The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed
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About this ebook
It's all here: My 2003 satirical essay on unemployment which got hundreds of responses, details of my 40-year work history, why it's probably not your fault if you're laid off, some unconventional advice on resume writing, and lots of encouragement for anyone who is currently job hunting.
David Dvorkin
David Dvorkin was born in 1943 in England. His family moved to South Africa after World War Two and then to the United States when David was a teenager. After attending college in Indiana, he worked in Houston at NASA on the Apollo program and then in Denver as an aerospace engineer, software developer, and technical writer. He and his wife, Leonore, have lived in Denver since 1971.David has published a number of science fiction, horror, and mystery novels. He has also coauthored two science fiction novels with his son, Daniel. For details, as well as quite a bit of non-fiction reading material, please see David and Leonore’s Web site, http://www.dvorkin.com.
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- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5His continuous political rantings compromised the strength of this e-book; otherwise, helpful.
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The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed - David Dvorkin
THE SURPRISING BENEFITS OF BEING UNEMPLOYED
by
David Dvorkin
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 by David Dvorkin
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re–sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
* * * * *
The cover photo, minus the computer, was taken by my wife, Leonore, in 1988 in northwestern Germany. She used the same photo for the cover of her breast cancer book, Another Chance at Life: A Breast Cancer Survivor’s Journey. For details, see http://www.leonoredvorkin.com/brcan/
* * * * *
Contents
The Surprising Benefits of Expressing My Feelings
The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed
The Day Job
The Response
The Lasting Benefits
About the Author
* * * * *
The Surprising Benefits of Expressing My Feelings
Perhaps the title of this book is misleading. It’s really about what happened when I wrote a tongue–in–cheek essay some time ago about the benefits of being unemployed. And yet in the end — years after the original essay and the layoff that led to the writing of it, and after other jobs and other layoffs — being unemployed did end up being a surprisingly positive thing.
I’ll get to that later, in the section titled The Lasting Benefits.
In the summer of 2003, I was laid off from my job as a software developer at InfoNow, a small software company in downtown Denver. This was the company’s second big layoff. I had survived the first one, but the second one swept most of the survivors of the first layoff, including me, out the door. Given that the company was not doing well, and given also the lingering shadow of the first layoff, it was not entirely a surprise. Nonetheless, it hit me hard emotionally. I liked the company and my coworkers, and I was happy to have settled into the software niche that suited me.
My first full–time job after college, in 1967, was as an aerospace engineer. (For a detailed description of my career, including the litany of layoffs, see the section titled The Day Job.) After seven years in the aerospace business, a layoff caused me to switch careers to computer programming.
In 1992, again after a layoff, I made another career switch, this time to technical writing. It was a change I had been contemplating for a while, thinking that it would suit me more than computer programming.
I quickly learned that I was wrong, but for a number of reasons, I found it difficult to move back into computer programming. I kept trying to make that move, and I kept failing. I grew increasingly pessimistic and depressed about my chances of becoming a programmer again. In the meantime, a new type of programming, Web development, was becoming increasingly important. I played around with Web development on my own and liked it very much. If anything, that made me even more depressed by my inability to get a job in the software development field. I feared that I would be a technical writer for the remainder of my working life.
My perseverance paid off, though, and in the spring of 1999, InfoNow rescued me. That’s certainly how I saw it at the time. I was happy, I was relieved, I felt that I was finally in my element, and I envisioned myself staying at the company for years — ideally until age 70, at which point, according to my calculations, I would be able to retire and, perhaps with the help of part–time work, my wife, Leonore, and I would be able to live above the poverty line.
When the InfoNow layoff happened four years later, I felt like a man whose wife hands him divorce papers and kicks him out of the house just when he thinks they’ve gotten past a rocky patch and the marriage will be fine. I felt hurt, betrayed, stabbed in the back, and ill rewarded for what I had contributed to the company.
I suspect that this is a common response on the part of those who have been laid off. Of course, it’s irrational.
When you work for a company, it’s not a relationship. It’s a business arrangement. You’re an item on a spreadsheet, an entry in a database. You are disposable and replaceable. Corporate apologists yammer about loyalty, but in reality they envision that loyalty as going in one direction only. Employees are expected to be loyal to their employers, but there is no reciprocation. Corporations are most certainly not people, no matter what idiotic courts, lawyers, politicians, and corporate executives may proclaim. Corporations experience no emotion save greed. To survive in bad times and to acquire more in good times — more money, more power, more market share — they will destroy and discard anything that stands in their way. That includes superfluous employees.
I was old enough to know that in 2003, but it took