We have a wheelbarrow

“I mean, if we only had a wheelbarrow, that would be something.”

Thank you to everyone for your kind words and generosity in response to my getting laid off from the slowly dying newspaper industry.

I’ve been struck, too, by how many others here — regular readers and commenters — are among the 14 million Americans and millions more elsewhere around the world who are looking for work and finding none.

Skim through the comments here and you’ll find dozens of sharp minds and smart, capable people whose productivity has been left on the sidelines. That’s just wrong. It’s a waste of talent and capacity that could be benefitting us all. And, as Pope John Paul II wrote, it is also a “scourge” and “the opposite of a just and right situation.” It constitutes a massive moral failure on behalf of the entire interconnected web of civil society, government and economy.

I want to encourage those of you who are looking for work. I want to tell you to have faith, hope and courage and not to be discouraged by the depressing and dismaying work of not finding work. Know that you are in my thoughts and prayers and that I am concerned and I care.

You care? Well that’s just great! Lah-di-frikkin’-dah, the author of the book of James says. You’re concerned! Thanks for nothing.

That’s a loose translation, but an accurate one. A stricter translation would read:

If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

Valid point. So, then, what can I do besides offer my intangible “concerns”? What can I do that might actually be of some use?

I don’t know. But one thing I have learned in 20+ years in the working world is that jobs often come from strange and unexpected connections. I got my last job because I was in a production of “Much Ado About Nothing.” The actor playing Conrad shepherded my résumé, getting me the interview that got me the job even though, as Verges, I had been helping Dogberry arrest and abuse him every day for weeks.

Having some connection — any connection — can make a big difference from the lottery-like process of refreshing Monster.com every half hour and then emailing your résumé out into the void.

Making connections isn’t easy for some of us. And deliberately making the kinds of connections that are likeliest to help with a job search — the dreaded “networking” — is particularly hard for many people. I don’t want to generalize too much, but networking can be especially daunting for introverts or for situational introverts (those who are outgoing in some contexts, less so in others — i.e., most people). And again I’m not trying to generalize too much or to pigeonhole anyone, but I think a Venn diagram of introverts or situational introverts and readers of blogs like this one would probably show a great deal of overlap.

So maybe one thing we can do here is find some more deliberate way of creating a space for those of us who are good at this whole awful networking and job-hunting business to share their advice with those of us who are less good at it.

But maybe we could also get more specific and more tangible. We’ve got this thing here, this blog. It’s not a massive community, but it’s not a tiny one either. And it’s frequented by some really astonishingly smart and capable people, people from all kinds of different backgrounds with all kinds of different expertise. Seriously, toss out the craziest, most obscure or thorniest question you can think of sometime in the comment section here and someone will have an answer for you.

That ought to be an asset we can put to use to help the many folks who visit here who are looking for work.

I’m not entirely sure how best to do that or what the most effective way would be to tap into the amazing hive mind of our community here to help those in that community who need to find work. But here’s my first somewhat crude and clumsy idea:

What if we started a series of regular Job Seeker Open Threads here? These would be open threads in which the specific needs of those seeking a specific kind of work in a specific place would always be on topic. Those in need of work could post where they are and the kind of work they’re looking for and the rest of us could respond — in comments or privately via email — if we had any leads we might be able to offer for their specific situations. It may be that someone here could serve as a reference for someone else. It may be that there is some other connection that some two of us have here that could turn out to be the kind of connection that leads to a new job.

Like I said, that’s crude and clumsy. It’s ridiculously dependent on serendipity (or providence) and the vast Powerball-odds of pure chance. There are countless reasons why it might never really do anyone any good.

You might be an unemployed reader of this blog in Des Moines, struggling to find work after completing your degree in Mesoamerican archaeology and there’s probably no one here from anywhere near you who knows of some job opening that has previously escaped your notice, and there’s probably no one here who knows anyone they could introduce you to or put you in touch with who could offer you any real help.

But then again there might be.

It’s unlikely, but it’s possible. There might just be someone who reads this blog who is, say, a bartender in Winnipeg, and while it seems outlandishly unlikely that a bartender in Winnipeg would have any useful leads for an unemployed archaeologist in Iowa, it might just be that this particular bartender has a friend with a cousin who lives with this guy who works in HR at the Museum of Natural History in Iowa City. And it might just be that this bartender’s friend’s cousin’s boyfriend might just be willing to pluck your résumé from out of the giant slush pile and get it into the much smaller stack of résumés that actually lead to responses and interviews and maybe even a job.

Stranger things have happened.

And anyway it won’t cost us anything to try.

At the very least, it could give those of us who are jobless job-seekers one more place online to check and double-check six times a day. (My current list includes Monster, plus Idealist and Opportunity Knocks.) Plus, thanks to the rambunctious diversity of readers here, job-seekers would also have all kinds of good people praying for them — Baptists, Episcopalians, Jews, Mormons, Pagans … more varieties than I could ever list or name. There would even be religious skeptics and atheists who, quite reasonably, see no rational basis for presuming any causal relationship between their keeping you in their thoughts and any possible effect that might have on your situation, but who would, nonetheless, be keeping you in their thoughts. For reasons that I cannot defend rationally, I believe that availeth much. (In any case, it can’t hurt.)

As usual when I have a half-baked idea that I’m too initially enamored of to break down myself, I’d like your help here. Is this too far-fetched to be of any use? Apart from the long-shot odds of anyone actually finding help finding work through this kind of Job Thread, is there some other downside to this idea?

Let me know what’s wrong with this idea and if there’s anything obvious or not-so-obvious that I’m missing, or if there’s anything obvious or not-so-obvious that could be done to improve it. Because I’d like to get started with the inaugural Job Seekers Open Thread on Monday.