Thanks for the explanation and apology. No harm done … using the second person when talking about contentious issues can be pretty fraught, so I just wanted to let you know how I received it.

To your last point, you’re dead wrong. I’m not whipped into anything, but thanks for the personal attack (not just on me, but on the gestures broadly “y’all”) with zero basis. That’s not Beehaw etiquette.

I’m far to the left of the current U.S. Overton window, so being cast as aligned with neoliberalism is laughable. As far as I can tell, your argument is that everyone for whom Gaza isn’t their only deciding factor in a U.S. election supports genocide. That’s certainly an opinion.

If you don’t care about any dead child above 17,000, you’ve made a fine argument. But now you’re saying more deaths is fine (and better than current policy) because you’ve reached some tipping point where more suffering and death is actually preferable to … what? A Democrat in the White House? Your logic doesn’t work within your own argument.

This is very common among single-issue voters. As another example: abortion. Plenty of people who think Trump is heinous vote for him based on that issue alone (something the GOP has been using to great effect for the past 30 years), and accept whatever else his cronies get him to enact because they perceive him as “wanting to get rid of abortion.”

If your think the suffering of Palestinians is the greatest domestic issue facing the U.S., dwarfing all others combined, by all means let it guide your choice. But don’t complain about the internment camps that start getting built if Trump wins when you found everything else in this election irrelevant.

Six hundred Nader votes in Florida going to Gore instead 24 years ago would have put this country on a very different trajectory, so it is not hyperbole that staying home or voting for the other guy can result in an even worse outcome.

And that’s as clear as she got the whole time. As least she was answering the question asked in that case.

(As to single-issue Gaza voters, I get it in the “had a close friend who was Palestinian in my 20s” sense, but Trump doesn’t give a shit about the Palestinians. Somehow suggesting she’s the worse choice in this race on that issue alone isn’t even true, regardless of the larger picture. That’s not politics or conjecture.)

Newsom comes with a raft cruise liner of other problems. He’s like choosing a red-meat wishlist for the right.

I’d be surprised if Kelly isn’t on the short list. I like Shapiro, but it feels like when Dems pick a governor with less than two years in that role, things go poorly.

But agreed that swing-state White guy is sadly the only option in this environment.

Agreed. There’s bad ideas, and then there’s this.

Have we seriously not learned “never get a liberal justice off the court in an election year”? Only slightly less famous is “don’t get involved in a land war in Asia.”

I wonder if he lets Harlan refer to him as “boy.”

This is actually funny if done in a Foghorn Leghorn voice.

I got on anxiety meds Thursday, and they actually work! Spent the weekend redoing my resume and applying for pretty much anything local or remote that pays $60K; isn’t sales, marketing or customer service/support; and dovetails with my experience. As I’m learning from today’s refresh, there aren’t many.

If you actually make something, you’re not worth anything. You have to sell things you could never make yourself to make a living wage, apparently.

I definitely view it as the only lie being where I was employed when. I’m certainly not adding things I couldn’t talk about in depth, including setbacks and how I overcame them.

That said, I’m going to be shit at a technical interview, should that ever come to pass, as I don’t really have a preferred language. I determine the project first, then look at options and learn or brush up on whatever’s going to be the best fit (or only option) for desired results.

From talking with friends and colleagues my age, I’m scarcely special in terms of the roadblocks I’m hitting. A couple of decades of experience and switching fields seems to be “irrelevantly overexperienced” to ATS.

You get a cookie! 🍪

Sadly, the website is just gone. I kept a hard copy, though!

Sorry! End of the night is not ideal for recognizing inside-baseball wording.

Batphone: The unpublished number that rings in the middle of the newsroom and is used by reporters when breaking news is witnessed. Likely no longer a thing most places since everyone has cellphones now, but that got a reporter and photog to the scene in 10 minutes.

As this was a SWAT situation, it landed on the front page (A1), and because I called it in, I was quoted in the story.

I should have been more specific that when I left Gannett, I was done with corporate journalism. I’m not against the field as a whole, but the job insecurity is just mayo on the shit sandwich of selling entertainment as news. The thing is, finding jobs through negative filters really doesn’t narrow things down.

On the plus side, I’ve never had any interest in writing what someone else wants me to write. It’s hard to start off as a columnist and then get news assignments.

Wow … lots of good info here. You’re correct that I’m in my mid-40s, but I’m not applying for any journalism jobs. What’s left of the field isn’t hiring people with more than a few years of experience anyway, and what’s left of my network has moved into fields like PR that I’m not categorically against, but I’m extremely picky about where I’d be willing to do that. My marketing position was the apex of my earnings ($45K in 2012), but the culture was mocking our customers for buying our products when we weren’t actually writing copy.

I’ve done a fair amount of automation coding in previous positions, and I did a full-stack bootcamp a few years ago that did not move the needle in terms of getting an interview. I’ve gone to networking events, all of which featured two types of people:

• not hiring: “You can think in code, so you should have no problem finding a job. My company isn’t hiring right now, but send me your LinkedIn.” (Narrator: They never got back to him.)
• hiring: “Yeah, you need to learn X, Y and Z before anyone will look at you.” (X, Y and Z were different every fucking time.)

Most of my coding has been accuracy focused, from a tool that automated the auditing of hundreds of audiobook tracks to client-communication, productivity tracking and item placement in InDesign. But I’ve come to realize that I’d be miserable writing code on a team, given that everything I’ve done has been an unsanctioned project I’ve brought to the higher-ups after determining obvious deficiencies and having a functioning prototype directors begrudgingly accept solves problems. Generally, that’s when the wheels start turning to get me to quit.

I’ve been looking nationally (remote jobs for now) since getting frustrated by Austin’s employment scene. But in talking with others about the issues I’ve run into, it sounds like it’s the same bullshit no matter where you are: If you don’t have inside connections, there’s no point in applying.

As to LinkedIn, I hate it with the passion of a million burning suns, but it’s a necessary evil. I paid for resume assistance both in 2020 and earlier this year, and I’ve got bullet points with specific department savings that go all the way up to 83%, and it’s still crickets. I’ve had a couple of conversations that weren’t initially work related that ended with them putting in a word for me about not-yet-posted positions, but both ghosted thereafter.

I have about 100 connections from my career and several recommendations from former directors that all touch on my ability to see the big picture, anticipate problems and solve them before they become production issues. I’m not sure if anyone even scrolls down to those, because they don’t seem to be doing me any good.

I did do some consulting here and there, but it’s been a while. I’ve got a couple of former colleagues that would happily vouch for me doing “projects” for them, but I’d of course need to give them a heads-up about the role I’m interviewing for should it ever get to that step. But adding it back in as a line item couldn’t hurt in the meantime.

Ultimately, it’s absurd that looking for work involves wondering how many lies I can get away with. But that’s the game employers are playing, and honesty is not rewarded.

I have no idea what I want to do, just a short list of things I know I don’t want to do. This is what led to the upcoming appointment, as I’ve done lots of online tests that are supposed to give me direction and without fail bin me into journalism, marketing or PR, the last of which would need to be for an organization I genuinely believe in. Having designed and built a 24V solar house system, renewable energy is certainly a field I’d consider, but I’ve not seen any PR jobs posted in that area.

Though my background is in writing, that’s really not an area I want to pursue both because I do not enjoy being assigned a topic and that’s where LLMs are coming in hot. I’m much happier creating and manipulating datasets, the latter of which is 90% of editing (the other 10% being qualitative – determining things like voice and wording choices).

Conversations and research have led me to think QA, prompt engineering (I was a linguistics major after ditching CS) and data science are my best fits, but with no titles in my history to suggest competence, it circles back to already knowing someone, which goes back to networking, and I cannot stomach another fruitless couple of hours where everyone pretends to love working.

Overall, from your feedback and what I’ve received on Reddit, I’m leaning heavily toward blowing up my resume and LinkedIn (definition of insanity and whatnot), essentially making sure to keep positions with recommendations and ditching most everything else between 2006 and 2014 in favour of longer stints at the two shut-down papers. I have no belief that these wholesale changes alone will move the needle (I don’t know what the algorithms are looking for, but every little bit helps).

While this may sound like I’m not implementing many of your suggestions, I’m looking at the resume as a starting point for how I change my approach, and focusing on that may well make some of your other suggestions seem more feasible.

Thank you for putting so much thought and experience into your response; I will be returning to this as things progress, and there’s a lot of useful, actionable info for others who come across it.

The latter is really my goal. I’m not one to be content to sit and bitch, but sometimes, so much piles up that it’s either that or another trip to the ward.

I at least have a parking spot where no one cares. The cops know I’m here, and as I don’t cause an issue, they’re on my side. Which is pretty amazing. I’m not traveling the country; this was a necessary choice.

I’m a vandweller, not a #vanlifer. I saw what was coming with the next round of rent hikes and made the call. I already knew I couldn’t keep my cat, but the new rent meant no food, and at that point, you really have to think about things. So years of thinking tiny house turned into where I now live. Is it great? No. Is it worse than a $1,500 apartment? Well, I have to take a shit at the gym.

I already told the real-property world to fuck off by buying a van and living in it. The problem is the extant debt.

That’s fair, and part of my issue, to be honest. Let’s say I score an $80K job tomorrow that completely aligns … then I’m not worried about buying food, but Trump could still destroy the country this year. Climate change gave Austin the sort of Phoenix summer I flew out the morning after high school graduation to avoid ever facing again, and we’re apparently hell-bent on seeing where Atwood didn’t go far enough.

I’ve done some consulting. That introduced different client-interaction problems that led to abandoning that.

I can, in fact, do marketing, and do it with a smile (I’ve a few decades of doing so, in fact … just unpaid). I have to believe the product stands out in a positive, unique way that benefits customers.

Let me see if I can drag this dead horse into the conversation …

I’ve never met with success trying to find a partner. They show up at the oddest of times, pretty much exactly when I’ve given up. And, to that end, I’ve been on one “successful” date, inasmuch as we lived together for a few months. But she turned out to be what I needed to get used to cohabitation again ahead of meeting my first wife.

I’ve been fully and inescapably in love twice. Once in 1998, and the other in 2009. In both cases, not only was hooking up not the goal; it was actively against either the situation or what had been agreed to. This oddly provides something of a comfortable situation to be oneself without artifice.

The 1998 story is a whole bunch of random shit had to happen just so for me to end up meeting her (she was nominally my boss for nine days while I designed my first newspaper pages). She did not want to hire me and was forced to take me on by the ed-chief, who rightly pointed out she needed staff, and that as a school paper, that meant bringing on people with zero experience.

She continued to be my boss, but that was really sort of a moot point by the time we put the paper to bed, had a 2 a.m. dinner with the rest of the production team and went home together. Nine days. She had her place, I had mine, and it was immediately clear we were overpaying for housing as a result.

Now, if 1998 required all of these specific things to come together, that was amateur hour. That was just upbringing and specific timing on being edited for a news story by the EIC because the news ed was at lunch. It was the end of a call he took as I left, where I heard only one side (this was a landline call) that included “yes, we are looking for designers.” I turned around from the door after hearing that and mentioned I might be interested.

I have no doubt that without the social aspects I found myself thrust into, I would not have ended up in journalism. In under two weeks, I had a circle of friends, a girlfriend and a calling.

Now, as I said, amateur hour.

The second wife, that’s where everything really comes to bear. It requires everything from the first chick I fucked to I-5 freezing from Ashland to Tacoma. Oh, and about five years, as I initially reached out to her before getting serious with my first wife. She wanted nothing to do with me and sort of told me to go find my own kink adventure. “I really have no interest in teaching anyone.”

So there I was, crashing on a friend’s sofa ahead of the holidays, trying to find work and maybe a little fun on the side. I started talking with this ex without knowing I’d already contacted her (different OKCupid account on her end) and been shot down. I’d worn out my two-week estimate for saying with him several exits back, and our conflicting definitions of “out this weekend” led to a chain of events.

I had one night of the unexpected two covered with a former coworker, but there was one glaring hole ahead of getting up to Tacoma so my lesbian ex could fuck me and then abruptly leave to admit all that had happened to her wife. She’d already played this game once before, driving down to Medford, getting a hotel room and then … crying and driving back. But her sister worked for Marriott, so I had the room with neither of us paying … I just needed to cover Saturday night.

And so, as one does, I reached out to the chick who was engaging me because I mentioned on my profile that I still slept with a stuffed animal. “Fancy a visitor?”

She can likely better explain what compelled her to say yes, but she did. She lived on the coast and was thus a logical stop for the night while I enjoyed the unfrozen 101 on my way up. She did want to know one thing: Did I contact her specifically to fuck her? Because that wasn’t going to fly. And no, at that time, I did not.

The problem was readily apparent upon walking into her kitchen. Oh, she didn’t realize it yet, but I looked at the magnets on her fridge, just a glance, and what was immediately core-of-my-being was “this is not the last time I’m going to be in this room.”

And this was absurd, because I was introduced to her kids as “an old friend.” But as one does, we watched both Labyrinth and The Neverending Story, part of the way through which she, having made sure I was not there for sex, said, “You know you can touch me, right?” Which isn’t as dirty as it sounds and also totally out of character for her.

So I timidly grabbed her hand, and at this point, all was lost. It was like touching a part of me and thus quite weird. She had the same reaction, which would in a week be somewhat of a bad time for her then-boyfirend who’d come down for the holidays.

But it wasn’t settled yet. That would take getting up to Tacoma and having a six-hour call in which it became clear I was going back to Oregon.

So, dating? Yeah, that can be rough, but I prefer skipping that whole bit and just waking up next to someone who was apparently just waiting for me to show up.