What a rough day I had today. Well, rough by my new vets dorm standards. Got up at 5:30 a.m., made my bed, vacuumed my quad's common area, had breakfast in the mess hall, showered, put on my "Yoke of the Oppressor" suit and tie, shot the breeze with the boys down at the retard benches and shuffled into the 8 o'clock Motivational Abuse Meeting.All this is standard. I haven't gotten to the hard part, yet.
At the 8 o'clock Motivational Abuse Meeting, a case manager, a different one each morning, either reads from some alcohol recovery book or reiterates the party line on shiny shoes, pressed pants, neat ties, whatever. Then we each read our cheat sheets, a list of five prospective employers we intend to contact during the day. We read them in as droning a voice as we can muster at this morning, uh, muster. Thirty or so drones droning the names of 150 employers that are not going to hire us today.
All this is standard. I haven't gotten to the hard part, yet.
Around 9 o'clock, we are released like a swarm of suit-and-tied locusts upon the world. We generally swarm to the computer room where we look up more employers who will never hire us. I got nabbed on the way by a roving case worker who needed a bunch of us to unload a trailer full of bunk beds into a hot warehouse on the grounds.
It's the first time I've ever done manual labor in a suit and tie. It was wierd.
After that, I visited my career counsellor about that auto parts delivery job. He'd hinted yesterday that the job was in the bag if I only went to the DMV and paid for my H-6 (DMV driving record).
So I got it and showed it to him this morning and there was a problem on it. It was clean. That's a problem. My career counsellor specializes in placing veterans with criminal records. I don't have one. Not having a criminal record therefore becomes a hiring barrier for me here.
My counsellor then looked at my resume, the one that I had taken a class here for, the one that was approved by the resume teacher, and he said, "Well, I see by your resume that you have no skills, so maybe we should consider you for security guard work. Do you think you could handle that?"
I felt like saying, "Duuuueeeerrr, dat be sounding mighty diffy-cult dere, boss, but I tries it if you sez so," but they're already watching me for attitude.
My resume has my prepress technical computer skills and talents on it, my military photojournalism training and my editorial experience. I thought I might get back into that, but I see now that trying to get that kind of job out of here would be like trying to do magic in the land of the unbelievers.
The unbelievers being my high school dropout career counsellors here in the homeless vets dorm.
All this is standard. I haven't gotten to the hard part, yet. The hard part today was driving around the city in this oppressive heat without an air conditioner in my car. What a scorcher it was today.
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