Been A Bit...

I know, one of the quickest ways to lose readers is to stop posting regularly.  Since I've "returned" I haven't been at all regular, so there's the problem.  And of late, it is compounded by a number of factors.  Factor the first being the impending end of my current employment, factor number two being very well summed up by one of my currently-soon-to-be-former-coworkers - "They're breaking up my work family."  

Yes, it hurts.  Fully half of the people on my ... well, former team are folks whom I saw daily when working in the office back in early 2020.  Y'all have those vague memories about them pre-pandemic days, right?  Yup.  Anyway, about a quarter of my team had been working from home then, already, as my employer had a policy which stated that if you maintained your productivity at a certain level, you would be able to work from home, so long as you maintained that level.  I was working towards it, but I was still in full-on learning mode.  I knew the job, but I was in the "learn the speed" stage.  Then the pandemic waddled in an plonked it's hind parts in the cube next to me.  

About a full third of my team was hired after we left the office.  Back when we were a growing portion of my employer's business, we needed all the help we could get.  I was pushing, pretty hard, to hit that magical level that would allow me to stay home and keep working there after the office re-opened when my employer closed and stopped renting that office space.  The plan, I was told then, was to find a new office space a bit further north from our previous location, but that was ... in the works.

Then the rug came out from under us.  I am not in the part of the business which sees the amount of money we make and spend in doing the business we do, I am in the portion of the business that asks the insurance companies to at the very least consider paying us for the service we're providing.  Which is a bit of a strange way of doing business, in my way of thinking, as I would think that you would at first want to be assured you'd be paid before you press onward to finding the people who need service, but that's ... well, that's not how it works.  We find the patients, then we ask the people who pay their bills if they'd be willing to pay us.

And from the inside, I did see a couple gaps, or canyons, or, well, areas of concern that measured light years.  It's not my privilege to share my employer's dirty laundry, so all I'm going to say is when you have portions of the business which have to work together to achieve success, these pieces should be intimately familiar with the absolute rock-bottom requirements of what each piece needs from another in order to get paid.  Once everyone's on the same page, then things work.  It doesn't take much to muck up the works.

So there's that.  Other than that, I've been pushing through some of these "job aggregate" sites - you know, these sites which purport to be able to connect you to hiring employers.  Here's the rub.  In June, the state I live in reported the lowest unemployment rate which has ever been reported.  What was not widely reported was the fact that, between the hiring and the layoffs, the state actually added only 100 new jobs.  So while they keep saying there are plenty of jobs out there, there aren't too many that are looking for people like me.  

I can't drop a search phrase in any of the three major aggregates without getting my search results loaded in crap.  Why someone looking for health insurance administrative positions (no, that's not the phrase I use) would get results including baristas, restaurant managers, warehouse stocking, merchandisers, and the like, well, I guess they paid a whole hell of a lot more for the ads than the folks who are looking for people like me.  So there went that experiment.  

I understand that it's an easy way to reach multiple people in multiple markets, but boy, is there a boat load of crap out there too.  Look, by "crap" I mean "results not pertinent to my search phrase or job preferences" - that means "jobs I can do" versus "jobs I would not last long while doing."  Not that I mean to demean a barista.  I simply wish to state here for the record that my absolute hatred of coffee, the beverage, would not be reflected in my search phrase, but my never having indicated even the slightest ability in that regard would make me both utterly unqualified and utterly unwanted as someone to do that job.  

Most of the baristas I know are good, decent, hardworking, and talented people.  They, however, can handle tasting coffee.  I'd rather vomit.  I cannot stand the stuff.  It is in my genetic makeup that my parents, my wife, and my children all love the stuff, which therefore requires me to utterly reject it.  Because it is what it is.  

So that's where we've plonked this week.  I've got another month of work to go, so I'm doing my best to make that my best work - not because I expect my current employer to turn about and suggest they'll keep me.  I'm not that optimistic.  I've been identified as redundant.  Sitting through the 90 minute training which they gave us for transitioning workers who might wish to stay with the company, I was intrigued by the potential opportunities.  The fact that the internal job posting site is unavailable 5 out of every 7 times I check the thing indicates to me that either there is plenty of competition for the few openings, and those openings are highly likely to be sought after by people with double-digit years of experience in the field, which I'm nowhere near.  I was hoping to get fifteen years into this job, because that's what I figured I'd have left, but my last day will mark my 4th Anniversary.  So before I have to go back into retail, I'm really hoping I can find something that uses my brain, instead of my muscles.

Here's hoping your next month will be better.