Experience

It is now nearing three months since I left my last job. Though I was fed up with many things at my previous place of employment, I also loved many of the people I met and helped throughout my time there. I had a few offers at other places, and I was ready to start at one very promising opportunity before their funding was slashed. As for the others… well, let’s just say that the person who took one job had just finished his bachelor’s and had no job experience whatsoever, or none that he included on his LinkedIn profile. I turned the job down because after some back and forth, the salary was still only slightly over half what I was making in my last job. And that last job paid less than I was making ten years ago, in real, non-adjusted numbers.

Now, I am a bit frustrated by my complete and utter inability to convey the many things I could and would do in the right work situation. By “right,” I don’t mean perfect. While I might dream of free gym memberships, work-sponsored training opportunities, retirement plans, and decent health insurance, these are not the things that immediately grab my attention as I have been looking. I am drawn to job descriptions that list the things I do extremely well, with some additional preferred qualities that may be just slightly beyond my current capacity. I want to perform well, but I also want to learn and adapt to a new opportunity. It excites me to use my talents, to exercise and improve my skills, to bring my years and years of experience navigating and negotiating and listening and researching and writing. I am patient and willing to pitch in on boring tasks with everyone else, too. And I have proven this time and time again.

I am also close to sixty. I cannot help but speculate that a few employers figure that out and would rather hire young. My daughter at age twenty-two was hired as director of an organization with no experience and no salary expectations. Her pay was indecently low, and she rose to the difficult occasions she met on a daily basis. If she had stayed there and kept learning, she could have contributed so much more, grown with the job, anticipated the next year’s inevitable challenges, and grown. The organization would have grown. But she became fed up with the toxic culture and left. Another young graduate took her place. The cycle continues.

I was ambitious when I was younger, and I learned so much in the jobs I had over the years. Even working temp, I was amazed how much I could see as an outsider stepping into roles with no intention of staying. I worked in a machine tool factory office, followed the safety path lines on the floor to reach the administrative side of the business. It was in an area of town that often made the news for street violence, and I remember the poverty I saw driving to work for the month or so I was there. The owner took us to lunch one day at a diner nearby, and it was good, wonderful. It was something I had never seen before. I worked in a stockbroker’s office years ago, long enough ago that staff had ashtrays on the desks. Bitten nails, daily horse racing forms, cocaine in the bathroom, three-piece suits, yelling. I was glad the assignment was short, but it was exciting while it lasted. Advertising agency similar, with mercurial bosses, champagne toasts with a new client. The sewer product manufacturer had barbecues every so often. They were friendly sorts with an office way out in the county, but they were also globally known. I still see their trucks occasionally. I spent over a year in a temp-to-perm job writing and editing for the nuclear power industry. Essentially, we improved the readability of event reports from U.S.-based reactors, and published histories of reactors around the world. I still remember a great deal about boiler versus pressure reactors, but I have no idea whether the countries still hidden from us back then ever shared their information with the organization. Soviet reactors were different, somehow, but I never learned, and I believe that many details were unknown even to our technical experts. I can see how Chernobyl remained such a secret for so long back then. I worked for the CEO of a clothing manufacturer. When I went to France for a year, I saw him with his bodyguard at the airport, and he wrote to me in France. He confused Caen with Cannes in his note, but it was still a nice gesture. Coincidentally, he had met my dad years earlier, when my dad was the foreman on the construction job for the company headquarters where I worked. Small world.

I worked in museums, schools, medical offices, nonprofits, consulting firms. I saw a lot. I learned a lot. It is only in the last eight years that I have ever worked for a company with a 401K. One place offered matching.

I have worked a lot, but perhaps I was unfocused. I can say that now, in retrospect, but in the moment, I remember seeking mentors, advice, opportunities, friendly cooperative working relationships with clients and coworkers. It just never stuck. I can only think I did something wrong along the way, because I know that other people have had more success.

Well, I did do something wrong, and that was letting myself be deterred from the path that suited me best. It wasn’t my fault, and I’m not sure that filing a complaint would have put me in a better light. But it did knock the wind out of me when I was in my twenties, and I struggled enormously after that to trust camaraderie for its own sake.

I will keep networking and reaching out to job prospects. I need a paycheck, after all. There is no safety net here. I am grateful for so much in my life, but I feel so pessimistic right now that I will find anything, much less anything interesting or lucrative.