One of the positive things about viewing Unemploymentville as a destination, as a travel destination especially, is it makes it easier to think about it as being some place you travel through as temporary surroundings.

There is a reader comment on Amazon on the book, Landing on the Right Side of Your Ass: A Survival Guide for the Recently Unemployed about what if you don’t land on the right side of your ass and they talk about how they took a huge pay cut and the jobs that they had does not really exist anymore at the level that they had it.

They basically asked the question what then? What if you don’t land on the right side of your ass? That question actually haunted me for a really long time.

Landing on the Right Side of Your Ass does end with a chapter on negotiating your job offer and the assumption that you are going to find something that is a step up potentially from where you were. One thing that I think is important and is true for me a little bit, for one of my friends a lot,

sometimes the way out of unemployment does not look particularly good

Your first stop, your very next stop out of being unemployed may not look that promising but that does not mean it can’t lead to something awesome.

Some of it leading to something awesome maybe you finding, using it as a tool to get to something better. So if you had a job that was a great match for your skills and your education and now the only job offer you have is to work at a quick store and the hours suck and the pay suck. Don’t assume that that means you will never be where you were before in terms of job satisfaction or salary. There can be a lot of stops in between.

I like to use the expression that the job I took after my most recent experience being unemployed was my date-to-the-prom job. I had had a really rough experience being unemployed, I had a job offer in December to start in January, I accepted it. I took myself of consideration for other jobs when I accepted that job. I got to January and the company cancelled the job offer.

I had filled out 401k paperwork, I filled out health benefits paperwork, I had done the drug test. I thought I was there and they cancelled and the recruiter said they had never seen that happen before and I thought, “Oh great” that is really a distinction I love, being the only person this company ever crapped on in this manner.

I interviewed, I landed another job in March, it was supposed to start in April. This time I had to supply my college diploma copy, submit for a background check, do a drug test. Everything is good. I’m even given a userid and password and instructions on how I should record the hours that I work. And then, unbelievably, once again, the job did not happen. They actually never cancelled the job offer, they just told me that they thought I should “no longer hold for that position.” They said that they still had not gotten final approval for the position and therefore I should continue my job search.

Again a different recruiter said they had NEVER seen anything like it even though they had worked for the company for years.

Long story short. I got my third job offer, actually I had two job offers on the third round which came in early May. Neither of them was awesome, they were a big drop down salary wise.

My husband asked me, “Do you want to just keep looking? Because the salaries are less than what you were offered before, the commute is very long, neither one of them is exactly what you are looking for.

I said, “No I don’t want to keep looking”. And here is why.

I said, “This is my date to the prom job” as in your senior year of high school and everybody else is making plans to go to the prom and you do not want to be sitting at home on prom night. So you don’t need to find the love of your life, someone you want to be with forever, you just need to find someone you like to go to the prom with, so you aren’t stuck home while everyone else goes to the party.

Well I was sick to death of sitting at home unemployed, without a job, and every day everybody else including my husband went off to work. I was sick of sitting at home, I was not going to sit at home any more. This job made it so I did not have to sit at home.

It was not my dream job, it was not the love of my life, but it got me out of the house and THAT was awesome.

The funny thing is, it developed in to an incredibly awesome job and actually some of it being so awesome was just luck. A project came in about three weeks after I started that because I did not have other ongoing work responsibilities they put me on and it was a huge project and I was in on day one. Anyway it has worked out great.

My point is, and I hope I am not being too preachy on this.

Unemploymentville, it is a place you travel through, it is not a permanent place. The only way it is permanent is if you stop traveling. As the unknown poet writes, if you are tired you are discouraged, it is okay to take a rest but do not quit. Do not give up on yourself and do not assume just because the job that you are offered is crappy or seems crappy on some level, that you will never get to a job you like again.

That is kind of harsh labeling jobs downright crappy, but some of them seem pretty crappy when compared to where you have been. But that does not mean your whole life is going to be that. It is a job. It is your step out of unemployment.

An upcoming post will talk about other paths out unemployment aside from landing a job.