Remember yesterday, during
my completely tongue-in-cheek Rant about how things were getting back to "normal?"
I was joking all the way through, thanks to Elizabeth Hurley’s seemingly 9,320,571,085th post about how wonderful she looks today after 55 years of utter hardship.
Well, today, I have a real feel-good story to tell you, something that is more real than Ms. Hurley is.
My son got a job yesterday.
I will repeat that.
My son was hired yesterday.
I have to keep saying it to myself, because having been in the situation that he has been in for the past eight months or so, to say he is actually employed is a mouthful that my wife and I are just able to digest.
As you know if you read this blog regularly, he has been out of work since March 11 like millions of others due to the coronavirus.
He love his job, they loved him, but once the virus hit, all bets were off, and they officially put him on furlough, which is another way of saying that he was in an endless holding pattern.
After six months on furlough, the New York State Department of Labor pretty much says that once that period is used up, a person is no longer on furlough, but is officially unemployed in their eyes. I had to re-up him for unemployment, because as happened to me, I went way beyond the usual mark for being out of work. Since the state currently allows for up to a year of unemployment, we both had to re-up, and he is currently on his first 13-week extension.
Anyway, when I was alerted that his job pretty much had straitjacketed him—after I called them, they told me that they had no idea when, or if, he would be rehired—I had to do something. I just could not let him sit here and vegetate, and most importantly, he did not want sit at home and while away the hours, either.
I made calls.
I contacted agencies.
I put up his situation on a local message board, and on Facebook.
I made his case known to agencies that handle those with special needs.
I did everything I could to try to find him something.
He had a few interviews, and quite honestly, the work environment is quite a bit worse than we have been told, in particular for those with special needs.
Having spoken to dozens of people, I have found out that the unemployment rate for those in this category is probably about 75 percent right now. Not every one of these people has filed for unemployment like my son did, and many of these people are even out of work from their volunteer and non-paying jobs due to the pandemic.
We had doors shut in our faces due to my son’s affliction. One local business in particular will be one that I will never use again because of the way my son was treated by them. I would rather go out of my way to use the services that they render than go five minutes away and use them.
We filled out so many forms—I had to help him to do all of this—that our hands and fingers became numb.
And associations which exist to help people like my son … well, they have never been able to help him, and during a pandemic, they have even become more useless than normal.
So how did he finally get a job?
Again—and I know this from personal experience, and that is why I was forced to retire against my will—it is often who you know rather than what you know that gets you the job.
And the wild thing about this is that my son’s getting a job actually stretches back more than 50 years.
Let me explain.
As I said, I made it clear to as many people as possible that my son was out of work and looking for employment.
And after going through one dead end to another dead end, an old friend—and I mean and old friend of yore, he is my age so he isn’t decrepit—came to our rescue.
As regular readers of this blog know, I grew up in something of a magical place in Queens called Rochdale Village, a then-new development of 20 buildings, thousands of residents, and what amounted to friends on every corner of the development.
I had my best friends, and one of them, now a lawyer, I have pretty much known off and on for more than 50 years.
A group of us old friends used to get together a few times a year in a Manhattan restaurant to talk over old times and new ones, and we kind of re-upped our friendship from these meetings, but with the pandemic, that stopped entirely. We have had a couple of Zoom meetings, but our group has had to curtail their meetings due to the virus.
Anyway, I had put up and made it known that my son was out of work, and this fellow came to the rescue, suggesting that I try one place that I had not tried before, a retailer where his daughter—who also has special needs—was able to secure a job.
We set to it immediately, filled out the online application, and within about two or three weeks, my son was interviewed, had orientation—which I attended, too—and today, on Friday the 13th of all days—he begins the newest chapter of his life.
It is only a seasonal job, but “only: is not really important: it is a job that my son will give his all to, as he has done with all his previous jobs since he was 15 years old.
I did let my friend know about my son’s good fortune, and I did thank my friend, although I can never thank him enough for pointing us in the right direction.
Sometimes, you just need something of a “guardian angel” to help you out, and this guy was just that to my son.
So it is déjà vu all over again, as I also became semi-employed myself through my own guardian angel, in my case a former Pentagon official who knew my work and knew what I could do.
So there you have it, a real feel-good story to start us on a great weekend, other than the fact that with my wife’s bank just reopening on Sunday, she has to work that day, which I am not too happy about, and quite frankly, neither is she.
But now, for the first time since October 2019, everyone in my household is gainfully employed in one capacity or another.
My wife and I could not be happier, and we are most happy for our son, who deserved better from many but finally got something to hang his hat on.
I was joking all the way through, thanks to Elizabeth Hurley’s seemingly 9,320,571,085th post about how wonderful she looks today after 55 years of utter hardship.
Well, today, I have a real feel-good story to tell you, something that is more real than Ms. Hurley is.
My son got a job yesterday.
I will repeat that.
My son was hired yesterday.
I have to keep saying it to myself, because having been in the situation that he has been in for the past eight months or so, to say he is actually employed is a mouthful that my wife and I are just able to digest.
As you know if you read this blog regularly, he has been out of work since March 11 like millions of others due to the coronavirus.
He love his job, they loved him, but once the virus hit, all bets were off, and they officially put him on furlough, which is another way of saying that he was in an endless holding pattern.
After six months on furlough, the New York State Department of Labor pretty much says that once that period is used up, a person is no longer on furlough, but is officially unemployed in their eyes. I had to re-up him for unemployment, because as happened to me, I went way beyond the usual mark for being out of work. Since the state currently allows for up to a year of unemployment, we both had to re-up, and he is currently on his first 13-week extension.
Anyway, when I was alerted that his job pretty much had straitjacketed him—after I called them, they told me that they had no idea when, or if, he would be rehired—I had to do something. I just could not let him sit here and vegetate, and most importantly, he did not want sit at home and while away the hours, either.
I made calls.
I contacted agencies.
I put up his situation on a local message board, and on Facebook.
I made his case known to agencies that handle those with special needs.
I did everything I could to try to find him something.
He had a few interviews, and quite honestly, the work environment is quite a bit worse than we have been told, in particular for those with special needs.
Having spoken to dozens of people, I have found out that the unemployment rate for those in this category is probably about 75 percent right now. Not every one of these people has filed for unemployment like my son did, and many of these people are even out of work from their volunteer and non-paying jobs due to the pandemic.
We had doors shut in our faces due to my son’s affliction. One local business in particular will be one that I will never use again because of the way my son was treated by them. I would rather go out of my way to use the services that they render than go five minutes away and use them.
We filled out so many forms—I had to help him to do all of this—that our hands and fingers became numb.
And associations which exist to help people like my son … well, they have never been able to help him, and during a pandemic, they have even become more useless than normal.
So how did he finally get a job?
Again—and I know this from personal experience, and that is why I was forced to retire against my will—it is often who you know rather than what you know that gets you the job.
And the wild thing about this is that my son’s getting a job actually stretches back more than 50 years.
Let me explain.
As I said, I made it clear to as many people as possible that my son was out of work and looking for employment.
And after going through one dead end to another dead end, an old friend—and I mean and old friend of yore, he is my age so he isn’t decrepit—came to our rescue.
As regular readers of this blog know, I grew up in something of a magical place in Queens called Rochdale Village, a then-new development of 20 buildings, thousands of residents, and what amounted to friends on every corner of the development.
I had my best friends, and one of them, now a lawyer, I have pretty much known off and on for more than 50 years.
A group of us old friends used to get together a few times a year in a Manhattan restaurant to talk over old times and new ones, and we kind of re-upped our friendship from these meetings, but with the pandemic, that stopped entirely. We have had a couple of Zoom meetings, but our group has had to curtail their meetings due to the virus.
Anyway, I had put up and made it known that my son was out of work, and this fellow came to the rescue, suggesting that I try one place that I had not tried before, a retailer where his daughter—who also has special needs—was able to secure a job.
We set to it immediately, filled out the online application, and within about two or three weeks, my son was interviewed, had orientation—which I attended, too—and today, on Friday the 13th of all days—he begins the newest chapter of his life.
It is only a seasonal job, but “only: is not really important: it is a job that my son will give his all to, as he has done with all his previous jobs since he was 15 years old.
I did let my friend know about my son’s good fortune, and I did thank my friend, although I can never thank him enough for pointing us in the right direction.
Sometimes, you just need something of a “guardian angel” to help you out, and this guy was just that to my son.
So it is déjà vu all over again, as I also became semi-employed myself through my own guardian angel, in my case a former Pentagon official who knew my work and knew what I could do.
So there you have it, a real feel-good story to start us on a great weekend, other than the fact that with my wife’s bank just reopening on Sunday, she has to work that day, which I am not too happy about, and quite frankly, neither is she.
But now, for the first time since October 2019, everyone in my household is gainfully employed in one capacity or another.
My wife and I could not be happier, and we are most happy for our son, who deserved better from many but finally got something to hang his hat on.
Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.
And to my friend, thanks again.
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