minimum wage job within a month or so that would allow me to work evenings and weekends. I would then take that paycheck and rent a room from someone and get a cheap cell phone plan so that I could have a phone number of my own, update my online resume and pound the pavement until I found a better job. Then I would try my best to climb the ladder within that company to get back to where I am now. This would be a long range thing though and would take at least a year to get me to a point where I was earning a decent enough paycheck to get my own place again.
Are we assuming all my friends have been wiped out by the plague? Because even if you take my family away, I’d have at least half a dozen friends who would let me use their address for a job application.
Homeless, broke, *friendless *and without family, and I’d probably just jump off a bridge. I’m not opposed to suicide, and that sounds like a situation I’d just not want to deal with.
WhyNot’s answer was pretty close to what I was thinking. I’d probably off myself.
There is PADS, but I don’t know if I’d have the wherewithal to make the effort.
In this scenario, do I still have three sons? If I do, and I’m 50, then they’re all grown up. Me at their doors: “Hi, honey! Remember that time I carried you for 9 months, and then I gave birth to you, and then I fed and sheltered you for 18 years?”
I have started over from nothing several times in my life, and if worse came to worse I know that I could handle living in a shelter and starting all over. It would truly suck, but I could do it.
Could you elaborate on what you did to start over?
Well, regardless of whether I’m staying with friends, family, or in a shelter (all perfectly doable), my first step would be to get a job, any job. That would be next to impossible to do living on the street, so I would make housing my first priority. With my basic needs taken care of, I’d next go to the government and see what social programs I qualified for. I figure at the very least I’d be a “displaced homemaker”, and whaddya know, Tucson actually has a program for that! I’d sign up with them, and maybe for some food stamps and/or AHCCCS (Arizona’s equivalent of Medicaid), and just by being in those programs I’d qualify for help with housing, transportation, and maybe even job training (which I may or may not accept- I already have a good skill). I’d jump through their hoops, and I’d say within a year at most I’d be in a home of my own (no doubt rented, though) and soon have at least as much as I do now.
I know that most cities still have day labor agencies. You show up at 6am (earlier the better) ready for work. Its physical labor. They send you out and hand you a paycheck at the end of the day - often they pay in cash. I know a guy who worked like that for a few months when he was broke, unemployed and nearly homeless (living on the couches of friends). Eventually, he had enough cash to rent a room, then with an address got a job that paid better and onto his feet.
I wouldn’t WANT to do it, but if you are assuming all my resources have gone up in a puff of smoke and I’m finding the best spot under the bridge to sleep in - I would.
If I were homeless, I’d look very hard for a night job. You can sleep on a college campus during the day pretty easy. In fact, I’m fairly certain at least one student I knew in college was homeless - took one classes, slept at school, used the schools gym for showering, and worked evenings as a security guard.
All this emphasis on having a valid address.
The only thing my corporate employer sends to my home address is bulk mail from my benefits company and related junk. Get a PO Box for $18 a year and that’s all covered.
Just lie on the application and say you have a physical address. As long as you don’t list “1600 Pennsylvania Ave” as an address, who would know you’re living in a shelter?
Yeah- here they pay you by check and direct you to their cashier, who will charge you to cash the check. I used to know someone who did day labor, and there’s no way I’d be put to work in the hot sun doing backbreaking physical labor, and then come home having made less than minimum wage once they took their fee to cash their own check.
I haven’t commented here, and I’m getting a bit ticked off.
You’ve postulated a scenario without any explanation of how a person became homeless, broke and jobless seemingly overnight. Yet you complain that people here who are trying to answer in good faith are “fudging with some of these answers”. Suppose we shift the burden back to you. It’s easy enough to explain how one became 45 to 50 years old. How or why did this person lose their job? What sort of job was it? What sort of home was it, and how did they lose that? Were they just barely making it before this happened and weren’t able to save? If not, how much savings did they have before they became broke. These situations usually don’t happen overnight, and to ask that we imagine someone suddenly stripped of these things and then complain because people aren’t answering the question isn’t reasonable.
Given the forum and that you are a moderator, I’m disinclined to get too feisty here, but it seems that you are getting cantankerous with people who are genuinely trying to answer your question. Maybe it’s just me. If you are trying to make a point, wouldn’t this be better in Great Debates?
Yeah. Short of some sort of apocalyptic event, there is no situation in which I would not have access to friends and family that would be willing to assist me if I had hit rock bottom.
People get laid off, mortgages go south, company pensions disappear all the time, unexpected catastrophic medical procedures wipe you out, necessary medicine is damn expensive and you don’t have proper insurance-these things do happen to individuals and families all the time. Any two of the above can wipe you out. What I am looking for are practical solutions in today’s society. When you are middle-aged, your network of local immediate family is likely smaller, and companies are less likely to hire you.
He said unforeseen circumstances. Here’s an unforeseen circumstance based in reality (not mine, obviously). You are charged and convicted of a crime you did not commit. After serving 20 years of your sentence, you are exonerated through DNA testing. You are released from prison with nothing but the clothes on your back, and the likelihood of getting compensation for the state’s mistake is nonexistent. You are also faced with the fact that potential employers and the general public are wary of someone who spent the last 20 years in prison.
How about that for circumstances short of some sort of apocalyptic event?
Yes, thanks, I’m aware, as three of the items in your list happened to us within the space of a few short months, back in 2001. We relied on family for help until we were able to get back on our feet. I fail to see how this is not a practical solution in today’s society. Edited to add: For people who have friends/family that are willing to help, of course. I realize that not everybody is lucky enough to have this.
Are you just going for some kind of thought experiment, or actually asking a question about what people would really do in a real-world situation? Because if it’s the former, then okay, I guess we’d move into a homeless shelter of some sort, find paying work any way possible (fast food, day labor, whatever) until we had enough to move into a more permanent location (even if it was a room at the Y), and proceed from there to find better paying work, better accommodations, etc. If it’s the latter, then my answer remains the same: I’d rely on family for help until we got back on our feet.
This is my recurring nightmare. I’ve been homeless before (in the living-out-of-the-car sense) but not jobless and living under an overpass; nonetheless, it seems all too easy to end up that way. Lars Eighner’s Travels with Lizbeth is the only book I’ve read that ever really freaked me out because of this.
I don’t really know what I’d do in that scenario; I don’t have any family to turn to, and I wouldn’t want to impose upon friends, especially in that kind of situation.
Stranger
What have you been told about asking for medical advice? Take her to a medical professional, please.
I would hopefully have family or friends to move in with and help me get back on my feet. If not, then the homeless shelter. I have marketable skills, so my first priority would be getting a low-income job so that I can purchase food.
Or, I could start a web-page about my homeless adventures. Hopefully I’d get hits, and then proceed to market t-shirts and things of that nature.
When I lived on the streets of Seattle, one didn’t exactly “live in a homeless shelter”. I usually had to get in line at 4pm to ensure that I could get in when it opened at 6pm. If I was lucky enough to get in, I had a place on a dirty mat(along with 50 other strangers in a large room) until 6:30am, when everyone was rousted and sent on their way. Has it gotten any better?