All the website advice I have gleaned about job searching emphasizes the importance of “networking.” At first, in my innocence, I had envisioned this as a freewheeling exercise in human sociability, possibly involving white wine. Joanne and Kimberly, though, have impressed on me that networking takes hard work, discipline, and perseverance. When I informed Kimberly of my intention to launch the networking phase, she caught me up short with a demand to hear my “elevator speech.” This, it turns out, is a thirty- to forty-five-second self-advertisement, which in my case, Kimberly suggests, should begin with “Hi, I’m Barbara Alexander, and I’m a crackerjack PR person!” In one of our phone sessions, Joanne shared with me her own elevator speech—it turns out that she too is job searching—and when I ventured that it sounded a bit stiff, she confessed to not having fully memorized it yet.
Hours of Internet searching have netted me a “networking event” only two and a half hours away at the Forty-Plus Club of Washington, D.C. Founded to help middle-aged executive job seekers during the Depression, the club attracted to its first advisory board such corporate and cultural luminaries as Tom Watson, the founder of IBM; James Cash Penney, of JC Penney; Arthur Godfrey, the TV personality; and Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking —whom I take to be the intellectual granddad of Kimberly. Despite their establishment origins, the nineteen Forty-Plus Clubs around the nation are the closest thing one can find to a grassroots organization of the white-collar unemployed. The clubs are run entirely by volunteers, conveniently drawn from the pool of unemployed, middle-aged, white-collar people.
The event starts at 9:30 on a rainy January morning, at an impressive address near Dupont Circle, although the actual space turns out to be a dark, almost belligerently undecorated basement suite. Pamela, who’s about fifty and dressed in a long, close-fitting skirt that creates a definite mermaid effect, greets me in the corridor and directs me to a table where Ted, also about fifty, is presiding over the name tag distribution. He wears a wrinkled suit and tie, set off, intriguingly, by a black eye. No, he instructs, I am not to take a red name tag; as a “new person,” I am assigned to blue. Looking off to the side a little, perhaps to draw attention from his eye, he confides that the networking will proceed until 10:00, at which time we will be treated to a lecture on “New Year’s resolutions for job searchers.”
Time is short, so I get right down to work, going up to my fellow job seekers, introducing myself, and asking what kinds of jobs they’re looking for. About fifteen people have drifted in so far and distributed themselves among the chairs arranged in semicircles around a podium. All are middle-aged white guys, and I manage to successfully connect with several of them before the seats fill up, hampering my efforts to circulate: Mike, who’s in finance; Jim, who is also in PR and, alarmingly enough, has been looking for seven months. A man who identifies himself as a media manager latches onto me next, relating that he is bitter—his word—because he gave eleven years to Time Warner and has just been laid off in some inexplicable corporate reorganization, leaving him with two teenagers to feed and educate. So these are my people, my new constituency—men, and now a few women, who will go home as I will to a desk off the dining room and an afternoon of lonely web searching.
I had worried about not having an elevator speech prepared but none of the people I talk to offers one, much less asks to hear mine. What were Kimberly and Joanne thinking of? Most of the job searchers present wear expressions of passivity and mild expectation; clothing-wise, few have advanced much beyond the sweatpants level. Going by such superficials alone, I’d be surprised if there’s another ENTJ in the bunch. In fact, even as the place fills up with a total of about thirty people, all in the same white and over-the-hill demographic, I notice that I’m the only one systematically working the room. One of the later arrivals, Michael, barely responds to my smiling overtures, burying his head in the Washington Post. From him I move on to Frank, a rumpled-looking fellow of about sixty, who says he is a consultant in financial matters.
“Do you know what’s wrong with Bush?” he asks me. “He’s never had to work; he’s had everything handed to him on a silver platter.”
When I nod in agreement and say that I am also consulting —a term I’ve learned to substitute for freelancing —he observes that “that’s what they want us all to be—consultants.” Because then they can use us when they need us and get rid of us when they don’t—no benefits or other entanglements involved.
At 10:00 the meeting is opened by Merle, who explains that the “core program” of the Forty-Plus Club is a three-week “boot camp” aimed at turning newbies like myself into mean, lean, job-searching machines. I find myself slavishly cathected to Merle; she is beautiful, for one thing, about my age or a little younger, and awesomely poised. I take her to be my female executive template—kindly in tone but brooking no deviations from the business at hand. She says she’s been job searching for nine months—which, given the setting, must be meant as a qualification for her leadership role—but the information is definitely disturbing. If such a paragon of executive virtue can go jobless for almost a year, what hope is there for someone in my situation?
Merle introduces our guest speaker, Joe Loughran, a former “Wall Street Associate” who has a Harvard MBA and now runs his own business as a career coach, or “transition accelerant” as the brief biography on the Forty-Plus web site puts it. A large, mild-mannered fellow turned out preppily in khakis and red sweater, he begins with a bit of self-deprecation on the theme of giving up chocolate as a New Year’s resolution—he “would have trouble with that”—and then seems to have trouble relinquishing the chocolate theme, getting tangled up in how resolutions can have a “domino effect”: you don’t buy a new suit because you’re waiting to lose a few pounds from the chocolate deprivation, and then, because you don’t have a new suit, you don’t go for an important interview. The lesson would seem to be: don’t bother with resolutions; lecture over.
But things pick up when he asks us what obstacles we face in our job searches. A half-dozen hands go up, offering such obstacles as fear, inertia, embarrassment, procrastination, money, “nonlinear career path,” and the mysterious challenge of “staying up.” I catch Ted, who is standing against the wall, nodding vigorously at each of the obstacles, suggesting that he knows each of them all too well. Joe is doing his best to keep up on a flip chart. I throw in that I get overwhelmed by all the things there are to do, lack priorities. This is recorded as “scheduling.”
At this point I am expecting some solutions from Joe, but Merle, who has never abdicated her position at the front of the room, steps forward to ask, “What have some people done to manage?” I want Joe’s job is what I am thinking, which seems to involve no more than note taking and serving, in his brilliant red sweater, as a human stoplight. But solutions to my problem of “scheduling” are pouring in as fast as I can write them down. “I make a daily schedule including Internet searches and exercise,” one woman contributes. “This forces me to be accountable even if I’m the only one in the room, managing myself.” Someone else adds, “I set the alarm for the same time I did when I was working. I get up, shave, dress, just as if I was going to work.” Another solution: enroll your spouse as a “supervisor,” to remind you “you said you were going to do such and such today.”
This advice comes as a surprise: job searching is not joblessness; it is a job in itself and should be structured to resemble one, right down to the more regrettable features of employment, like having to follow orders—orders which are in this case self-generated. Something about this scenario carries a whiff of necrophilia. I think of the fabled resident of old Key West who somehow had his beloved’s corpse preserved in a condition congenial to continued physical intimacies for years after her death. So, too, we are not to accept joblessness but to hold on desperately to some faint simulacrum of employment.
Everyone agrees on the necessity of managing oneself much as a real boss might, although this presents immediate conceptual problems: if “selling myself” had seemed like a tricky form of self-objectification, “managing myself” takes the process even farther, into the realm of mental cloning. I picture the Barbaras splitting off into worker-Barbara (the one who sits at the computer and searches for jobs), product-Barbara (the one who has to be “sold”), and now manager-Barbara (whose responsibility is to oversee the other two)—all contending for dominance in the same cramped office space. I recall that one of the mysterious “Core Competencies” in the scheme developed by Morton, my first coach, had indeed been “Managing Self.”
But the theme here, I am beginning to see, is pain management and structured grieving. If you have been spat out by the great corporate machine and left to contemplate your presumed inadequacy, it makes sense to fill the day with microtasks, preferably supervised by someone else. Imagining one’s search as a “job” must satisfy the Calvinist craving to be doing something, anything, of a worklike nature, and Americans may be especially prone to Calvinist angst. We often credit some activity with the phrase “at least it keeps me busy”—as if busyness were a desirable state regardless of how you achieve it. As I later learn in Harvey Mackay’s business best seller We Got Fired!. . . And It’s the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us, job searching, properly undertaken, should be far more time-consuming than an actual job: “If you have a job, then you might have the luxury of working 9:00 to 5:00. If you’re getting a job, then plan on twelve to sixteen hours a day.”1
The alternative to manufactured busyness is flat-out depression, as a large gray-haired man seems to confirm when, in an apparent non sequitur, he raises his hand to caution that “introspection can be very powerful if you do it in the right frame of mind. Otherwise it can get you down.” One wonders what dark nights of the soul he has endured in the course of his search, but for Merle and Joe, his comment serves only as a segue to “staying up,” which amounts to maintaining a winning attitude, even in the face of despair. Here the grim Calvinism of self-management suddenly gives way to a wan hedonism: We should go to the gym, networking with other gym-goers while we’re there. Have lunch with a friend. Make a list of things you enjoy. The dark-haired, somewhat exoticlooking woman sitting next to me, who has been looking for a communications job for six months, leans over and whispers naughtily, “I take antidepressants. Do you think I should shout that out?” We both giggle, although it isn’t really all that funny.
We are on to “Fear” and Joe asks what we are afraid of. “Failure” comes up in various forms, and I add “rejection.” There’s no dodging fear. Joe exhorts us to “get in its face,” and a woman, who I later learn is a career coach herself, stresses the need “to really feel your fear.” This seems to delight Pamela, who has remained standing, like Merle, though off to the side: “That’s honoring your feelings!” But fear, once faced, is quickly abolished. As Joe summarizes the topic, “The point is, what is there to be afraid of? It’s Nike. Just do it.”
Now Pamela has an idea: laughter, specifically, “artificial laughter.” At least you start with artificial laughter, which can magically evolve into the real thing. She produces a five-second-long laugh, followed by “See?” But the fake laugh fails to catch on; most people are looking at her with slight alarm. She tries again in a higher register—Ha ha ha ha ha, Ha ha ha ha ha—and out of solidarity I try to join in. Otherwise, though, there is an appalled silence.
We move on through Health and Money to an obstacle Joe calls “the Gap” and identifies as a chronological defect in one’s résumé—caused, for example, by a spell of unemployment. This may be a measure of my extreme naïveté and longstanding distance from the world of regular employment, but I had not realized that being unemployed may in and of itself disqualify one for a job.2 Joe wants us to acknowledge the Gap, accept it, and emphasize the bright side of it, such as what we learned while enduring it. I raise my hand and ask, “What if the Gap was homemaking?” I’m expecting at least some nods of commiseration from the women in the room, but I might as well have announced that I’ve devoted a chunk of my career to collecting welfare. Joe looks away uncomfortably, forcing Merle to step forward and promise that this subject will be dealt with “in boot camp.” Ted, from his position near the wall, speaks up to suggest that I stress “the time management skills you developed while managing children.”
Yeah, right, like I’m going to have résumé entries like “negotiated complex preteen transportation issues” and “provided in-home leadership to highly creative team of three”? I think of all the recent articles about upper-middle-class, professional mothers who opt to stay home with their children during the early years, fully expecting to pick up their careers at full stride later on. One of the Gen-X moms interviewed in a Time article “desperately hopes that she won’t be penalized for her years at home.”3 But the Mommy Track appears to end right here, in a support group for the long-term unemployed.
At precisely 11:00, Joe winds up to hearty applause, and I choose this break to start edging toward the door. I have just reached it when Merle, who is now presiding over a little ritual honoring a boot-camp graduate who has actually found a job, calls out, “Barbara, it’s not time to go yet!” Stunned that she can read my name tag at this distance and mortified to have been singled out, I stand there and watch as a fortysomething Asian-American—he is today’s lucky job finder—takes a mallet and hits a large metal bell, making him a “bell ringer.” I take a step backward through the door frame, but Pamela is directly behind me, blocking the way. “You’re losing your name tag,” she whispers to me. I smooth it down obligingly, if only because I am beginning to lose confidence in the physical possibility of egress. If I were to take another step toward freedom, I might get jumped by some of the beefier cult members.
Because that’s how it’s beginning to look to me. If profit is not the aim, and it can’t be, since everyone in charge is a volunteer, then what could it matter if one potential recruit leaks away after the formal proceedings? I get the paranoid sense that I have fallen into the Cult of Merle, and what happens next only seems to confirm this. New people like myself—there are only six of us—are to repair into a side room for a special session of their own, suggesting that the reason for Pamela’s concern about my name tag had to do with the ease of sorting out who is new.
The special gathering for new people turns out to be a heavy sell for the boot camp, which costs close to $600 for three weeks of eight-hour days. Ted and Pamela officiate, beginning with some videotaped testimonies to the effectiveness of the boot camp, while we new people sit in frozen expectation. It will be an intense experience, Ted advises, ranging from résumé development to body language and elevator speeches. Among other things, we will each star in a three-minute videotape sales pitch for ourselves, which will be revised until perfect. He is standing next to where I am sitting, going over a poster describing the boot camp’s syllabus, when suddenly he bursts into tears.
My mind had wandered during his presentation, so I have to do a quick rewind to recall the emotional subtext of what he had been saying at the moment of breakdown—something about a neighbor of his who had been laid off and not said anything to Ted about it for months. A broken friendship? Or just a reminder to him of how lonely the first months of unemployment were? And how did he get the black eye anyway?
I have to restrain myself from reaching out and putting my hand on his arm, but Pamela is impatiently insisting that she take over the poster presentation. Thus rebuked, Ted struggles and pulls himself together, although the tears are still running down his cheeks.
I finally get up to leave, resigned to never knowing what was up with Ted or whether Merle, our charismatic leader, is a saint or a demon. No doubt there’s nothing cultish going on, and the only reason the volunteers push the boot camp so insistently is that it gives them something to do: better to immerse yourself in Forty-Plus activities than to sit home alone waiting for the phone to ring. But Ted’s breakdown does reinforce the impression that, whatever is going on in the corporate world today, whatever wild process is chewing up men and women and spitting them out late in life, damage is definitely done.
AT MY NEXT session with Kimberly, I report that I’ve been successfully networking. “So did you make some contacts?” she wants to know.
“Just the people I networked with,” I admit, explaining the context of the Forty-Plus Club.
“But they’re unemployed! There’s no point to networking with unemployed people unless they have contacts in companies you want to work for!”
So much for my people, then, the great army of the white-collar unemployed. They’re not worth the time of day. You are encouraged to go to networking events, only to be told that you’ve been wasting your time.
“Look,” she says, trying a new tack. “What companies do you want to work for?”
I’ve had a new insight into this, so I tell her, “I’ve been thinking . . . I’ve done a lot in the health field, maybe I should emphasize that more. Maybe like a drug company.”
“A drug company—good! And what else?”
“A medical supply company?”
“And what else?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“A hospital! What about a hospital?”
I have to admit that I didn’t know or had forgotten that hospitals maintain PR staffs—another reason for resentment when perusing the medical bills. So how would I network with hospital people?
“You have a doctor, don’t you?”
I acknowledge that I do.
“So network with him!”
“But she barely has time to tell me my blood pressure, much less talk about my career.”
“Does she have a receptionist?”
I acknowledge this too.
“So network with her!”
I don’t tell her, and I’m not proud of this, but I find the suggestion insulting. Here I am, a “seasoned professional” according to my résumé, and I’m supposed to be pestering the clinic receptionist for job leads? Not to mention the fact that the receptionist appears to be even more distracted and rushed than the doctor. Meanwhile, Kimberly is going on about the need to network everywhere, like with the person I’m sitting next to on a plane. Almost anyone seems to be worth my smiling attentions except my brothers and sisters in the job-searching business.
Session over, I refill my iced tea and sit down to reflect on my aversion to Kimberly, which seems completely out of proportion to the circumstances. I hired her; she was my choice; she’s supposed to be helping me. Beyond that, of course, this is only a journalistic venture anyway, in which I have no real-life emotional stake. Yet the dislike is reaching hatelike dimensions, and it seems to me that if I could get to the bottom of it, I would be a leg up on the whole job-search process. She represents something about the corporate world that repels me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness. In fact the “mask” theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, and Robert Jackall, in Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers, refer repeatedly to the “masks” that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces.4
Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness, and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to “get in the face” of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me.
ALL RIGHT, DISTASTEFUL as the idea may be, I do have to structure my job search in some joblike fashion. I determine that my daily plan will be as follows:
7:30 A.M.: Get up, eat breakfast, read the paper, check CNN for major disasters—terrorist attacks, asteroid hits, et cetera—that may foreclose the possibility of finding a job for the immediate future or at least call for a revision of the daily plan. I refuse, however, to dress up as if heading for a real office, clinging to my usual preclothes, meaning a cross between the T-shirt I wore to bed and the gym clothes I will need in the afternoon.
9:00–12:30: Proceed to desk for the bulk of the day’s work—read e-mail, revise résumé, visit the various national job boards, and whatever else I can think of to do. Thanks to the Atlanta Job Search Network I have signed up for, which showers me with several dozen job possibilities a week, e-mail alone can take up to twenty minutes. Why Atlanta? Because it’s a happening place, job-wise anyway, with an unemployment rate of only about 4 percent—far lower than Boston, for example, or New York. That and the fact that it’s one plane ride away from home qualify it as an appealing target for me. Unfortunately, the job tips that come to me by e-mail from the Atlanta Job Search Network are almost always in irrelevant fields like “systems management” and “construction oversight,” but there are sometimes more interesting things to read—brief waves, or cries for help, from my fellow seekers. Trinita, for example, writes sadly (to me and everyone else in the network):
I have finally found a position, but again it is temporary with no benefits . . . I lost my apartment in Atlanta and had to move home with my mother at the age of 26 after being laid off and unable to pay my bills. I owe everybody and their mama’s but I guess I am back on the right track to daylight.
Some of the homespun advice from fellow seekers is equally suggestive of desperation. Mark, whose subject line is “What To DO After You Stop Crying!,” lists thirteen activities beginning with “1. Hug your significant other. (Family Must be First!!!)” and ending with:
13. LAST BUT NOT LEAST—Hug your significant other AND KIDS. (REMEMBER—Family MUST be FIRST!!!)
In between, there’s the usual enjoinder to network “WITH EVERYONE,” including “Aunts, Brothers, Sisters, Cousins, Classmates . . . Accountant, Hair Dresser, Barber, Etc., Etc.” and “KEEP A POSITIVE ATTITUDE. DO YOU WANT TO TALK WITH ‘DOWN’ PEOPLE OR THOSE WHO LIFT YOU UP?”
For weeks, the core of my day’s work consists of revising my résumé to meet Joanne’s exacting standards. We agree eventually on the opening, which, after every comma has been vetted, reads:
SUMMARY: Seasoned consultant with experience in Event Planning, Public Relations, and Speechwriting is prepared to provide leadership advancing company brand and image. Special expertise in health policy and health-related issues, with a track record of highlevel national exposure.
To my chagrin, she informs me that my education is a little scanty. I’ve listed a BA in chemistry, which I in fact possess, and earned in my maiden name, Alexander. But this is not enough. Surely I have at least audited some relevant courses along the way? So I make up a list of courses I have taken, hoping that they resemble plausible educational offerings, with the idea that I can revise them to suit the situation:
• “Marketing Social Change” (Progressive Media Project, 1991)
• “The Media and New Technology” (New York University, 1995)
• “Writing to Persuade” (New School for Social Research, 1998)
• “Women’s Health Issues and the Media” (Long Island University, 1999)
• “The Social Psychology of Event Management” (University of California at Berkeley, 2001)
More vexingly, Joanne wants my résumé to get longer; hers occupies a remarkable four pages. But this is beyond my fictional capacity, so I argue that, no, the résumés posted on the Public Relations Society of America’s web site, which I visit daily, are all a terse single page, and that this seems to be the industry standard.
The résumé is still far from perfect, a condition which may take several more weeks of costly coaching to achieve, since both Joanne and Kimberly keep coming up with minor permutations of the latest draft, dithering at length, for example, over what “volunteer community activities” to list. I am beginning to suspect that the process is being artificially prolonged for purely commercial reasons: each half-hour session, which can focus entirely on issues of punctuation and format, earns the coach $100.
Even with an imperfect résumé, as judged by my coaches, I can’t resist applying for some of the jobs that pop up on the PRSA web site. It’s easy enough: I just scroll through the PR job offerings—there are usually more than a dozen a week—and send along my résumé-in-progress. I can also apply directly to a company by going to its web site, clicking on “careers,” searching for PR job listings, and then submitting my application online. I’ll go for anything except the jobs that require technical knowledge—computer networking or video production—or lengthy experience in a particular industry. If all the company seems to want is the ability to think and write, backed by five years of experience, I consider myself a highly qualified candidate, whether the emphasis is on internal communications, publicity, or public affairs. And of course I am admirably flexible, applying at one point for a job as PR director of the American Diabetes Association and then switching sides and offering myself to Hershey’s. In most cases, I have the satisfaction of receiving an e-mail automatically confirming my application, and giving me a multidigit number to refer to the job by, should I care to continue the correspondence.
12:30–1:00: Lunch and further newspaper reading, justified by my need, as a PR person, to stay on top of trends, new technologies, business scandals, and the like.
1:00–3:00: Back at the desk for more leisurely or more reflective forms of labor, such as learning more about my chosen fields—PR and event planning—and casting about for further tips and leads. Sometimes the effect of my afternoon labors is to undermine whatever I accomplished in the morning. For example, one day I spend the morning on my résumé and the afternoon reading Don’t Send a Resume: And Other Contrarian Rules to Help Land a Great Job, by Jeffrey J. Fox, who informs me bleakly:
A résumé with a “for everyman” cover letter is junk mail. A résumé without a cover letter is used to line the bottom of the birdcage . . . All unexpected and standard résumés go from the IN box to the trash box. Some may generate a rejection form letter; most get ignored; 99.2 percent get tossed.5
According to Fox, no one is interested in my background or “career objectives”; all the companies want to know is what I can do for them—which means many more hours at the computer, researching each company in detail, identifying its problems, and dreaming up solutions. Another afternoon’s fishing produces the distressing information that employers, especially the large ones, no longer bother to read résumés at all; they scan them with computer programs searching for the desired keywords, and I can only hope that public relations and health are among them.
3:00–4:30: Proceed to gym for daily workout, as recommended by all coaches and advice-giving web sites. I would work out anyway, but it’s nice to have this ratified as a legitimate job-search activity. In fact, I find it expanding to fill the time available—from forty-five minutes to more than an hour a day. I may never find a job, but I will, in a few more weeks, be in a position to wrestle any job competitors to the ground. On the downside, I have no clue as to how to use the gym as a networking opportunity. With whom should I network? The obviously unemployed fellow who circles the indoor track for at least an hour a day? The anorexic gal whose inexplicable utterances on the Stairmaster are not, as I first hoped, attempts to communicate but an accompaniment to the songs on her iPod? No matter how many inviting smiles I cast around the place, my conversations never seem to get beyond “Do you mind if I work in?” and “Whoops, I guess that’s your towel.”
BUT YOU CANNOT spend all your job-search time at the computer. At the Forty-Plus Club, Joe exhorted us, “Get out of your caves!” so I resolve to make an attempt to network with the actually employed. Joanne alerted me to the monthly meetings of a local businesspersons’ club just a few miles from home in Charlottesville, at which, for $30, I can get a box lunch and the chance to mingle with current jobholders. I arrive a few minutes late, pockets filled with my business cards, at the hotel meeting room where the session is being held. About seventy people are seated around tables listening to the hotel manager welcome them with a rundown on the hotel’s attractions, should anyone decide to check in after lunch and stay for the night: 118 rooms, each with coffeemaker, blow dryer, and ironing board. I guess you could say he is networking too.
A panel of three speakers on the theme “Funding Emerging Growth: Venture Capital and Other Strategies” is introduced, but I am too far back in the room to see them. So, from my vantage point, there are only disembodied male voices to accompany the PowerPoint presentations, all of which highlight the same trend: a dramatic decrease in venture-capital-backed IPOs throughout the state of Virginia since 2001. Everyone seems to handle the bad news with admirable stoicism. There are no interruptions from the audience, no whispers, groans, or attempts to sneak out early. Certain phrases keep recurring—“skill set,” “end of the day,” and “due diligence”—which I write down to add to my corporate vocabulary. The only other entertainment possibility is my box lunch, which seems to have been designed as a direct rebuff to the recently deceased Dr. Atkins: chicken salad wrap, macaroni salad, potato chips, and a giant chocolate chip cookie.
Who are these people? Though I’m sitting against the wall in the back of the room, most of the assembled businesspeople are arranged around tables, so quite a few name tags are visible to me and most include company names: CVS, Moneywise Payroll Solutions, WBT Advisors, and a few realty firms. The attached humans are hardly intimidating; I see the same desultory coiffures and dulled, passive expressions you might find at the Forty-Plus Club. It must be that the same corporate culture embraces both jobholders and job seekers, and that it is a culture of conformity and studied restraint, maybe something like that of the Chinese imperial court in the heyday of hardline Confucianism.
But I have to wonder what distinguishes the jobholders as a class. If they don’t look any better or radiate any more zest than the job seekers, how come they were chosen for their jobs? Of course, they no doubt possess skills I can barely imagine—in finance, for example, or accounting—and will go back to perform complex, even—from my perspective—occult, activities at their desks.
One person attracts me. A panelist is indulging in a rare attempt at humor, telling us that an SBA (Small Business Administration?) loan cannot be used to fund “strip joints or porno,” at which a woman sitting near me mutters “or for overthrowing the government.” Funny gal—or hardened revolutionary? I decide she will be my first networking target, but when the program comes to an end she escapes before I can catch her. This leaves me standing near a scary-looking guy of about forty, who is turned out to resemble Michael Douglas in Wall Street —well-tailored suit, emerald green silk tie, hair slicked back to a curly fringe brushing against his collar. I should say hi and put out my hand, but he dismisses me with a look of impatience and strides out of the room. I should go up to someone else then, but they are all moving in clumps toward the cloakroom. I smile at anyone whose eye I can catch, but everyone is hastening to reclaim their coats. What do I do? Start thrusting my Kinko’s cards into their hands? Throw them up in the air and let people scramble to claim them?
There’s nothing to do but get my coat and return to the car as friendless as when I arrived. Maybe Kimberly, if she had been perched on the cheap chandeliers lighting the meeting room, could have told me where I went wrong. But for now I only note with relief that the search part of the day is over and the time has come to repair to the gym.
Lesson learned: I am not ready for the next step, the step that involves face-to-face interactions with people who might actually have jobs to offer. There’s the matter of my business cards, for example. It’s the end of January, and in two months I have managed to give away no more than five out of 100 of them. I understand that with respect to the cards, my job is like that of those guys on the streets of Manhattan who try to hit you with deli menus—the point is simply to get rid of them. Until the cards are out there, fluttering around in the world, I might as well not exist. But to hand out even a single card, I would have to engage someone in conversation long enough for it to seem natural to say, “Here, why don’t you take one of my cards?” Something is holding me back—maybe “lack of confidence,” as Kimberly and I agree to call it, though I suspect also a prideful resistance to “selling myself.”
Other job seekers seem to suffer from the same reticence. Hillary Meister, for example, whom I met by e-mail through the Atlanta Job Search Network, says she has trouble with “the whole networking thing”:
It’s personality. I’m very quiet, not very extroverted. It [networking] feels so fake to me, but I know that’s the game.
It feels “fake” because we know it involves the deflection of our natural human sociability to an ulterior end. Normally we meet strangers in the expectation that they may truly be strange, and are drawn to the multilayered mystery that each human presents. But in networking, as in prostitution, there is no time for fascination. The networker is always, so to speak, looking over the shoulder of the person she engages in conversation, toward whatever concrete advantage can be gleaned from the interaction—a tip or a precious contact. This instrumentalism undermines the possibility of a group identity, say, as white-collar victims of corporate upheaval. No matter how crowded the room, the networker prowls alone, scavenging to meet his or her individual needs.
These objections, though, are in the present circumstances only excuses. Whatever is holding me back—shyness or pride—it must be vanquished, and in this enterprise I can see I need further help.
The Forty-Plus Club’s boot camp is not an option. On my next trip to D.C. for its Monday-morning get-together, Ted confronts me with the question “What’s holding you back?” I freeze, sure that this is a Joe-type query to which the possible responses include “procrastination” and “nonlinear career path.” “Money?” he continues, and I realize he’s asking what holds me back from enlisting in the boot camp. I say no, I can’t commute two and a half hours each way every weekday for three weeks of 9–5 sessions.
“There’s a guy who commuted all the way from Pennsylvania,” Ted reproaches me. “Or you could stay in a hotel.”
If I went through boot camp, I would be entitled to become an actual member of the club, which might put me in a position to hang out with Merle, exchange views on the correct hanging of scarves over suit jackets, and absorb some of her executive aura for myself. But I have found an appealingly condensed alternative; or rather it has found me. One day when I was weeding through the Atlanta job possibilities, I came across an announcement for an “executive boot camp” to be hosted by something called the ExecuTable and scheduled to take exactly one day. It isn’t cheap, especially when you factor in airfare and a night in a hotel, but the difference between 7 hours and the 120-hour commitment required by Forty-Plus is compelling. So I go to Travelocity.com and, after about thirty minutes of comparative shopping, come up with a travel plan.