I’m cleaning out the mom van when I find an old spiral notebook. Daughter’s scribbles. Husband’s jottings. My notes from an interview:
Guy across the street, highly educated, engineer, been out of work almost as long as I have. Not a good time, not a good time, at all.
Who was this, I wonder, and keep reading.
It’s so easy to want to be bitter, and that’s one of the things you gotta fight every day. Keeping the mood up and not getting bitter.
Wow, I think, this interview could have taken place last week.
I have to tell myself: It’s not just me. It’s not “John is a bad person and can’t find a job.”
And I remember. An information- technology guy. I visited him in his suburban home, where beautiful wedding portraits of him and his wife hung on the wall. He sat on the couch next to her. She emigrated from Asia and could not reconcile her images of the United States and its bounty with what was happening. How could a good man find no work? she wanted to know. They hadn’t told her family. John asked me not to use his last name.
I keep turning pages. A piece of paper slides out. John’s original e-mail to me. He wrote that he’d been out of work six months. “I only WISH the elected officials could get a glimpse of how many are truly out of work.”
Sent at 8:03 a.m. on Jan. 9, 2003.
Six years. A lot can happen in six years.
I’d heard from John a few times after that first note. He was an Army reservist and at some point was called into active duty. Went to Iraq and Kuwait. I lost track of him for a while. I knew he had returned safely.
The combination of my imagination and my optimism allows the story to get ahead of me. I map it all out in my head. I would write about his experience, his return to work. I’d end by using John’s full name. A triumphant ending.
I call the number I have. He’s still there. Pleasantries exchanged, I tell him my idea.
He says: “That sounds good except I was laid off again in November.”
Butterflies plummet to the earth. This is life. Not Hollywood. John will remain, for purposes of this column, John. He says his wife’s family still wouldn’t understand, would find his unemployment shameful. He’s in his mid-40s now. Still married. The father of two young children. A man who has become a little more skeptical. A little more frightened.
“In my opinion,” he wrote in 2003, “the only thing propping us up from complete depression are the low mortgage rates (though if this goes on another year, the defaults are gonna make the 80s look like good times) and the fact that many, many people (myself included) cashed out 401ks in order to live.”
Toxic mortgages. Credit-default swaps. Frozen credit markets. Bailouts.
Yeah, a lot can happen in six years.
“You can do everything right, and you can still be crushed,” John says.
So, he fills me in. Five months after that first e-mail, he was Iraq- bound. He stayed there for two years. He’d run through $42,000 in his 401(k), so he socked away much of his pay, and back home his wife was working. But two years is a long time to be away from the family. In two years, a toddler becomes a little girl who wants her daddy.
He returned in February 2005, and it was all good. “I got picked up for work within a couple weeks,” he says. He was back in IT consulting.
“The industry was getting healthy again, and then the consulting projects just went off a cliff. Literally, off a cliff. Nearly everyone I worked with at the last company is gone. The people who worked two levels above me? Gone. It wasn’t just my company. In the consulting world, no one was spending a dime.”
That was in November. His wife is still working, and he’s waiting for unemployment.
“I’d be excessively worried, but I have investments in a couple places that are paying, slowly, very slowly. Without them, I’d be on the street, no question. My wife’s salary is not enough to pay the mortgage.”
He does not sound despondent. Or bitter. He’s trying to start his own companies. He says, sounding like an analyst, that unless credit markets thaw and consumer confidence improves, we’re looking at a depression. He sounds like what he is, a veteran.
“When things loosen up, companies are going to need people who can make things happen quickly, and that can only be done by people with experience, people like me,” he says.
I don’t want to leave him or, more to the point, you who find yourself unemployed for the first time, without some benefit of his experience. So I ask him what he’d say to you. He’s silent for a second.
“This might sound trite,” he says, “but pride has nothing to do with this situation. Keep at it. Don’t be afraid to do whatever you have to do. Whatever it takes. Period.”
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-1416 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
