Monday Job Search Blues

It's Monday.
In my email In-box is a notification that my pitch for a position as a media mogul for an international energy operation has been politely declined. At least they took their time to say so, and expended four carefully crafted paragraphs to wish me well in my future endeavors, blah-de-blah-blah-blahhh.

Last week I applied for a job through one of those mandatory computer filters and was rejected within less than 24-hours. Wham, bam, no thank you, ma'am. It's very easy to understand why people just give up looking for work. The humanity in the job search area has been totally leached from the system.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that in April, the Houston unemployment rate was estimated to have dropped from 4.2% to 4.0%. Those numbers can be misleading, because a drop in the number of jobless folks who are actively looking for work skews the mainline numbers downward. It's very easy to fall off the cart because you're just beaten down by too many rejections.

I used to boast that in my hometown of Houston there was no need to be jobless: You could find a job doing anything, and if I had to, I would drive a bread truck. Guess what--all the bakeries are run by the Big Conglomerates, and they use computer screeners to look for their bread truck drivers, too. Guess the joke is on me.

This morning I spent nearly 90-minutes very carefully following directions to complete an online application through another computer screening routine. The job application was a work of art. All the right answers, all the right experiences. Why, they should be sending over a Black Town Car at any moment to whisk me away to my new corner office. But a side-jog click of the mouse to research a question resulted in the total loss of the online application.
Cancel the Town Car, this moron can't fill out his application. 

I used to really look forward to weekends as a chance to decompress from the week's demands. Now, I see weekends as a two day interruption in my quest for full time employment. When Monday rolls around, that's my clarion call to charge forward and attack the hill, assault the ramparts, and post more job applications on line. And with the click of the mouse, all can be lost in an instant.

So I post this in frustration.
It doesn't get me any closer to the job I want.
It doesn't get me any closer to any job.
But it's a purging of the bile that's built up as I play the game, again.
Click.