Category: Unemployment Diary

182 days

A.S. Gerdee, of 3251 Maypole(?) Street, working as a switchman at Proviso yard of C & NW RR, Chicago, Ill. (LOC)Give or take a few holidays and weekends (though after a couple weeks every day felt like Wednesday), that’s how long I’ve been out of work since being laid off in March. Last week I started a contract position in downtown St. Paul–an interesting project with good technical challenges to chew on, and a much-needed boost to the cash flow, but not exactly a return to full employment: the measure of my success will be how quickly I program myself out of a job.

The return to a schedule regulated from the outside is a little jarring. Summer was long and timeless, dedicated mostly to supervising the kids, going on adventures as part of my book project, and going through the motions of the job search. Now I’m expected to be at a particular place at a particular time, as are the boys, and my summertime routines of grocery shopping, meal preparation, and laundry have been disrupted. In some ways, it’s a relief not to have to plan out each hour; in other ways, it’s a hassle to comply with the bus schedule and meeting appointments.

During those 26 weeks, I’ve been able to do some thinking and reading, a little writing and picture-taking; I’m still digesting the lessons as I move into the next phase of my career. A few things that I’ve noticed and hope to unpack:

  • Unemployment is not a vacation. The open-ended nature of unemployment makes it hard to focus attention on projects that have a longer duration than a few days. Should I start on something that might be interrupted by a job offer? Can I afford to be too far from the phone and e-mail in case one of those job applications, interviews, or phone calls pans out? Is it wise to pass on a job interview that doesn’t sound like the kind of gig I’d like, just to work on something that isn’t focused on finding work? Budgeting time when you don’t know how much time you have is impossible.
  • The eternal values are truly valuable. Friends, neighbors, family: those are what count. The high points of the spring and summer–field trips with the boys, my birthday camping trip, our kayak and canoe voyages, National Night Out with the neighbors–all revolved around important people. And the private pleasures that sustained me–walking the dog, reading, writing–exist outside of the workaday economy. I find that I have a lot less patience now for the bullshit of the work world–the buzzwords and one-upmanship and petty politics–than I had before (and I had precious little patience for it before), because those things are all in service to very fleeting and ephemeral rewards.
  • Loyalty to institutions is overrated; loyalty to people is what matters. The corollary to the above is that we are far too willing, as employees in the modern economy, to give our employers far more loyalty than they deserve. Modern corporations, by and large, are not loyal to their employees; there are exceptions, but that they are so rare is what makes them exceptional. I’ve seen people who were dedicated and loyal employees get the ax in the first round of layoffs; and I’ve heard employers continue to spew the corporate loyalty lie while they trim their work force. One’s obligations to one’s employer ought to extend no further than the employment contract. Our loyalty should be to the quality of our work, to our ethical obligations to offer value to our customers, and to our co-workers when working in a team; and before that, our loyalty belongs to our families, friends, neighbors, and personal integrity. Corporations deserve no more loyalty than they actually extend, which lately has been very little.
  • Bill Holm and Carol Bly were right. About pretty much everything, but most importantly about the value of bold failure, the ethics of generosity, and the morality of poetry and music. I read a lot during my unemployment, and by far the best–timeless and urgent at once–were by these two cranky Minnesota treasures.

There are, I’m sure, many other things I’ve learned in the last five months and twenty-nine days, and I’m sure these lessons will change over time. The human mind is amazingly elastic, and oriented toward optimism (listen to this Daniel Gilbert presentation for some interesting insights into the psychology of happiness). I expect to keep some of the cynical edge I’ve acquired, and hope too to sustain the lessons in generosity; I’m hoping to pick up more new lessons as I enter this next phase in my career.

showing what you know

Last night I participated in the Board of Review process for a new Boy Scout troop founded by the graduates of the Cub Scout pack my sons belong to. It was the first time that I’ve been on the delivery end of the Board of Review process–I went through plenty of them myself as a Scout a quarter century ago–and it was an interesting experience. The purpose of the Board of Review, held when a Scout has completed the requirements for his next rank badge, isn’t so much to quiz the Scout–that’s for the Scoutmaster to do, and we take his word for it that all the requirements have been met–but to assess how well the troop is serving the Scout’s interests. It’s more of an “upward feedback” or “manager assessment” session, a rarity in the business world.

In the spaces between the four sessions (three Tenderfoot, one Second Class), I heard some interesting stories about of the Scoutmaster conferences from the troop committee chair . The troop’s Scoutmaster is a veteran Scout leader, with an encyclopedic knowledge of all the things that kids like to do and a deep commitment to Baden-Powell’s “game with a purpose”; he was the Cubmaster of the pack when I joined, and a big reason that we picked this pack.

One of the problems of twelve-year-old boys (and there are many…) is that they often know what they know, but can’t express it in words. When asked to describe how to set up a tent, or to name the rules for ax safety, or explain the first aid treatment for shock, they’ll stare blankly at you and fidget. Their hands might know all these things, but the pathways from hand to head to mouth are not quite cleared yet. Needless to say, most Boy Scouts, at least the younger ones, would not do well in a formal job interview.

During the Scoutmaster conference for one of the Second Class Scouts, which requires knowledge of first aid for a puncture wound, the Scoutmaster broke out a packet of theatrical blood and “punctured” his own hand. The Scout, who had been slouching and fidgeting through the verbal quiz, sprang into action, demonstrating that he knew what to do even if he couldn’t say it out loud.

It reminded me of a series of job interviews that I conducted when I did desktop support early in my IT career. The job was mostly about putting out fires, and there were plenty of fires to put out in those days: overloaded printer queues, missing network files, virus outbreaks, keyboards drowned in Diet Coke. During the interviews, conducted at my desk since I didn’t have the seniority required to book a conference room, I was frequently interrupted by fires. Rather than shoo the problems away, I sat back and let the candidate handle them. It let me see if they had the right combination of sang froid, courtesy, and technical know-how to handle the fragile computer environment of the early ’90s. It also gave me a breather for a few minutes.

In my current job search, I haven’t had an interview at all like this. Most IT interviews are thoroughly intellectual exercises: you get quizzed on some technical minutia and Java theology, demonstrate your grasp of TLAs and buzzwords, and then talk with the non-technical people about “opportunities” and “resources” and “initiatives.” Very little of it has to do with the actual day-to-day work. What would be more interesting and valuable would be if the candidate were given a real problem to solve–a web page that doesn’t parse, a servlet that doesn’t load–and the resources to solve it (an IDE and an Internet connection should suffice). In an alloted amount of time–15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, depending on the problem and the position–the candidate should at least show some progress toward solving the problem, and have some ideas for how to finish it up. The quality of the solution would much better demonstrate technical skills than the ability to rattle off some technical trivia.

I have a job interview this afternoon, where I expect to be asked the difference between an interface and an abstract class, the thread-safety status of vectors and array lists, and the merits of generics in JDK 1.5. These are roughly the same questions I’ve been asked for the last year and a half, and I’ve yet to find a real world problem that hinges on knowing the right answers. Perhaps I’ll break out the theatrical blood this time and demonstrate how to properly clean a wound.

the days are just packed

Calvin: Do you know what day it is?
Hobbes: Nope. Why?
Calvin:Oh, no reason. I was just curious. . . . I sure like summer vacation.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

In the spring, the great beneficiary of my employment situation was the dog. She was guaranteed a long walk every morning, in addition to an evening stroll, and had someone with thumbs available to open the back door whenever she found herself on the wrong side of the barrier.

Now it’s the boys who benefit from having me at home. Not that they’re at home much; since school ended, they’ve been roaming in a semi-feral pack up and down the alley between my house and their friend Pat’s. They check in for food, band-aids, and occasional referee services, but otherwise I know where they are just by the relative volume of boy shouts.

I think it’s generally a good thing for kids to have some unstructured, wild, wide-open time in the summer. Normally, they’d be at the park day camp all summer, which involves a lot of supervised playground time but also swimming lessons, group activities, and field trips. Their unstructured time was in the evening, from about four o’clock until the street lights come on; a good chunk of time, but not the kind of unstructured time I remember as a kid. (I feel sometimes like I grew up in the 1950s instead of the 1970s; my mother stayed home until I was about thirteen, and we usually lived in the safe, clean, subtly-supervised world of military housing, which resembled, and may still resemble, Beaver Cleaver’s subdivision.)

Unstructured time with other kids teaches them important lessons in following rules, making decisions, and sticking up for themselves, in addition to wearing them out. I’ve been called in less and less often to referee disagreements, and they seem happy to have found their spot in the pack: as two of the younger kids on the block, they don’t get to call as many tunes, but the other kids recognize that many games are more fun with more participants, so they get included in most activities. They also have a good sense of propriety–some of it natural, some of it subtly instilled through Cub Scouts (I’m a firm believer in Scouting as “a game with a purpose,” and make sure that all of our den meetings include lessons in fair play, inclusiveness, and good sportsmanship)–so I feel comfortable peeking in on them only about once an hour if I don’t hear screaming or smell smoke. I’m not quite the perfect idle parent, but I lean toward that end of the spectrum.

Alas, some structure will be imposed in the next few weeks, whether I find regular employment or not. They’ll be taking some morning classes at the middle school down the street, maybe a little music camp, and evening swimming and baseball. This imposition of structure has been met with significant unhappiness, of course; once they get to a class, they’re enthusiastic and excited, but there’s a hurdle to climb to get there.

A little structure is good for them, I think, and good for me, too. There’s plenty of summer surrounding the morning and evening activities, and I’ll be pressing them into service on another project that will require occasional field trips. Learning how to manage unstructured time is an important lesson, but so is learning to follow Dad’s recommendations.

Oft stubborn, peevish, sullen, pout, and cry

Oft stubborn, peevish, sullen, pout, and cry;
Then nought can please, and yet I know not why.
As many was my sins, so dangers too,
For sin brings sorrow, sickness, death, and woe,
And though I miss the tossings of the mind,
Yet griefs in my frail flesh I still do find.

Ann Bradstreet, The Four Ages of Man

There are plenty of reasons to be peevish about searching for a job, especially in a sour economy. The “opportunities” disappear as quickly as they appear, owing to budget changes, project plans, drastic changes in direction or stultifying fear. Interesting jobs attract many candidates in similar circumstances with similar skills, and differentiating yourself from the rest while staying basically honest is a daunting task. A general wariness and distrust hangs in the air, with hiring managers talking about how “we value our employees” and candidates saying wonderful things about their last employer, both knowing that there are worries, woes, and stings beneath the surface.

These are the existential condition of recession-era job hunting in the age of the across-the-board layoff; one gets used to them and generally accepts them. But there are a couple peeves that irk me in looking for information technology work that I don’t think we should have to accept; whether these exist in other lines of work I’m not sure, but I suspect they’re nearly universal.

Coy Recruiters

Technical recruiters are a different class of people from the IT professionals and employers they work with; I’ve only met a few who have an understanding of the technology beyond knowing which buzzwords go together, and all of the recruiters I’ve worked with have been salesmen to the core. Their job, after all, is to sell a candidate on an “opportunity,” and to sell the hiring manager on the candidate; sometimes it’s a case of honest matchmaking, with attempts to find the right fit for both, but more often it’s all about the sale.

That’s fine enough; I’m used to the pitch-man approach and I can dissect the lingo. And I’m sure I’m not the only candidate who tends toward the taciturn when the recruiter really gets pitching. What really bothers me, though, is when they play coy.

I get the sense that there’s some cut-throat competition in the recruiter world, with everyone angling for a limited pool of jobs. In addition to making their matches, they’re also trying to extract leads and protect their turf, which explains the “I can’t tell you who the client is; but I can assure you they’re a top-notch, premium, exclusive company you’d love to work for.”

From the candidate’s perspective, though, this is simply annoying. We need to know where we’re applying to ensure that we aren’t submitting multiple applications for the same job, and to be sure that this really is the sort of place we’d like to work. It wastes our time to go through five minutes of pitch before we get to the punchline, the punchline being that the client is a company we’ve either applied to already, or for whom you couldn’t pay us enough to work.

This game is especially annoying when the recruiter is reading off the same job description as every other recruiter. It doesn’t take long to recognize the patterns and match the description to the company; most candidates will already have seen the same description on Monster or Dice, or heard it from another recruiter just minutes earlier.

I suppose that some enterprising candidate could game the system somehow if they had this crucial piece of information up front, or could try to scoop the recruiter and pass the “confidential” information on to another recruiter. But by the time the job description has been floating around Monster.com for a couple days, the cat is out of the bag as far as confidentiality goes. It would be much less annoying to start the conversation with, “I’ve got a job at XYZ Company; you interested?”

Redundant, repetitive, and non-portable resumés

This is a problem for everyone, but it especially irks technologists. I’ve got profiles on multiple job search sites, and a couple versions of my resume in Word and PDF formats, but every time I apply for a job online or get beyond the initial phone call with a recruiter, I’m filling out the same information yet again in a slightly different format.

When I start filling out one of these forms, the first thought that goes through my mind is, “This is a job for XML!” The same pieces of information are required for everyone; the data types are largely universal; I should be able to provide my resume in an XML format and have the recipient parse it to the format of their personal delight.

I’ve found that there are at least two XML formats for resumés: one from the HR-XML Consortium, to which Monster belongs, and an open-source XML Resume Library which appears to be abandoned (no development since 2004, no forum activity since 2008). Neither appears to be in use by anyone.

This seems like a great opportunity for streamlining, rationalizing, and simplifying the hiring process. There would need to be a large enough number of adopters to start to sway the environment, but the benefit to everyone–candidates, recruiters, hiring managers, HR–should be clear. A standardized XML format for resumes would make searching, storing, matching, and managing resumé data much simpler than it is now. If I could provide my resumé, or a subset of it, to employers in an XML format, I would spend far less time being annoyed at them for not using technology to solve real problems.

Hmmm… if any employers are interesting in integrating HR-XML (which looks like the most stable format) into their hiring workflow, or if any technical recruiters would like an education on why they should accept only XML resumes, drop me a line; maybe I can turn this peeve into a gig . . .

Spare these, and let thy time be when it will

At thy contagious darts, that wound the heads
Of weeping friends, who wait at dying beds.
Spare these, and let thy time be when it will;
My bus’ness is to die, and thine to kill.
Gently thy fatal scepter on me lay,
And take to thy cold arms, insensibly, thy prey.

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea

It’s hard not to be of a somewhat macabre mind when looking at two disasters that are converging this week: if, in a novel, the swine flu outbreak had arrived in the midst of a global financial crisis, the reader would either (a) dismiss this as a preposterous coincidence, or (b) prepare for more post-apocalyptic excess, like zombies or mutant hordes. Though I suspect we’ll see a rise in the number of confirmed cases over the next few days, I hope that we avoid an outbreak of pandemic scale (and also avoid the zombies and mutants).

Still, I wonder what impact the unemployment numbers will have on the spread of the disease? I could imagine them being a brake on the spread of the flu; nearly 10% of the work force is circulating through offices and factories far less than they did a year ago, keeping their germs to themselves and not picking up any new microbes. Indeed, as the flu ravages society, leaving places of business empty in its wake, the unemployed may become the vanguard for saving civilization, the last best hope to rebuild society after the collapse. Perhaps the stimulus package ought to contain some guidestone construction.

But gallows humor won’t be very helpful in averting disaster. Good handwashing (and remember, as my second-graders remind me, to sneeze into your elbow, not your hand!) and staying home when sick have already been suggested; and the U.S. government has acted quickly to release resources. Looming disasters are best met promptly, forcefully, and calmly; perhaps we’ve learned at least that much from the recent past.

yet what grim society

. . . Peterson’s

calls them ‘social creatures,’ yet what grim
society: identical pilgrims,

seed-like, brittle, pausing on the path
only three seconds to touch another’s

face, some hoisting the papery carcasses
of their dead in their jaws, which open and close

like the clasp of a necklace.

Ants by Joanie Mackowski

It’s starting to feel like summer now–Minnesota springs are a short and unpredictable affair–and one of the sure signs that things are warming up beneath ground is the sudden activity of ants.

At the bus stop this morning, I noticed a swarm of them running along the seam in the sidewalk. When the kids joined me down on my hands and knees over the ants’ busy errands, we noticed that they were traveling a two-lane highway between twin hills on either side of the sidewalk. Surely there’s some huge subterranean metropolis underneath the sidewalk itself, where the queen is busy producing more citizens to go about their constant work. These are tiny ants, smaller than a fingernail clipping, and the queen’s flight must have gone unnoticed a week or two ago.

We all know Aesop’s story of the “Ants and the Grasshopper,” in which the diligent ants are shown to be better adapted to winter survival than the profligate grasshopper, who spends a lazy summer playing and singing when he should be storing food away for lean times. In the Disney version, the ant is invited into the queen’s court where he earns his food by fiddling for the colony; in the original version, though, the grasshopper (or cricket or dung beetle; versions vary) is cast back into the cold when he comes begging, we assume to die in a snowbank. In any case, it’s one of those stories that we’ve interpreted as having a message that is not only practical but moral.

Less well known is Aesop’s fable of Ants and the Pigs. Like the grasshopper’s ants, this is another colony that spends all summer hard at work, collecting grain for the winter. But in the fall, a herd of pigs descends on the colony and gobbles up their stores. The moral, it would seem, is that the miserly gathering of material wealth is vanity: all our efforts will be for naught against the rapaciousness of thieves.

Taking moral lessons from insects is probably unwise. In more recent times, E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, which grew in part out of his work with ants, was given a simplistic just-so-story interpretation and attacked as neo-Social Darwinism. (Wilson’s approach wasn’t so different from the anarchist Petr Kropotkin’s in Mutual Aid, though Wilson was armed with better scientific methods and skills of observation.) Ants are intrinsically interesting, have yielded a lot of useful information about chemical communication, and are a good distraction for kids waiting at the bus stop, but not a very useful metaphor for human behavior.

After the bus came, the dog and I continued on our morning walk, no doubt hurrying past many more Formicidaen cities. We didn’t notice, and I suspect that the ants didn’t notice, either.

Directed as by madness

I saw a ship of martial build
(Her standards set, her brave apparel on)
Directed as by madness mere
Against a stolid iceberg steer,
Nor budge it, though the infatuate ship went down.

Herman Melville, The Berg (A Dream)

The Titanic has been a major topic of discussion at my house for a couple months. I’m not sure where the interest in all things shipwreck-and-iceberg related came from–these obsessions are often a mystery to me–but the boys have devoured every book on the Titanic from the Minneapolis Library’s children’s section, and a fair number from the adult section. They know all the facts and figures about the ship’s size, means of propulsion, and passenger accommodations (as I’ve noted before, kids are really smart about the things they care about), and they ask a lot of really tough questions about why it sank and how the sinking was handled.

Their interest in the Titanic is probably similar to the interest that some kids have in fairy tale monsters and horror stories: they’ve found something that they fear, and by learning as much about it as they can they master that fear, or at least build contingencies around it. We’ve had similar discussions about Pompeii, tornadoes, and plane crashes, and I always try to respect their concerns and their solutions, and work out plans with them about what to do if we should suddenly encounter, say, a volcanic eruption somewhere in South Minneapolis.

One of their favorite books has been Eyewitness: Titanic. Like all the Eyewitness books, it’s packed with pictures and facts. And at the end of the book, it covers some “lessons learned” from the inquiries following the disaster. Many of these lessons were implemented, and passenger lines were considerably safer afterward.

It’s interesting that in transportation generally, humans are good at learning from their mistakes; one of our Cub Scout leaders drives the historic trolley at Lake Harriet, and he has explained to us that “every page of the motorman’s manual is written in blood.” And it’s equally interesting, and tragic, that we don’t apply our “lessons learned” in other spheres of human endeavor. So in the service of trying to apply the motorman’s and ship captain’s ethic to the current malaise, here are a few things that people learned after the Titanic sank that might make sense for our economic future.

Enough lifeboats for everyone

The tragedy of the Titanic was that there weren’t enough lifeboats for everyone on board. It carried 20 boats, with a maximum capacity of 1,178 people, but there were at least 2,223 passengers and crew. There were enough lifebelts for everyone, but since most of the victims died of hypothermia rather than drowning those were cruelly useless.

We have a similar lack of lifeboats in the American economy. As companies have shed employees like so much ballast, they’re being cast into choppy waters without benefit of health care, limited unemployment benefits, and little assistance to keep their homes. Indeed, many states are in the process of setting their lifeboats ablaze, cutting spending on social services as their revenues drop, precisely at the time when those services are most desperately needed.

The Titanic was in full compliance with British shipping regulations, though it could have carried more lifeboats. The White Star Line didn’t carry more lifeboats because they feared that the decks would be too cluttered with more boats, and the new and larger lifeboats were too expense. We’re similarly fearful of clutter and expense when we talk about improving our social safety net in the United States; but clutter and expense seem like minor inconveniences when the ship starts to sink.

Keep in radio contact

Another tragedy of the Titanic occurred in the radio operator’s room. Throughout the day of April 12, the Titanic’s wireless received numerous reports of heavy ice fields and large icebergs from other ships in the area. But the operators were too busy sending out vanity messages for the first-class passengers (radio from ships was a great novelty) to pass the warnings along. Indeed, when the last call about ice came in around 23:00, the Titanic’s operator snapped, “Shut up, shut up, I am busy” and took no more warnings.

When the tragedy occurred, and the Titanic began sending out its distress signals, the nearest ships were too far to respond. Some had even shut down their radios for the night. A massive failure of communication is at least in part to blame for the Titanic’s sinking.

The “Shut up, shut up, I am busy” response sounds a little like CNBC and the rest of the financial news industry in the years leading up to the financial meltdown. Though there were signs of trouble in the sub-prime and derivatives markets, and reasonable people were asking questions about unreasonable practices, exuberance was the tone of the day. The financial programs continued to send vanity messages from the first-class passengers long after the economy began to sink, drowning out the warnings and criticism that would have been very useful indeed to hear.

Water-tight compartments and firewalls go only so far

The Titanic was “unsinkable,” in large part because of its innovative design. It had sixteen “water-tight compartments” that could contain flooding to a section of the ship while protecting the rest of the ship, making it far more likely to survive without sinking. Unfortunately, the bulkheads proved not to be entirely water-tight, and five were breached by the collision and subsequent flooding; when the five compromised bulkheads filled with water, the Titanic snapped in half.

We’ve seen a similar failure in our economy, where financial institutions that should be protected from each other–mortgages, insurance, investment–have proved to be dangerously interwoven. AIG “insured” incredibly foolish investments in incredibly foolish mortgage instruments, compromising what we’ve always been taught to believe is a safe and boring part of the economy. And when enough of the bulkheads failed across the financial industry, the economy snapped in half, sinking industries in now way directly related to the ones that caused the crisis.

Truly “water tight” engineering would have been inconvenient on the Titanic, forcing people to go up and down between decks to travel from stem to stern. And regulatory firewalls between, say, insurance and speculation, would have been likewise inconvenient and put a brake on the “innovation” in the financial markets. Sometimes brakes are good to have.

The Greeks had a word for it …

And that word, of course, was “hubris.” If you really believe that you’re unsinkable, indestructible, you’ll be very unlikely to heed warnings and build contingency plans. Of course the Titanic didn’t need more than 20 lifeboats; of course we don’t need to weigh down our economy with the taxes necessary to build a social safety net; the ship will sail on, the economy will grow, and everything will always be good and getting better.

The opposite of hubris is humility. It’s a recognition that “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley” and that we can’t always predict the nature and the hour of their collapse. Contingency planning, frugality, and caution are useful tendencies to cultivate, but it’s too late to cultivate them after the disaster strikes. We can only hope that they’ll be written down and codified in preparation for the next disaster, so even if we can’t avoid the icebergs we can at least save all the passengers and crew.

a solace of ripe plums

. . . They taste
good to her

You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand

Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her

William Carlos Williams

Reading the Confessions of a Bailout CEO Wife at Portfolio.com without giving in to boiling rage is a good exercise in the sort of sympathy and decency that Carol Bly urges, or maybe in Keatsian negative capability. The anonymous author, spouse of the CEO of a financial firm that has taken TARP money, bemoans the fact that she must now make her daily decisions “according to a complex algorithm: balancing the need to look like your world hasn’t crumbled beneath you . . . with the need to appear duly repentant for your subprime sins.” She has been forced to tone down her husband’s annual birthday party, curtail her shopping, and ship gifts to people so as not “to be spotted climbing into a taxi, laden with Bergdorf Goodman shopping bags.” She recognizes that “people are angry—angry at those they view as responsible for the subprime crisis and the subsequent economic meltdown,” but she deftly shifts the blame “to any number of culprits:”

to Alan Greenspan, who encouraged the loose-money policies that undermined the pricing of risk; to Barney Frank, who cudgeled Fannie Mae into supporting loans to unfit homebuyers; to the rating agencies that were ethically compromised; to the subprime-mortgage brokers who chased fees and ignored any accountability; to the investors who didn’t do their homework and absurdly leveraged up their balance sheets. . . . And yes, I blame those who were in charge of the big banks—including my husband—for not seeing the default tsunami coming. But almost no one did. Everyone knows this, yet financial CEOs have replaced the Mob as the most despised group in the country.

My natural response is anger at her myopia. From her perch, she doesn’t see the ripple effect that the poor decisions made by her husband and his peers have had on the economy, and on the lives of millions of people who have had to make decisions far more dire, far more costly to spirit and soul and heart, than to forgo a new spring wardrobe or fly coach. Swimming in a sea of privilege, she can’t recognize the flood that the collapse of the financial institutions has brought to people who have never had the opportunity to give up the extravagances and indulgences that she and her family enjoyed during the good years. Indeed, she can’t possibly understand that many of those good years came at the expense of other people, and that the check for the “multi-star Michelin hotspots” and “opening night at the Metropolitan Opera” is being picked up by exactly the people who have been damaged.

But anger is too easy, and maybe a little too gratifying. She can’t step out of her own shoes, and that’s a terrible pity; but we can try to slip into her shoes and feel the way they pinch, even if they are a tad more comfortable than our own. Failure is, after all, a relative thing; a fall from a high place can be as devastating as a fall from a low, and sometimes more so.

The Bailout CEO Wife is expressing a “quiet desperation” that Thoreau would certainly have recognized. She admits that “we aren’t facing the prospect of losing our home or having to turn to our families to support us,” but she has worries about money and also has to contend with a public scrutiny that the rest of us who have suffered in the failed economy don’t face. A large part of her role, after all, has been to project an image of success and stability, to support her husband’s reputation as a Wall Street lion, to provide lavish gifts and grants not unlike a Kwakiutl potlatch. And now that role has changed drastically, and the old skills she honed are no longer of value; indeed, the old ways of doing things are certain doom.

She is also suffering on behalf of her husband:

Here is the reality: TARP managers are scared to death. The executives of these companies are desperately trying to hold their businesses together while complying with a slew of damaging bills flooding out of Congress. My husband has battled the shutdown of the credit markets and a deteriorating business environment for two endless years without respite. He’s exhausted, terrified of losing the company, and beaten down by the constant criticism hurled at him.

If her world has frayed a bit, his is in danger of completely unraveling. “For a person whose life has been punctuated mainly by success—from perennial class president and high-school sports star to Ivy League MBA—failure is the worst of all nightmares.” We have to assume that she loves him, though she doesn’t say so, and so suffers with his loss.

I don’t mean to be an apologist for the ancien régime. There’s a fire-breathing anarchist in my heart, after all, a Leveller who rages at the unjust distribution of wealth and the rapacious treatment of the working and middle classes both before and during the fall. The Bailout CEO Wife is still convinced that “the trappings of success were earned and not given,” when indeed those trappings have more often than not been stolen, if not from the present workers (whose real earnings have barely nudged upward in the last several decades while CEO salaries and bonuses have soared), then from the future in the form of massive bailouts to prop up the crumbling monuments to excess. If bringing the wealthy down a peg will bring the poor up, then I have trouble seeing the tragedy in her reduced circumstances.

But, alas, it’s unlikely that there will be a rise from the bottom in proportion to the fall from the top. For all the hand-wringing on the Right about President Obama’s impugned “socialism,” he’s hardly a socialist by any reasonable definition. The means of production remain solidly in the hands of the ownership class, and the sweeping reforms we so badly need in health care, credit, and education are unlikely to be enacted with the same swift necessity as TARP. Instead, the misery felt by the Bailout CEO Wife simply adds to the general pool of misery that has already been moldering for decades.

No, what I’m suggesting is that Schadenfreude, though a deeply satisfying emotion, is not productive. Instead, I would like to imagine that the Bailout CEO Wife’s struggles will have some positive effect on her soul, if not on the national mood. I can identify with her angst, though on a much-reduced level, and I’ve found that there is indeed value in my reduced circumstances. I spend more time at the library and at art museums than I ever did before; I have a better sense of what is truly valuable, and what is mere dross; I find that I can enjoy things like a good loaf of bread, or a long walk with the dog, or getting lost in a novel or story, whether I have a job or not. And when I do have a job again, when the Bailout CEO Wife’s husband’s damage to the economy has finally healed, I’ll still have the things that are valuable.

And most important, through the loss of work and through good teachers like Bill Holm and Carol Bly, I’ve expanded my ability to sympathize with other people. I feel bad for the Bailout CEO Wife, just like I feel bad for people who never received a bailout and never will; I’m angry at the injustice that shields some people from the brunt of the disaster while unleashing its furies on others, regardless of merit, but I recognize that there’s suffering all along the continuum.

And my hope for the Bailout CEO Wife is not that “some other group will come along to absorb all the frustration and anger” and let her return to her previous lifestyle, but that this experience will jar her into feeling sympathy for others and taking pleasure in simple things like bread and books and plums.

Unemployment Diary: thousands to his bidding speed

. . . But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, ‘God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.’

The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (Modern Library), Sonnet 19: On his blindness

March 30, 2009

Jack and Peter (especially Peter) have lately been fascinated with playing hearts. Peter is starting to catch on to the strategy of the game, and he mumbles under his breath, Rain-Man-like, as he figures out what cards to play. He takes it very seriously, and asks me lots of questions when I beat him (I never let them win at games, if I think it’s a game they can master).

Using card games as a metaphor for life is generally a bad idea; it leads to things like Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler.” I once tried to write a short story that revolved around a strange Wisconsin trump game, “Sheep’s Head,” that involves a truncated deck, a “blind,” and the strategy of “burying Schneider,” but it didn’t work out, largely because I didn’t understand the game. About the only time I’ve seen it successfully used was in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, when the Yankee uses a poker metaphor–”a new deal”–to describe how he plans to reorganize King Arthur’s feudalist society, more than forty years before FDR resurrected the image.

Still, I can’t help but get a little philosophical about hearts. I had a double major in college–English and sociology–but I minored in hearts. More nights than I care to remember, I sat at the Country Kitchen in DePere, Wisconsin, with a giant sweet roll, a bottomless pot of coffee, a deck of cards, and three friends. I got pretty good, but I was never as good as Bob Kennedy.

Bob was a naturally gifted poet–one of those people who could turn a perfect image or a stunning few lines with no apparent effort. But I was always critical of his lack of follow-through, his refusal to edit, his reliance on a big personality when there was so much else he could bring to a poem. He didn’t seem to care, though, and when I was editing the college literary magazine I couldn’t help but take most of what he submitted, even when he submitted it under a pseudonym and never admitted to it (more about that some other time). I sweated and toiled over every syllable, and buried most of what I wrote in tattered notebooks that I never showed anyone; Bob shouted out imperfect but evocative jumbles and seemed pleased with the rough drafts.

There was more under the surface, though. I remember one day Bob asked me if I had ambition. We were reading Milton, I think, the most ambitious of English poets–he was going to out-Homer Homer, out-Virgil Virgil, and write the epic poem to end all epic poems. And he did, I think, though maybe there are no great epics after “Paradise Lost” (except maybe “Moby Dick”) in part because the epic fell out of fashion.

Of course I had ambition, I said; I was obviously going to be a great poet. I read Hopkins, Eliot, Yeats, I had huge ambitions. That I knew those ambitions were out of proportion to my talents, I never admitted, even to myself. Bob just nodded, seemed a little sad, and said that he didn’t have any ambitions. And then we went to Country Kitchen and played hearts.

Twenty years later, Bob and I are at roughly the same place. He’s married, has two kids, lives in Green Bay, and from what I can tell is happy, and funny, and as full of life as he was in college. And I’m married with two kids, living in Minneapolis, and still wondering if ambition is a useful virtue or one facet of the deadly sins.

What does this have to do with hearts? Not much. There may be some lessons in the game, though. It’s a loser’s game–avoid taking any tricks, keep your head down, play from the bottom of your suit, and you’ll do well. That’s my strategy. And if you do have ambition, the best you can do is lose big, “shoot the moon,” take all the hearts and the queen of spades, too, and share the suffering with your opponents. I rarely try to shoot the moon, preferring the slow and steady accumulation of nothingness.

Bob was a moon-shooter, and a good one. He knew how to flame out in style, and that one small victory, one slip of letting someone else take the fall on a trick, is the path to ruin.

In The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth, Bill Holm writes about Lángavitleysa, “The Long Craziness,” an Icelandic children’s card game that resembles the American game “war.” There are no winners possible in “The Long Craziness,” just a stalemate in the trenches ending in exhaustion–it’s the perfect bedtime game, sure to wear down the toughest little player. But I suspect, given his celebration of the Icelanders who failed on the prairie, that Holm was a champion hearts player, and bold moon-shooter.

Unemployment Diary: A Mob of Solid Bliss

They storm the earth and stun the air,
A mob of solid bliss.
Alas! that frowns could lie in wait
For such a foe as this!

Saturday Afternoon by Emily Dickinson

March 27, 2009

Today was a good day. There were no “leads” from recruiters, no “updates” on “opportunities” that had suddenly dried up in the harsh sun of fear and trepidation, no new job postings on the Internet. Instead, I spent the afternoon with a bunch of second graders.

In the boys’ classes, each student has a week of being the “star,” which culminates in a visit from a family member. Usually, Kelly and I take turns on the visit. In Kindergarten, I read a book about moose on Peter’s day, and Kelly presented areal photos of the school on Jack’s; in first grade, I showed scale models of mountains and talked about Mount Washington to Peter’s class, and Kelly showed storm sewer plans and pictures; and this fall, I gave a knot tying demonstration to Jack’s class. Peter’s day should have been Kelly’s turn, but given my current situation it made sense for me to do a repeat performance.

Peter’s favorite thing in the world is visiting his grandfather in Maine. We ride his little Koboda dump truck in the woods, build tree forts, go kayaking on North Pond, and search for the elusive moose. So he wanted me to give a talk about Maine to his class.

I talked about some of the similarities between Maine and Minnesota: the climate, the wildlife, the geology. They had covered some American tall tales earlier in the year, so I told some Paul Bunyan stories (Paul being a native of Bangor, Maine, who came west with the lumberjacks). I talked about some Maine writers they might know about: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Portland native, gave his name to our Minneapolis neighborhood, and wrote about Minnehaha Falls, though he never visited; E.B. White, whom they all knew through Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, summered in Maine; and Robert McCloskey wrote two of his best books about Maine–Blueberries for Sal and One Morning in Maine–and big drawings from Make Way for Ducklings are on the walls in the downtown St. Paul Library. The kids, who sat on the rug in front of me, were engaged, often raising their hands with comments and questions, and it was a fun back and forth.

When I brought out some rocks and minerals from Maine, though, the floodgates opened. As I learned at a Cub Scout meeting about collections, kids love rocks. Everyone had a favorite kind of rock, many had rock tumblers, and all of them had really good and astute questions about geology; I was well out of my depth, and I asked them as many questions as they asked me. Kids are really smart about the things they love.

After my talk, which took about half an hour and flew by quickly, I was invited to join them on the playground for recess. Peter usually spends his recess spinning a jump rope with his teacher–he doesn’t jump himself, but he loves turning the rope. But he insisted that we play tag, and joined in for a rollicking session with more than half the

kids in the class while the rest jumped rope or played on the slides. I was surprised at how good natured the tag game was: no shoving, no yelling, no arguing about who was “it,” just a lot of running and laughing with an insistence on full participation by everyone. I was the main target of tagging, maybe because I’m old and slow, but I did my best to keep up with them.

When the whistle blew, I was out of breath, probably red in the face, and sorry to have my recess come to an end. I helped herd them inside for a drink of water and their last lessons, and scurried off to the coffee shop down the street to catch my breath and wait for the end of the school day.

I like kids a lot more than I like most adults, especially elementary school kids. There’s no pretense or bragging among second-graders; if they tell you they like something, they mean it; if they boast about an accomplishment, it’s because they’re sincerely proud of it. They also don’t hide their boredom; if you’re not interesting them, they’ll let you know, with no subtlety or attempts to protect your feelings. Kids live on the edge, with their emotions always close to the surface, and, at least at the boys’ school, they still have their curiosity and sense of wonder intact. They’re eager to learn, and if you can present the material in an engaging way that aims to their level without talking down to them, I’m convinced they can be taught anything. And with that boundless energy behind them, a gang of second-graders with a purpose is unstoppable.

After school, we went to the library to look for books about the Titanic–the boys’ current obsession–and pick up Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary which I had ordered a couple weeks ago. We ran into another of my Cub Scouts there, and the three of them lay down in the middle of the floor to pore over a pop-up book about the doomed unsinkable ship. (It’s a great book, by the way, very cleverly done and packed with facts, but it does seem a grim topic for a pop-up …) If I didn’t have to get home to fix supper, I’m sure they’d be there still.

I’ve given some thought to making a career change, and becoming a teacher. I’ve always been a “kid magnet,” even before I had my own, and I love my Cub Scout den and pack. Teaching is hard and exhausting work, and far too poorly compensated (why is it that we pay people so well at AIG and CitiBank to so badly manage our money, but pay teachers so poorly to educate and nurture our children?), but it’s work that means something. Finish a software project on time and on budget, and you’ll get a little praise, maybe a raise, but the world won’t likely be any better or worse than it was without that project; teach a kid to read, or work with fractions, or about the life cycle of the moose, and if you’ve done it right you’ve changed a life.

I used to approach software with a sense of wonder and excitement, and in my last job often had a chance to be creative and playful, but the fun has really drained from it in the last few years. Even though I was tired after my brief visit to second grade, and was kept on my toes with questions that came faster and more insistently than in any technical interview, I came away from the school energized in a way I haven’t felt for years.

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