What it's like

You might think that being unemployed is all sitting around, collecting checks, eating candy and watching the Jerry Springer show. Believe me, that's not what it's been like at all.

In the past month I've taken at least a dozen classes and workshops at Pennsylvania Career Link offices in both Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. Next Monday and Thursday I have all-day sessions at the Scranton Chamber of Commerce. I've been to a job fair in the middle of a Springtime blizzard. I've written and rewritten and polished and repolished my résumé. I've bought special résumé paper and special résumé envelopes. I've put out job applications - not too many, because the rule is that if you are offered a job that you have applied for and you turn it down, your unemployment benefits may be immediately terminated. I've signed up with Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com.

And life goes on. Lawns still need mowing, weeds need whacking, my garage needs painting (when the bumblebees permit), my grapevine wall needs mortaring, my grapevine sidewalk needs repair. Let me tell you a story.

I was at the house yesterday pulling out loose chunks of concrete from the sidewalk so I could replace them with new concrete. (The new concrete looks awful, by the way, so now I have to figure out next steps here.) I decided to take a break, so I made some lemonade and put in a call to the Domestic Zookeeper to see how she and her baby are doing. While I was talking to her my mom stopped over to see the progress, and she asked me what had happened to one of the decorative aluminum shutters on the front of my house - one of them on the second floor on the "vacant" side of the house was missing.

While we were looking into this my cell phone rang. It was the friend that I have been going to classes with, calling to tell me about the all-day sessions scheduled for next week - we were only just informed of them yesterday. While I was on this call my mom, who was by then headed back across town, called to tell me that she had spotted the shutter. It wasn't missing, exactly, and was in fact still attached, but by the bottom screws only, and the entire thing had flopped forward onto the porch roof.

So while trying to process this information, I ended all the phone calls and let myself into the other side of the house to see if I could do something. I found the window that would give me access to the shutter and opened it - only to find that this was one of the many windows in the house where the sash weights that would hold the window open are no longer attached. OK, I'd have to try to find a way to hold it open. But first, I removed the screen, not too difficult. Then the storm window - also pretty simple. Now I had to find something to hold the window open.

The first thing I grabbed - a compression rod that could serve as a drapery rod or shower rod - didn't work; it was designed to stay open horizontally, and quickly spun itself to the fully-compressed position when held vertically. After some trial and error I noticed a push pin inexplicably sitting on a radiator. This had been the bedroom for one of the tenants' teenage kids, so there were probably posters tacked up everywhere. A push pin will do it, I thought. I opened the window and pushed it into the track. Yep, that held the window open.

The shutter was completely flopped over. One of the upper screws was still through the shutter, but the other was missing. The two bottom screws were in place, though neither looked to be fully screwed in. I decided my best bet was just to remove the bottom screws and remove the shutter until I could figure out what to do next. Now, how was I gonna do that?

I used to maintain a decent toolbox here at home, but somewhere along the way most of its contents got scattered, including the adjustable wrench and most of the screwdrivers. Fortunately, one of the items left in the toolbox - which is now over at that house - was a right-angle screwdriver, a thing like a steel pencil shaft bent at right angles at the two ends, with a flat-head screwdriver head aligned perpendicular to the shaft on one end, and parallel on the other.

So there I was, hanging halfway out of a second-story window, using one of the few tools I happened to have in the house, removing an aluminum shutter hanging off the front of my house while mentally trying to sort out how I would ever get this thing replaced, and just what I was going to do about my concrete sidewalk, and how I was going to finish my grapevine wall, and whether or not the bumblebees would allow me to finish painting my garage, and how soon the thunderstorms would be rolling in, and when I would get a chance to mow the lawns at both houses, and whether or not my company had processed my COBRA payment yet so I could actually keep my Saturday dental appointment, and how I was going to work all my tasks around my Monday and Thursday all-day sessions in Scranton, and on top of it all wondering if I will be able to get a new job that would pay anything like my old job and wouldn't require me to relocate.

Yep, you might think that being unemployed is all sitting around, collecting checks, eating candy and watching the Jerry Springer show. But believe me, that's not what it's been like at all. For me, anyway.