Catching The Unemployeds

So my boyfriend and I were at a cocktail party last Friday and I have to say since I’ve become unemployed I’ve noticed an interesting phenomena. We were walking around this party meeting a few new people but not exactly sure what to talk about. Since we are both unemployed our lives have been consumed by job hunting, unemployment calls, and being poor. What could we possibly talk about that is in the least bit cheerful? Typically when someone asks what we’ve been up to we say “looking for a job” they simply look down at their feet, offer a few words of encouragement, and walk away. It’s rather peculiar that this reaction occurs 90% of the time. People rarely have a solution or help for us but simply say the politically correct words of “you’ll find something” or “things will turn around”. I get the strange feeling that we have a highly contagious disease that these people don’t want to catch called the “unemployeds”.

To give you a bit of a background on myself before becoming unemployed I could work a room like nobody’s business. I was cheerful, talkative, and genuinely interesting to talk to. Since I have become unemployed it really has worn me down so much I feel like nothing else is on my mind but finding a job. My once  witty, intelligent comments seem to have been replaced by standing awkwardly shuffling my feet mentioning for the millionth time how much it sucks trying to find a job. There is an odd dynamic that seems to occur when we now mill about parties. An undercurrent of fear and sneaking suspicion that we have something contagious. My theory is that I have something called the unemployeds. Possible side effects are nausea, stomach cramps, headaches, awkwardness, and desperation.

When I started dating my boyfriend he was unemployed. I feel in love with him because he is intelligent, motivated, cute and funny. The minor set back of him being unemployed really wasn’t a concern. A few months later I too became unemployed. As we drove home from the cocktail party that night we joked that I caught this highly contagious disease, the unemployeds. So make sure to use protection and keep your resume updated, who knows, you could be next.

Will Spec For Food?

As our economy gets worse and worse (or at least as my bank account gets lower and lower) I’ve noticed companies are finding new and innovative techniques to try and seduce the starving designer. Within the last month I have received inquires from two companies (generic emails of course) requesting I submit a design for their “design competition”. Because I’m a classy lady no names will be mentioned here, I simply replaced the real name with “company”. Here is the email that was sent to me:

We’re searching for an original graphic which captures the essence of our company, and we plan to feature it on a new T-shirt this spring. We’ll put our logo on the back, but the design that best represents the company experience gets “front billing.” If you’re an artist and think you’ve got a great idea, here are some simple rules: Submit the following via email (deleted).

• Your name
• City of residence
• Age
• A phone number to reach you at during the day
• Your proposed graphic interpretation of what our company is (JPG files only), along with a brief explanation. This should be a completed, full-color, camera-ready design that measures no larger than 10” x 10”. It doesn’t have to be a digital work, but we won’t accept mail submissions. In other words, if you’re submitting a painting or drawing, please scan or photograph the work and submit a JPG version.

Deadline for samples is Thursday, February 11, 2010, at noon.

What happens next:
We’ll review all entries, pick 4-5 semi-finalists, and then vote internally.
The winning artist will be named on Friday, February 19, 2010.

Here is perhaps the best part of the ENTIRE email. At the end of all the work you put into creating a design you are left with what as your payment?

In return for your work, our company will be proud to name you as creator of the 2010 Company T-Shirt in all on-air and web promotions. We’ll also be happy to include information about your work with all T-shirt deliveries.

Good luck!

So let’s get this straight I work for you and my name is mentioned as doing work for free. Now am I just stupid or does that really just mean that I value my work so little that I’m willing to advertise I am willing to whore myself out to companies. This will most likely just get more “design contests” sent your way. What do you think a doctor would say if you went in and said you refused to pay them upfront but promised that much more work would come there way if they just helped you out this once. My guess is that they’d laugh you out of the office and tell you to go to a free clinic. Now, I try not to profess myself to be a genius of design but admittedly I would think of myself as a little better than a “free clinic” of design if you will.

So moving on to inquiry number two:

We saw your profile at coroflot.com and we really liked your art.

We just wanted to inform you about our new t-shirt design contest where you
can win up to 3.000+ € if your design gets chosen for print.

Furthermore you can help us extending our community by inviting your friends
and having the chance to win an iPod Touch 32GB or a gift certificate.

Feel free to check out our website.

What is perhaps the most insulting of all of this is that these emails were sent generically to me! If you are going to take advantage of my design skills can’t you at least do me the honor of sending out a personalized message saying why you like my work in the first place? Right now I’m am frantically sending out emails to loads of companies singing their praises and why they are different and special. These emails take a long time and are hand crafted if you will to really help them realize why I am so awesome.

So what is my response to all of this? Well first of all I’m a part of the AIGA and they simply don’t allow this type of thing. I knew I wanted to try and help enlighten these companies that really what they were doing is reprehensible so I decided to write them back with some nuggets of information. I grabbed some information off of No-Spec.com and took the best parts of their view on design contests and sent that along to these busters. Of course I didn’t hear anything more from them but I felt I had to at least do something. Some people are just ignorant/desperate/stupid and might potentially just enter their contests anyway in the hopes of gaining fame and fortune. Let me go on record as saying “IT MOST CERTAINLY WILL NOT!” I hope you don’t think I’m money hungry here or something, I assure you that is not the case here. I believe when you offer a service you should be compensated for it. You can’t run into your local grocery store and expect to get a cart full of groceries for nothing. Why wouldn’t that same logic apply when it comes to design? It shows a lack of respect for design as a profession. Designers of the world UNITE against spec work and stop helping these busters.

Starting Unemployment

The first weekend after I lost my job I didn’t want to deal with any of the mess I had to deal with. It was Halloween (my favorite holiday) so I tried to have fun anyway. So Monday morning hit and I wanted to get right on to all the paperwork that needed to be filed. It was so weird going into my old office. I felt like I had to be “fake nice” with all my former co-workers but truthfully I just looked around at them hating them. I wondered what they were thinking “will I be next?” Of course every Monday morning there is a meeting to discuss the business and where it’s going. My boss mentioned that a group had been laid off and of course everyone freaked. They asked if they should prepare their resumes and, of course, he said no. My advice to anyone that is currently working in a company that just did lay offs. DON’T BE STUPID! See the writing on the wall and get your resume together and portfolio prepared. I was reassured many times my job was safe and low and behold I was blindsided and laid off without warning.

Anyway, back to the paperwork, so really it was a fairly simple form. I really didn’t realize that it would be so simple just to file for unemployment. A couple simple steps and I was officially a government case. I found it really awesome that so much could be done online. No office visits or phone calls. Theoretically I wonder if you could make someone up and just start claiming unemployment.

So when I lost my job my boss said that he thought that my unemployment would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of my salary. HA big mistake, try 70%. Now you may be saying that is a lot but when you really break it down that is not much at all. I started factoring in all my expenses, $600 for rent and $825 for school loans are my significant costs every month. That doesn’t count electric, car costs, or groceries. So my $1288 per month for sure wouldn’t cover that. I had to do the unthinkable and ask my parents for a loan for my loan! Thankfully they have a lot of savings and are able to help me out for the moment. I was thinking to myself as I was crunching these numbers what would anyone do if they didn’t have someone to bail them out!? I don’t have a family, house or anything (I mean besides one cat) but if I did really I don’t know how I would get through this. I know thousands of people all over the country are doing this but wow it would be so hard.

One thing that my boss omitted from me when I lost my job is that he canceled my insurance the DAY after I lost my job. I had a dentist appointment scheduled for that week actually and thank god I didn’t go. Yet another reason my former boss really sucked. If you are going to blind side someone by laying them off without severance or an additional paycheck why cut off their health care right away as well! I didn’t have the time or resources to get something else set up. Another dick move but thank god I don’t have a lot of health problems. I had worked for him three months without any kind of health coverage so it would stand to reason that the health coverage would continue three months after you left that job. I am not sure of the legality issues here but seems a bit sneaky. I checked into what other options were for health care and it was horrible! $300 a month for the shittest service ever. I actually just heard that there is a lot of government aid available directly through hospitals. You can check into financial counseling at your nearest hospital and see if they can help you out. One of my friends mentioned having some huge back surgery and being in the hospital for 4 weeks. His bill was $800,000 and he didn’t pay a penny! The hospital took care of it. Look into it!

Setting up unemployment seemed to be the simple step, I didn’t realize that really there was a lot that wasn’t mentioned in the beginning that I had to learn the hard way.

Laid Off

5:33pm October 30th, 2009. Things had been slow around the office recently but not really that bad for me. I was busily working on editing these videos we were making for a campaign. It was so fun and I was getting close to finished on them. Then I got this aim message from my boss “we need to talk, meet me on the first floor”. Given our space is on the third floor of this building and the first is vacant I knew this wasn’t good. My head started thinking “ok what the hell did you do, did you piss off a client?!” I was expecting to get reprimanded about some stupid thing but really it was worse.

A little bit of background on this situation is that I was hired onto this company to help with this million dollar website that they had gotten. They needed a lot of help and really needed a larger staff. I really gelled with the bosses (all three of them). I to a completely different state for this company and left ALL friends and family behind to live in a city I first visited at my interview. So things were all hunky dory. We had this huge website and were working hard for 4 months. Then my bosses completely fucked up and ended up not getting the money we were owed. We tried to sue this company we were working for but they filed bankruptcy and reopened under another name. Leaving us powerless to get the hundreds of thousands we were owed. After that it was a slow and steady decline for me. I noticed that we got really small projects that just plain sucked. I got to do a few cool websites but most of the time the boss was so desperate for any kind of work he just would accept anything that walked through the door. We were paid peanuts to be the clients design bitches. I tried my best to stick out of the bosses affairs. I didn’t want to tell him he was being a complete idiot about things but I thought to myself “don’t rock the boat and you’ll be ok”. This was the mentality that I kept all through my time at this company.

I got along with some of my co-workers but there were two guys there that really just were royal assholes that had egos through the roof. It seemed like they just wanted to shit on anything fun and just had the worst attitudes ever.

What really surprised me was after I told all a couple of my friends about this their response was “oh yeah, I had heard this was going to happen. . .” seriously what awesome friends! I was completely floored that my own friends weren’t watching out for me telling me that I may get the boot. I guess the wife of one of my bosses had told our mutual friends that it potentially was going to happen and soon. I felt a mix of betrayal and just plain being pissed. I would for sure have looked out for them and I felt so sad they didn’t want to do the same for me. I’m still friends with my boss and his wife. I thought of letting that friendship go but really it wouldn’t get me my job back or make my financial woes disappear. I actually asked my old boss why exactly he had kept from me that I was going to loose my job and his explanation was that really he didn’t think I’d be a good worker once I knew I was loosing my job. They thought they should surprise me and just cut me off when the last paychecks were sent out. Really it was handled just poorly. What should have happened is they should have decided between giving me severance pay or giving me a heads up. The way payroll was done I didn’t even have a paycheck coming two weeks after I left my job. So really after that day I was left with nothing. The next day my health care was cut off even before I had a chance to figure out what I was going to do next!

The crazy thing is that you tend to think you should have seen this coming. I evaluated everyone at the company and saw that the two people that could potentially be expendable were myself, the other guy that got canned and the developer. Really there were more than enough people that could do the work that was coming in but I trusted in my boss to keep us in the loop when things started to go sour. I remember time and time again him saying “trust me! this is our company, I will always let you know if something comes up.” In looking back the reason that I didn’t pack it in in the first place was because I thought it would look horrible on my resume to leave a place after only working there less than two years. Just thought that would make me look more like a liability.

The funny thing about all of this is that really you realize how little control you have in your own life. Things happen that really you can’t see or control.