In a Corner with the Work World: A Few Simple Facts

Here are a few simple facts. I was supposed to be laid off as of May 1st. Since that time I’ve been granted various extensions of 2 months and a series of 1 month extensions. During that time I’ve been looking for a new job. I’ve had a number of interviews by phone and in-person, but no offers.

Before my manager headed off to Singapore for good last week, where the division I work for has been globally shifted, he told me he will try and extend my employment a month at a time until I find a job if I promise I will earnestly look for a new job. In the meantime, he seems very pleased with what I’m doing to improve the product with negligible direction or supervision, as he’s otherwise very busy. Ironically I’m doing some of my best work as I’ve been given free rein to ‘finish’ all the unscheduled improvements before the final transfer of the product to Singapore.

Given that much of our identity for better or worse is fused with what we do for a living, or at the very least where we spend much of our waking life, this is a difficult situation. Given the unresolved nature of the situation, it has come to resemble the iron ball of Zen that is stuck in the throat and cannot be swallowed.

I sense a very rich stew of pride and humiliation and endless capacity to generate stories to explain and analyze the whole unresolved, uncertain, ongoing present.

Every unsuccessful job interview is an open opportunity to create some sort of explaining story. In normal life, we have long established relations and expectations; we think we understand what’s going on. In an interview situation, there’s this intense burst of information exchange with people we don’t know. Coming away, I fall into second-guessing.

I have a friend who offers very good advice on interviewing and discerning the interviewer’s expectations and tailoring your presentation accordingly. There are online guides to 64 or 100 toughest interview questions and how to answer. Similarly there are guides to how to stand out from the hundreds of other applicants using online applications and cover letters and most effective follow-up practices.

What I’ve come to realize is it really is like an iron ball stuck in the throat. You can’t know. You can’t possibly know. But nonetheless I will tell a story to myself to explain the failure – a story as my good bipolar friend points out that allows us to live with ourselves and go on. There is no way to check the accuracy of that story.

I can offer all sorts of explanations about pay scales or age bias or how I’ve allowed my skill set to get too far behind the market or the issues with technical testing and a variety of things I should have said or shouldn’t have said, and some of these stories may be more useful than others in going forward, but mostly my takeaway is I can’t know.

Nonetheless, my presentation has to be of someone who does know. If I was to hire someone would it be someone who doesn’t know or someone who comes across as knowing: confidence in the face of not knowing.

Can you do this job? Better than anyone else we will talk to? After your confidence has taken a beating?

I find myself sometimes asking how would a stable, confident person behave in a given situation, instead of someone who would sooner let passive-aggression poison the well and be assured by the steadier certainty of failure.

I have a certain pride in trying to analyze the situation. Would I rather have an accurate analysis of the situation or a flawed analysis and a new job? It’s easier to send an application off and get an instant rejection than be left hanging, not knowing that first week if I’ll get a call or not. There’s an attraction to certainty even if it means failure. Success means going forward into more uncertainty.

But that’s finally what we do. Even this little story, this analysis that seems pretty good and comforting to me, it’s not really going to work all that well for long. There’s no checking its accuracy without going forward into more not knowing.