Well, that’s all fucked up divorced. I’m sorry there was no job and that your wife is acting like a jerk. That’s all got to feel lousy.
But, nevertheless, I would encourage you to keep looking for work!
I have a neighbor who has struggled for a long time to find a job. He is our age and he is still looking. He has found work at UPS loading boxes, especially over the holidays. He has also turned up in a local bakery, the place where they do emissions testing for your car, and then last month at a swim team banquet, he told me about a position he is chasing driving school buses where (here at least) they pay so that you can get a commercial driver’s license. None of these jobs match his original salary or skill set, but he is using them to cobble together some income. He quit the UPS gig soon after the holidays because he said it was brutal on his body. Can you imagine?
I say keep looking for work, maybe outside of the normal channels. Once you get a job, you can get a new wife. Someone who is younger and sexier and won’t complain about inexpensive purchases made at Target. And then a new house that’s better and bigger.
You see where this is going, right? Keep looking. :)
Get yourself out of Louisiana, ASAP. If your life is going to be disrupted anyways (which sounds like the case), you need to start over in the right place. If Louisiana law has destroyed the industry you’re in, get yourself to a state where that isn’t the case and where your skills and experience are still in demand.
Good luck.
Man, good luck Divorced. Hopefully your car will point you to a much better place.
nKoan
1724
All I can say is good luck too. Being without a job is one of the most stressful things I’ve ever gone through, and I can’t imagine everything else that has piled on you too. Sounds like getting out of Louisiana is a good first step.
rowe33
1726
Is getting out of Louisiana a legitimate possibility? I’d agree with the others - try and get a completely fresh start away from the area & her. Best of luck!
I know it’s much easier said than done divorced, but I agree with the folks urging you to bail out on Louisiana. Speaking as a guy who grew up there and still goes back regularly to see my family, it was one of the best things I ever did. That place is deadsville. Even if you just hop over to Texas, that’s a world of difference. Go check out Houston or Galveston, see what’s going on there.
JeffL
1728
Agreed; divorced, from personal experience and experience coaching others in career, the size of your “box” of job opportunities is defined on:
- What are you willing and able to do?
- How much do you need to be paid to do it?
- Where are you willing to do it?
That #3 is a huge one. To take one extreme: I guarantee you 100% there is a company somewhere in the United States who would love to hire you.
For what I do, having to find a new job 3 times since 2004, one of those in the depth of the recession in 2009, there was never any question I would have to relocate, almost certainly outside the state. And we did have preferences of where we did and did not want to live, where we were kinda neutral about. But at the end of the day, if we had to take a job somewhere in which we preferred not to live (and you never know sometimes - you may actually be surprised to find you like it there!) well, we had to have a job. We figured, OK, if we have to, we take the job, and then if we do hate it we can look for a job in our ideal location while working there. You can always be more picky when you are currently employed.
Of course it is tougher just finding those jobs if they are outside your location, but these days, with the internet, there are a lot of tools that really simplify that. I don’t know your background all that well, but I just did a search in CareerBuilder.com for home care, and there are 160 pages of hits that came up from job openings posted in the last 30 days.
And in the end, sounds like you are actually lucky that ass didn’t offer you a job. She sounds like a low integrity jerk.
Hal9000
1729
Well that was the ill-conceived plan which has gone horribly awry. All of a sudden there are no openings anywhere. Regardless, I’m applying for another job where I grew up. Same career field as the one I’d like to leave, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers.
But I sure hope I don’t get used to it. It’s a weird feeling of butterflies in my stomach.
Never discount the ability of an ill conceived plan to get you in exactly the place you need to be (eventually, I mean)! Good luck.
I do appreciate the thoughts of going elsewhere and there is a lot of wisdom in it. Louisiana is indeed dead. But I can’t just pack up my undies and throw a dart at the board and say “Okay, here I come Topeka!” I have to have something to move TO! I would gladly move to Topeka, Kansas if there was a job there I could support myself with. But physically, I am really limited. I cannot work retail or such as I can’t stand for hours at a time. A catastrophic injury I suffered while on active duty decided that. And when you mention all those years running a family business, tons of people out there consider it “dead time.” I mean, who in your family is going to give you a bad reference? It’s not that I haven’t tried to think outside the box. I have sought every job that wasn’t completely ridiculous for me to consider. I didn’t apply when our local hospital needed a Head of Thoracic Surgery. Maybe I should have. I’m sure there a “Complete Dummies Guide to Thoracic Surgery” somewhere.
If I had a job lined up, I could probably get anywhere in the country with enough scratch to initially keep a roof over my head. That would probably involve selling a fair number of my things here, but since I’m about to be out on my butt anyway, who cares? But the reality is I don’t have a job lined up in Topeka, Kansas. Or Plymouth, Michigan. Or Boise, Idaho. Or anywhere. Not even right here.
Right now there is nothing good in my life. Nothing. I have people that wish me well and hope things turn around. I appreciate that. But I can’t eat that or pay the electricity bill with it. Every day gets 24 hours closer to July 1. And right now I have no answers. This feels like a nightmare I can’t wake up from. I would be happy to not wake up right now! But every morning, here I am again…
I definitely understand the need to have a job lined up before packing off somewhere, especially if you can only afford one move. I’m sure you’ve looked here before, but have you tried USAjobs? I’ve been applying to positions through it recently. There’s bound to be positions somewhere in the country with your kind of administrative and management experience.
Thanks, Tim! Anything back in Montana would be the bomb, I guess. I don’t want to raise rabbits, but I am looking forward to eating some grouse.
Divorced, I’ve been thinking about it, and it seems like you’d be a good pick for a clerk position with either Union Pacific or BNSF. UP has the jobs open up fairily routinely. You’d have to relocate, but it’d do you good. The pay is ok, but the benefits are awesome, and they are massively pro-military in hiring practices.
Reemul
1734
A little annoyed the company said they would come back to me by close of business today and haven’t. They did say to chase by end of the week if I heard nothing but really seems odd, if there is no job just say it.
nKoan
1735
That is so annoying. Happens all the time (to me at least) in the job search. It doesn’t always mean a bad thing. It just means there is probably one person who is swamped doing some bit of paperwork holding everything up.
That would have been a good idea a few weeks ago! Thanks for thinking of me. I should have thought of a place like that. I’m really in the “it’s too late” area of time now. I have to vacate the house in a week. With no job, I couldn’t rent even some tiny efficiency apartment. They like to know you’re going to be able to actually pay the rent. So now I’m in liquidating mode. Got a guy coming to look at the couch and bed tomorrow. Hopefully I can get $750 for both. Then it’s selling the tv, consoles, etc. I gave it my best shots. The universe seems to have decided it can do without me.
JeffL
1737
You’re alive. You have options. You may not like them, but your choices are to determine your options and choose the one you think is best, no matter if it isn’t what you’d prefer. You can still pursue the options people have presented here. Yeah, you may be starting from scratch, but as long as you’re alive, you have options. I have a friend who just passed away, as in this week, from a disease (I don’t want to go into details here, hurts too much right now) and he went from healthy guy with wife and 3 kids and good job and life looking great to disease diagnosis to quickly being no longer able to work and struggling to function. But he never, ever rolled over and gave up. Not when he couldn’t go to the bathroom without help (or when he couldn’t at all,) not when he could literally no longer move more than his extremities, not when his family was struggling to figure out how to pay the enormous bills, never. He told me, hell, Jeff, YOU may get hit by a truck on the way home, all we have is this moment, so I’m gonna do whatever I can with each moment. He was in incredible pain recently because he fought being drugged up to where he couldn’t visit with people. He treasured every moment he was alive and was determined, even when he could barely function, to make the most he could out of literally every moment, no matter how bad it was.
You’re alive. There are other people who have been in your situation, and worse. A lot. It sucks, but you’ve gotta decide to quit wallowing and feeling sorry for yourself and go do something about it. I know that sounds really unfeeling and harsh and that I’m being a real asshole, and I probably am due to how I’m feeling right now about my friend’s passing, but dammit “the universe” doesn’t decide anything.
(I should wait before posting this, but the hell with it. And all of you who want to tell me to go screw myself for being so unfeeling, go ahead, I probably deserve it.)
Jeff is right. You have options, even if you don’t like any of them. If you chose to give up, that would be sad.
But it’s still a choice.
Forget the universe and dig deep. Make yourself do the searches and send out the emails for out of town gigs.
Sell the computer last.
Don’t move into your car until someone knocks on your door and escorts you from the house. You don’t get any extra points from the bank for vacating the house on time.
JeffL
1739
What he said. It’s hard. Damned hard. I know people who have gone bankrupt and had to move from their nice house into a section 8 apartment (where they know you can’t afford rent) and lost their life savings, the 401K they had planned to retire on in a few years, everything. And it sucked. But they accepted, OK, this is where I am, so lets dig in and figure out all our options and go from here. And they did.
Take a look in the forum at the Having Cancer thread and count your blessings.
There must be some extended family or associates that can put you up somewhere in the country, if it comes to that, no? If that means you have to relocate somewhere you don’t like for a while, you still have to try. Or some social assistance? Some charity service that assists with room/board? Or someone you can borrow some money to buy a few more months of searching (relocating still sounds like the best idea, given the job situation there).
Keep fighting, even though your morale is depleted and you’ve been given a bad set of circumstances. Life is too precious, as Jeff said. You will be happy again. Don’t deny yourself that chance.
