About a year ago, I wrote here that I had gotten a job. It was a major change for me, and although I had my fears, I approached it with eager anticipation. It gave me something to write about other than the gloom and doom of being homeless.
I had quite an adjustment to make. Suddenly I had to acquire a suitable wardrobe ample enough to enable me to attend a job five days a week. I had to accustom myself to getting up in the morning to travel to work and to sustain a pace for close to nine hours per day. Then there was the work itself, which was not the greatest challenge, as it was work in which I had been proficient previously; that was, after all, why I was hired. Still, I had to file reports each week relating what I had done — detailing what progress I had made, what problems I had encountered, what steps I had taken to deal with the problems, and whether I had involved other personnel in the problem solving – quite a few things to enter into a weekly progress report. Somehow in all of this, I had to grab my meals and get in a reasonable amount of sleep every night. Notice that in this description I am not including any time for anything that could be classified as fun.
Weekends were never meant to be for rest. I had an obligation to work as a staff member at the Community for Creative Non-Violence, and that took my weekends from me. In effect, I worked seven days a week with no down time. It should come as little surprise that when a federal holiday came around, I slept like a baby from sheer exhaustion.
In May, our team at work had to participate in a re-compete for a new contract at the federal government agency at which I worked. We worked night and day – literally – to prepare a presentation that we gave for the government on May 5. It was not until the day before our current one was to end that we received notice that we had been awarded the new five-year contract.
It would have seemed that this news would have given me reason to rejoice. However, such rejoicing would have been premature, because as I was to discover two weeks later, the government incorporated cutbacks into the contract and eliminated positions – one of which was mine. I was told that I could work until the end of the month, during which time I should wrap up the projects that I was working on and document them so that someone else could take them over. That did not change the fact that I was going to become another statistic: one more unemployed person in this recession.
It is true that I can always look for another job. However, I need not point out that finding a job is not such an easy thing to do. I have many reasons to regret having lost this job. It is on record that I was not fired but released because of budgetary cuts, and this may entitle me to unemployment compensation, but everybody knows how inadequate that is.
Just the day before I was given the news, I had spoken before a group and said that I had hopes that soon I would be able to find a place of my own. We have a saying in Hebrew that says that a pessimist is an optimist with experience. I guess this is just one more experience that should teach me not to get my hopes up so quickly when job stability simply does not exist in the United States.
Maurice has been writing for Street Sense since the second issue and hopes to publish a book soon.
