The Thursday! Newsletter 1-29: Old Guy ISO New Gig
Volume 1, Issue 29
I need a new job.
The situation isn't dire, at least not financially. Spiritually and emotionally, well..let me sum up. I have a job that demands very little in the way of time or energy or even skill from me. It does demand a lot in spirit and hope and, for the past several years, it has taken far more of both from me than I ever expected to surrender. But I did (and I think I wrote about that in a past newsletter).
Sooner rather than later, I expect to have to go back to the office regularly. I have no desire to do that. I don't want to sit in a semi-permanent trailer, the only person who doesn't have an office door they can close and who is treated more like a piece of furniture than an actual human being. I don't want to have to hide behind my desk while a meeting goes on barely 20 feet away, headphones in my ears, quiet as a dead mouse in the wall.
Oh, and I don't want to have to be the only person who has to spend eight hours in a building that smells like dead mice as I've done at least once each of the past three years.
Ideally, I'd have a writing career just starting to bloom but that's not happening. Not yet. Maybe one day if I catch a lucky break here and there it will, but I can't count on that. In the here and now I need a new job, my friends, except whenever I think about looking for one, I get so afraid I can't even begin.
Let me be honest with you. I'm a middle-aged man without a college degree, which is not exactly what has hiring managers slavering to print out employment contracts. I know darned well that many doors that might have been open to be in years past are closed now. That's just the way the world is. No use arguing it. On the other hand, I have a BUNCH of skills, many of which have ever shown up on an official description of any job I've held in the last quarter-century. I am an excellent writer, executive assistant, office manger, customer service manager, procedure-wrangler, troubleshooter, and have done other work nowhere near my wheelhouse such as building manager, schedule-wrangler, creator of various official forms, expense tracker, project manager, bid-arranger, and a couple other things that I'm not sure have short descriptions. I've done crisis communications, critical incident stress debriefings, peer counseling, radio dispatching through disasters both natural and man-made. I've done media work behind the mic and behind the scenes. I've written press releases and police reports. I've been on television and on the radio and on podcasts.
In short, I can handle a LOT of things.
The best skill I have, though, is a superpower. Unfortunately, I don't know how to describe my superpower in acceptable resume form.
I have this ability to make myself useful inside an organization in a way that neither I nor anyone who brought me into the organization could have predicted. My superpower is being helpful. I can't NOT be helpful.
The big problem is, I don't know how to get all of that, including the superpower, stuffed into a lean, sharp resume with acceptable resume words and in acceptable resume form. I wish I could simply call up a company's hiring manager and say "Look, I'm the guy you need in that position. Hire me and let me show you." That, unfortunately, isn't done. Besides, I'm pretty sure the fear would freeze me cold before I got the number dialed.
I don't have a point to this week's newsletter except to say that I'm about to work on something I've never done before for a very harsh and unforgiving boss named Jimmie. I've not written a resume in a very long time and I don't even know what is and isn't acceptable anymore. I won't get past most of the hurdles the various hiring sites like Indeed let employers erect because I don't have a degree and I don't have experience in particular fields. But I know a lot of things and I can do a lot of things. We shall see if getting a new job is one of them. We shall see if I can use that superpower of mine to help me this time.
Wish me luck! Wish me resume-writing skill! Wish me a couple solid miracles!
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What I Wrote and Read Last Week (More or Less)
"This is the Carnival" hit the page pretty quickly, once I realized The Carnival wasn't sinister but was...something else.
"Skipping Town", written in 2016, is one of the best 100-word stories I've ever written. When I say a short story needs a bit of snarl and bite, I mean this.
I rather like that Austin Kleon can write intelligently about indexing all your notes and ideas without having anything close to a good indexing system for his notes and ideas. It gives me hope and makes me feel not quite so alone in my note-taking haphazardness.
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Arts and/or Letters, to Class Up the Joint
It's not the first sign that gets you, but the second one.
And if you want to use this as a story prompt, who am I to discourage you?
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One Last Thing
This is where I ask you to help me out. I don't like asking for help but there's no way I can share Thursday! far and wide without wonderful people like you who dig what I do and are willing to tell other people about it. Please, feel free to share this or any past newsletter with anyone you think will love it like you do. You can also buy or share my cool book, give it a solid review, or get an autographed copy (ask and I'll tell you how!).
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