Epic Default Productions

Yeah, the unemployemt office line looked like this

First off, I would like to let you know, that this Rant 500 is not being posted posthumously. I am, in fact, still very much alive.  I’ve just been busy. The last 4 months have been very interesting, and to be quite honest, life changing.

For a quick recap of the last four months, here we go… I lost my job at Circuit City due to them going bankrupt. Then I got a job with the U.S. Census Bureau.  That ended a month later, and a month ahead of schedule due to the fact that everybody on the job was working full-time. That same week I got married to my high school sweetheart of over six years. A week honeymoon in Puerto Rico later and I have become an unemployed husband.

I knew that getting a degree in television or radio was going to have a rocky start post college. There’s a reason why all of the station internships are unpaid, because everybody is willing to do almost everything to get a job. My television internship was almost a 2 hour drive from where I was living that summer. The economy just made my bad situation worse.

But, this free time has given me a good look at two things. The first is how the world of job hunting has changed. The last time I seriously looked for a job before graduating was about 5 or so years ago. I know that some people would think that isn’t much time, but a lot has changed.

No Twitter, iPhone, Hulu, PS3, Xbox 360, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, HDTV, Facebook was still closed, Gmail was still invite only, and my parents still were able to get a local newspaper. That newspaper was where my older brothers looked when they got their first jobs. What if I had a younger brother? Where would he look?

Well, the physical local paper is out in my case, but you can search their online classifieds. Or you can check craigslist, or monster, hotjobs, the sites that are for more specific industries like dice and tvjobs, or the thousands of individual company websites. It’s a full time job in order to find a full time job.

Granted, I understand why the companies are doing this sort of thing – larger talent pool.  But I’m getting really annoyed. I’m a jack of all trades. I’ve worked at television and radio studios, both the front and warehouse of multiple retail stores, worked the night shift at a bar for a semester and I even worked on a production line. Yet, I know from talking to people at conferences and others who have hired me, my resume got lost in the crowd. To quote ZP, “It’s like throwing a message in a bottle into a sea of messages in bottles.”

Once again, reading over what I wrote, I feel like a 70 year old retiree trapped in the body of a 25 year old college graduate.  Do I sound like that?