My Time Unemployed, This Time: Part 2. How the Rollercoaster Starts
(Going up)
Friday Apr 18 12:28:11 2014
So, you are home. There's a hastily thrown-together box of office 
stuff in the trunk of your car that you left there because you don'
feel like getting it right now. It will wait. You already dismissed
a little too TV-drama-y the idea of going to the nearest bar on the
way home and drinking yourself into oblivion, so pretty soon you ar
going to have to start telling people you got laid off. You will st
with your significant other, and then things get a bit more 
complicated. You obviously should tell your best friends, first 
because they're your best friends, and second, they may be the most
motivated and potentially best-positioned to perhaps help you out. 
your siblings. And... Your. Parents. Yeesh. They are worried for yo
and they will tell you so, and spin all kinds of not-good scenarios
that you weren't really to the point of thinking about yet. You kne
they would do this, but even if you waited a couple days to tell th
you didn't wait long enough. So that's around time you start to pan
a bit, as you realize it's true, and it happened again. You are 
unemployed.

So you register for unemployment. Because really, that's something 
that you should do AS SOON AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN. Seriously. Why woul
you wait? You don't deserve it? They've been taking it out of your 
check all this time, just for this potential occurrence! So after t
first time you are unemployed, you definitely prioritize this. It's
lot easier now that it's all a few clicks away, anyway.

Also, you update your resume on the job websites. You will not be s
later if this was or was not a good idea, but that's a topic of 
another post.

You now, quickly, have gotten yourself two sources of job leads: on
the lower-volume, high quality stream of jobs that apparently is 
always flowing around your circle of friends and coworkers, that 
everyone is normally ignoring, but now that you need a job, people 
looking at for you; and the other, the firehose of contract jobs yo
probably don't want, that all these agencies seem to be falling all
over themselves to jam you into.

This is the first "up" part of the rollercoaster, with buddies givi
you leads and passing your resume to their various HR departments f
you, with the double incentive of helping you, their friend get a j
and maybe pulling themselves a nice referral bonus(!). At the same 
time, these contract agency recruiters keep calling you, telling yo
how good your resume looks and how they have these contracts they w
to put you up for. From your initial despondence, you transition to
really starting to think *you won't even have enough time* to enjoy
these unemployment days off! Time to make a list of all the home ta
and hobby things that you really, really want to get done in the ne
few days, before you end up starting a new job!

At this point, one of two things will happen. In the first scenario
one of your friends' leads pans out, you get an in-person interview
and a job offer, and you really are back to work before you know 
it--this really does happen, not even half the time, but it happens
In the more-likely scenario two, you maybe get the in-person 
interview--or don't--but you don't end up with that first quick job
And after that initial rush of sending off resumes and chatting wit
these contract recruiters (you don't even *want* a contract job!), 
those end up feeling like black holes, because they may hound you f
your resume and right to represent you on this job, but then you he
crickets from them.

So this is then where the next phase starts, which is actually the 
 *real* part of finding a new job. The slog. This is the part of th
roller coaster ride where you wish you hadn't gotten on.