Having been out of town over the weekend, I didn’t see this until now. But now I’m glad I resolved to read the papers I’d missed over lunch today, because otherwise I would have missed this in Kathleen Parker’s Sunday column:
WASHINGTON — Maybe it’s the dog days, but three friends recently got in touch within a 24-hour period to catch up. Or more like it, to catch their breath.
One reported the onset of panic attacks. Another is seeking treatment for depression. The third began an e-mail asking for help with: “Reports of my employment have been greatly exaggerated.”
The first two were women, 40-something and 50. The third is a man in his 50s. They all have one thing in common: No job….
The “man in his 50s” is me. Considering the circumstances, I suppose I come off all right — as the stiff-upper-lip sort who has preserved his sense of irony. I almost sound cool in the face of unemployment. I’m not sure what I and the other two friends have to do with the people who’ve been disrupting town hall meetings — which Kathleen goes on to opine about — but I appreciate the mention. Maybe she thinks I might go to a town hall meeting and make oblique little wisecracks based on literary allusion, thereby messing with everybody’s heads. And now that she’s given me the idea…
Anyway, that little play on Mark Twain — “Reports of my employment have been greatly exaggerated” — is from a semi-form letter I’ve been sending out to a lot of friends. I realized late in the summer that a LOT of folks thought I had found permanent employment. This was not a good thing for me, because it meant I had lost the edge I had in March.
In March, I was fortunate enough to be laid off in a VERY public way — in one version of the first day’s story on thestate.com, I was the only one of 38 people being laid off to be mentioned by name — and under circumstances that generated a lot of support for me in my search for new employment. But my good luck in quickly finding some temporary contract work unfortunately made a lot of those people, who were all willing to augment my own eyes and ears in my job search, to think, “Oh, he’s OK now.” Whenever anybody ASKED me, I’d tell them no, I DON’T have a full-time, permanent job yet. But I didn’t start actually systematically contacting people to tell them this until the contract ran out on June 30 and I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands.
Anyway, here’s the latest version of that note that I send Kathleen and others, minus a passage with contact info I’d rather not share THIS broadly:
August 12, 2009
Dear Friend [except that I always sub in the actual name of the friend],
The rumors of my employment have been greatly exaggerated.
Like most of my friends and acquaintances, you probably know that I was laid off in March from The State, where I was a vice president and the editorial page editor. This happened as part of a trend of severe cutbacks at the paper, and throughout the newspaper industry, with which loyal readers are sadly familiar. I had the honor of being the person most prominently mentioned in published reports about that round of layoffs (that is, of course, until the departure of my far more talented and popular friend and colleague Robert Ariail was announced).
The outpouring of support and even affection that I have experienced since then has been gratifying and humbling.
What you may not know is that I’m still looking for a job, and more urgently than ever.
Yes, I’ve done some temporary communications consulting work that was very satisfying, and which helped me slow down the expenditure of my severance pay. But as I have explained all along to friends who heard about that and congratulated me on having landed a job so quickly, the contract ran only until June 30 – which a glance at the calendar will confirm has come and gone.
Now I’m back to job-hunting full-time, and I could use your help.
So if you know of a good job to which you think I would be suited – or if you know of someone else who might know of such a job – I would greatly appreciate a heads-up. And while full-time employment is my goal, until I find it (and perhaps even after I do), I’ll be very interested to know about any free-lance or part-time consulting work that might be suited to my skills. What skills? Well, I’m hoping in particular to make use of my communication skills, my knowledge of South Carolina and my understanding of public policy.
Finally, I’d like to hear from you whether you have any tips to pass on or not. My e-mail address is brad@bradwarthen.com…. When you have time, please visit my blog, https://bradwarthen.com/.
Thanks for reading this far, and I hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
Brad Warthen
I’ve heard from a lot of people, and some of them have offered some really thoughtful advice. Following up on the leads has kept me fairly busy, although not quite as busy as I want to be. So I keep sending out the updates, and keep hoping — and do a little freelance work here and there as occasion offers.
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Brad–you sound a bit smug about your apparently superior mental health compared to the women friends of Ms. Parker. Please be a bit more careful in your wording and kinder in your comparisons– perhaps they did not get contract work; perhaps their situations are far more dire than yours; perhaps they did not get your hardy genes. There but for the grace of God….
:>)
Gosh, Kathryn, I was just trying to think of something jaunty and upbeat to say. I have a tendency toward depression myself, and I’ve had my dark moments recently, but I don’t really want to get into that. For anyone who’s been out of work this long, there’s a place where it’s 3 o’clock in the morning. I certainly wasn’t trying to make anybody feel bad.
If anything, I was amused that I came off looking like the cool, unbothered guy. My wife will tell you, I’m a world champion complainer (maybe THE world champion complainer). So there was a bit of self-mockery there, and certainly no attempt to make be snide about anybody else’s troubles.
If it will make anyone feel better for me to go ahead and have a public nervous breakdown (and who knows? maybe it would be my 19th), I will. Being cool hasn’t worked so well for me as a strategy so far.
Here’s how my own neuroses work out — now I’m looking back at what I said and trying to think of how to word it so that no one thinks I was being smug. I certainly have no reason to be. And I know good and well that the world is FULL of people who are worse off than I, and I do care deeply about that. I just don’t know what to say.
Did anyone else get that impression?
Kathryn’s got me thinking about an aspect of humor that’s always worried me. I look at people who make a living from yukking it up, and I often wonder whether they worry about whether something that they’re playing for laughs is causing particular pain to another person.
For instance, last night I saw part of a Seinfeld rerun on the tube. It was the classic “double-dipping” episode. You know, George travels out of town to a funeral for a loved one of his new girlfriend, and gets into a fight with one of her relatives over “double-dipping” a chip at the food table. Much further hilarity is generated by Kramer persuading him to get a “death-in-the-family” discount from the airline. George pesters people at the funeral to get him a copy of the death certificate for the airline. Funny stuff. Unless someone you care about just died, and you just had to fly on such a discount. In that case, you’d feel like someone was going out of their way to mock your pain, when they were merely not thinking or caring about you and your pain, which really wouldn’t make you feel any better.
Once in the mid-80s when Dave Barry was in the first flush of his celebrity, he came to visit our paper out in Wichita. He was the Knight Ridder star, and some time was set aside to chat with us worker bees in the newsroom. One guy — sort of the office clown, a very funny guy in his own right — asked how come Barry got to have so much fun and the rest of us had to work our butts off in the shadows. Barry had a one-word answer: “Talent.”
Funny. Pretty damned insensitive, but funny.
It was on the tip of my tongue in that moment to ask him whether, in cranking out his truly entertaining columns, he ever wondered whether his mockery of something or other was causing particular pain to someone for whom that subject of ridicule was a personal tragedy.
It was a pretty dark question, and it was way outside the spirit of the loose gab session, so I didn’t ask it. But I’ve always wondered. Barry’s a smart guy. Surely he’s thought of that. Does he rationalize it by saying that any pain is far outweighed by the far greater number of smiles he causes? Maybe. I have no idea, because I didn’t ask.
Obama has already hired more former journalists than any President in history. It looks like he has his own jobs program for his media cheerleaders.
As a student of Improvisational Comedy (improv), I hear exactly where you are coming from. I believe, as do many improv theorists, that the funniest things are not mocking or making fun of others, but merely truthfully representing life, in all its glory—perhaps in a spotlight, but just truthfully depicting how we really are, kindly. Sort of “don’t you hate it when _____happens”
Dave Barry’s funniest stuff is about himself, I think, followed by his utterly nonsensical riffs on language, which do, I suppose, derive from bad usage originally, but I doubt the original bad language users are aware of them.
I think your expanded comment clears away any whiff of smugness. No, you don’t have to bleed all over the page or have a breakdown for us. I would hope that when relevant you would write truthfully about where you were emotionally at any given time. I just wouldn’t compare myself to others — it’s how you got into trouble with the online IQ test to begin with, remember? It’s your Achilles heel (or as someone wrote recently “heal”)
Speaking of which, some really smart people — even people who are good with words — can’t spell. Which floors me. Oh, sure, I might get in a hurry and write (or “right”) “hear” when I mean “here,” or whatever. But I do know the difference. I’ve worked with some really fine professionals, good writers, who were VERY dependent upon the dictionary in the old days, and electronic spelling aids more recently.
And journalists with that problem fear exposure their whole careers. We all have weak spots. I, for instance, am an excruciatingly slow note taker, so you’ll seldom see long quotations in anything I write (unless from a written source), because I just can’t keep up word for word. I compensate for that by being very good at understanding the gist of what people are saying, and paraphrasing it (often, according to the sources themselves, putting it better than they did).
I’m also a very, very slow reader. I mean, I read at something close to the rate at which you would read the same text aloud. But I have good retention of what I read, possibly because of that slowness.
So yeah, we all have weaknesses. But I always found spelling easy — always first or second in the spelling bees in school — and I don’t know why it isn’t easy for all literate people. God just makes us different.
I am reading the Democrat’s medical legislation for you, Brad. I will keep you informed of what’s really in there.