Lookin’ For Work

Finding a job is really annoying. Even in this electronic age when it ought to be easier than ever, it’s just really frustrating. Oh, don’t get me wrong, the old days were no picnic, riding the bus all over town all day long, following leads from the want ads and running into dead-ends and scams. It’s still the same electronically. The more things change the more they stay the same. One time, back, as the saying goes, in the day, I answered a promising-sounding ad for a salesperson. A one-day training seminar, bring a lunch and show up at this address at this time of the morning. What is the product? No idea. Call up and they assure me that it’s a great product but you have to attend in order to get the information. I was on terminal leave from the Army, taking the last thirty days to search for a job, so I could make the time. The “seminar” went on and on for a couple of hours about the importance of clean air in the home and how, if only someone had a way to filter the air and catch the dust mites and nasty particles of rodent droppings that people had and didn’t even know it. I was suspicious of what they wanted and sure enough, it was door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales. Well, it was, they said, a professional-grade in-home air purifying and cleaning system that, yes, would work as a vacuum, carpet scrubber and I don’t remember what all else. On commission. I left the “seminar” as soon as they wheeled out the product, taking my sack lunch with me and hitting the bricks along with a half-dozen others.

The Internet is not much better if you have any sort of honesty about you. I mean, you could get into a content-scraping scam and steal other people’s content and make money off it on your click-bait farm site without the author’s permission. Stealing their content is what honest people call it. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, without that person’s knowledge or permission, and especially if you sell it, you are a thief. Anyway, there are a lot of thieves, scammers and just plain ne’er-do-wells out there. There are also legitimate and honest businesses online, you just have to be careful.

Job boards are handy, but you have to make sure they are reputable as well. There are a number of good ones out there, though. But, the best lead so far that I have gotten was from a long-time friend who has worked at a local credit union for quite some time now. He is a high-risk person and they are still paying him even though he’s at home and can’t work. On Glassdoor the CEO has a 97% satisfaction rating. Anyway, we’ll see what happens.

The Lord has helped all this way and He isn’t going to just dump us now. In the Bible story about when Elijah went up into heaven in a fiery chariot and Elisha took over, there is a good allegory. Elijah’s just been taken up and Elisha parts the Jordan and crosses back. There are fifty guys, supposed to be prophets, waiting to meet with him. What did they do? Seek counsel on how to be a prophet? Ask about how they could get power to cross Jordan on dry land? They didn’t do any of that. They said, and I paraphrase here but I am capturing the feeling of what went on, “We saw Elijah get scooped up into that fiery chariot from heaven. Do you want us to go look for him? He might have fallen out or the Lord might have cast his body down on a mountain or into a valley or something.” What foolishness. Elisha told them not to go but they would not let up until he said they could go and look. Three days later, fifty strong men came back from searching. Emptyhanded, of course. “I told you not to go.” You can read it for yourself in 2 Kings 2:1 – 18.

We know that God isn’t just going to get us halfway up to heaven and realize he can’t get the fiery chariot over the mountains and toss us out. It’s not His style or character.

In all of the stuff going on, places you apply to sometimes ask for links to your website or other online information. Well, I don’t do social media, although I do have a LinkedIn account, which I have been thinking of getting rid of as well. It used to be a professional networking platform and while it still is, I think it’s not the same as it was. So, one of the links, which I have added to my “About Me” page here is to my resume. There is a bare-bones work history version and there is a page I have called my Curriculum Vitae. I feel like I am using the term correctly but others may not. For those who want to know more about me, you are welcome to look at it. Curriculum Vitae.