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[theinevitable]

OK, I did a stupid thing where my quotes are actually around a major paraphrase.

although I did think it was weird that she didn't understand why someone with a college degree would want to work at a (hip?) restaurant.

I think she was trying to feel out whether this was a "I'll work here for 2 months, and then leave when I get a better job" thing. My friend didn't get a job because he apparently came across that way.

[wombat]

Uh, "weird," yeah. Is this person really in the restaurant business? Does she not understand that many people with degrees and skills work as waiters while they do their creative work, go to school to get other jobs, etc?

And, duh, of course you'll work there for two months and leave when you get a better job. But it's a valuable career skill to have the sense not to be obvious about that in an interview.

[Doc]

She wants someone that's really going to commit to being a busboy.

[greenkoolayd]

apparently, you dont look desperate enough to be a busboy fo lyfe, d.

[wombat]

Don't feel bad dude, in 1990 I had a guy at a Chili's say the same kind of thing to me. And a guy in a gas station. And a guy in Viva Mexicana!

I started leaving out that I'd degreed at the local university and got two jobs in a minute.

I also leave some of my education out of some of my job applications. Americans don't believe in downward mobility.

[Carlos del Vaca]

Yeah, "overqualified" gets your resume thrown out all too often.  Sometimes you may be overqualified, but you really need a damn job.

[littlefallsmets]

Americans don't believe in downward mobility.

Even though it is the rule now.

[theinevitable]

ah, the problem then would be when they noticed that I had never had a job longer than 2 or 3 months, with 9 month gaps in between.

[theinevitable]

You just keep lying to make yourself feel better, skippy.

I keep having these mental images of you(r avatar) in a brawl with the Union Stewards from my store. Two tough ladies v. mad-scientist-cartoon.

[greenkoolayd]

Don't feel bad dude, in 1990 I had a guy at a Chili's say the same kind of thing to me. And a guy in a gas station. And a guy in Viva Mexicana!

I started leaving out that I'd degreed at the local university and got two jobs in a minute.

i had considerably less cares in 1990........

[littlefallsmets]

I know that my perspective might be occluded by my own circumstance, Ash, but everything I read and hear and nearly everyone I've talked to who wasn't either born with advantage or had the ability to work to establish the groundwork of their situations many years ago suggests that this is the most difficult time to start an effort at upward class mobility since the first Great Depression at least.

Perhaps part of it is that I am some kind of neurotic decadent wanna-be artist, a child of the upper working class convinced in the late Eighties that I was special and could do anything easily and so I can't bounce back from failure as well as children of different decades (to reference Achewood) and all of that, and that I probably run in circles of similarly permanent cripples and failed seekers looking for existensial validation at the price of 2MB a hit. Maybe it exaggerates this feeling for me, I'll grant.

But every other news piece on the radio or television or newspaper or internet newssite seems to be screaming that the gap between the top 1% and Everyone Else is growing, growing absurdly and continuing on that spiral of absurdity.

Again, I give you that the ghosts in my own head might inflate the purportion of this trend, but these numbers and newspieces would suggest that whether we personally made our hay while the sun was shining or not, Downward Mobility is the new black. Things may have not changed forever but they seem to have changed for now and for a while to come.

[jay-ell]

I know that my perspective might be occluded by my own circumstance, Ash, but everything I read and hear and nearly everyone I've talked to who wasn't either born with advantage or had the ability to work to establish the groundwork of their situations many years ago suggests that this is the most difficult time to start an effort at upward class mobility since the first Great Depression at least.

Perhaps part of it is that I am some kind of neurotic decadent wanna-be artist, a child of the upper working class convinced in the late Eighties that I was special and could do anything easily and so I can't bounce back from failure as well as children of different decades (to reference Achewood) and all of that, and that I probably run in circles of similarly permanent cripples and failed seekers looking for existensial validation at the price of 2MB a hit. Maybe it exaggerates this feeling for me, I'll grant.

But every other news piece on the radio or television or newspaper or internet newssite seems to be screaming that the gap between the top 1% and Everyone Else is growing, growing absurdly and continuing on that spiral of absurdity.

Again, I give you that the ghosts in my own head might inflate the purportion of this trend, but these numbers and newspieces would suggest that whether we personally made our hay while the sun was shining or not, Downward Mobility is the new black. Things may have not changed forever but they seem to have changed for now and for a while to come.

Being of LFM's decade and of such a person who worked incredibly fuck*ng hard to make hay even while the sun did still shine, and still finding myself struggling financially, and also seeing many of my college-degreed friends and relatives completely and unfathomably out of any kind of work for months and even years, and those who aren't completely unemployed are mostly waiting tables and selling shoes, which makes me think that perhaps Ash is just slightly on the wrong side of the hill to have a clear perspective on just how fucked the economy is for the class of 2001.

I had the good luck to graduate in 2000, a full year or two ahead of the vast majority people born in 1979, because I worked my ass off in high school and college and shaved a year off my Bachelor's, which meant that I had already been in my job for a year before the economy hit the shitter. This was an extremely serious advantage that I didn't plan, nor could I have foreseen. But most of the people I know in the range of 30 are struggling, unless they come from family money, because they entered the workforce just as it suffered a major contraction. There is a big divide between people who graduated from college between 1997 and 2001 and those who have graduated since then, it it has little to do with age.

Then again, I am commie scum anyway, so just my buck-oh-five, for whatever that's worth.

[wombat]

Over and over and over the counter swings and the balance is returned.

Remember: THIS TOO SHALL PASS.

This is no doubt true. But it's no reason to deny that hard times are hard times and right now we're in them. Come on, would just a little teensy tinsy but of sympathy bust your cold hard heart to pieces?

[Choop]

it would. well, it would if his heart had been able to reassemble from the only time he was able to experience sympathy, 20-odd years ago, when he saw a child being told his dog went to a good farm where it could run around all day.

[AugustWest]

What about working to make your country's economic system more equitable to the people who actually do the work instead of just the owners?  Is that an acceptable form of work that you can respect?