Rant #2,827: Hello It's Me

Good things come to those who wait, and I guess my good thing has finally come to me, as a story more than two years in the making will finally be published in the local Newsday newspaper.
 
(It was supposed to be published today, but literally at the last second,, they decided to hold it to Sunday … the story of my life. I guess I just have to wait a little bit more.)
 
The story, “Early Retirement Forcing LIers To Take Social Security Early,” actually began as an acorn of an idea about two years ago.
 
I had been out of work for about four months at that time, having gone down the tubes with the company I had worked for for nearly a quarter century in October 2019.
 
So again, this was pre-pandemic, folks, In October 2019, nobody knew from pandemics.
 
But I knew from frustration in my job search.
 
As regular readers of this blog know, I literally could not get arrested.. Joblessness was at a very low level—unemployment was at 3 percent, which according to the government, means that unemployment literally does not exist—but here I was, with nowhere to turn to even though I was looking feverishly for a new job.
 
Nothing was working, I couldn’t even get a phone interview, and my worst fears—that my last job was literally my last job, as I kind of thought it would be based on the non-response I got even before I was unemployed in finding a new job—were coming to fruition.
 
I was so frustrated that I contacted Newsday about a story idea that I had related to my own plight.
 
Every day—and they still do it, by the way—they run a column in the back of the newspaper in the business section about new hires, featuring the person’s picture, where they are from and where they are going and what their new position is.
 
I had to look at this every day, but in my situation, I wasn’t going anywhere but into a brick wall, so I figured, If Newsday could run a section trumpeting new hires, why not run a section of people who were looking for work, using the same exact format?
 
I pitched the idea to Newsday, but they turned me down flat. I guess they figured that nobody wanted to hear about people out of work like they want to hear about people who have found new jobs, and again, with unemployment at 3 percent, nobody was out of work anyway.
 
But I think they liked the concept of unemployment as a storyline, because a few days later, one of their reporters call me back, I ended up meeting with him and he interviewed me for two hours about my experiences as an older unemployed person.
 
But the very next week—it literally was just about two years ago to the day—the pandemic became part of our collective vocabulary, and my own tale of unemployment woe was forced to take a back seat to what was happening with the coronavirus and how it was impacting every facet of our lives.
 
I would contact the reporter here and there over the next several months, and when I decided to pack in my work search during the fall of 2020—“decided” was not really the correct word, let’s be honest about it, I was forced into doing it because of circumstances beyond my control—I let him know about it too.
 
Nothing happened with the story, as the coronavirus simply took hold of our lives over the past two years or so.
 
A few weeks ago, the reporter contacted me totally out of the blue, and asked if I wanted to pick up the story from the angle of the coronavirus and how it had impacted my employment possibilities and thrown me into early Social Security, and I jumped at the chance.
 
Over the past two years since I had last spoken to him, there were a few new wrinkles in the story, and we went over everything again, which led to another interview, this one taking place a couple of days ago.
 
And the fruits of that effort will eventually be found on the pages of Newsday, actually premiering online on Thursday at https://www.newsday.com/business/early-retirement-social-security-1.50497455?fbclid=IwAR37LT4LL1XyP1SFnl1oYjp9boC1T55ot5nhrk-xjWoNsRjH3L0T6qYdL-I
 
Unfortunately, you have to be a subscriber to access the entire article, so I have put up some photos of the article when it gets published in the newspaper, Just click and enlarge it to read it in its entirety.
 
The article is a good one, the photo is not.
 
The story with the photo is that they sent over a photographer to take some photos of me, and the article’s writer was very taken by my record collection which he saw in person during the first interview,, which again happened in my house just before the pandemic officially hit.
 
He is a millennial half my age, and as you know, that age group is completely taken by actual vinyl records—and with thousands of them in my collection, that really stuck with him.
 
So when the photographer came to my house a few days ago to get some photos of me, many of the photos she shot revolved around my collection, sort of telling the story of what I was doing with myself during my time out of work, that is, diving into my hobby of record collecting at a more intense pace than what I could do when I was working full time.
 
The photographer took photos of me with the collection from every angle imaginable, and then she took a few more in my kitchen, where the glare of the sun during the day made the photos … well … like the mush that they actually ended up using.
 
I knew the photo part of the story was in jeopardy when the writer called me a few days ago and asked me if I had an older photo of me at work, which I did not have.
 
So that blotch of a photo, of all the good photos taken, was the one that they used, to my chagrin.
 
But if a photo speaks a thousand words, then a story does too, I guess, so please focus on the story, rather than the photo, and you will get a wisp of what I went through during the past nearly two and a half years, from unemployment to complete and total rejection to Social Security and, in April, to Medicare … all way before my time.
 
I am just happy that the article finally will be published, so just click the photos of the article I put up here when I put them up, expand them a bit, and you should be able to read the whole thing.
 
If you are still having trouble, contact me via Facebook and I will send you the text in your email.
 
So that closes another chapter on my life … another story in Newsday to go into the dozens I have been included in over the past 50 years or so.
 
So as your either read the newspaper on Sunday or read it online, have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday …
 
It will give me time to fully contemplate the fact that, as I said in the article, seven years of work was ripped from me without my approval, seven years that I could and should have been working, but there were forces beyond the coronavirus that put an end to that work folly I had in my mind …
 
It is the business world’s loss, even though I am the one bearing the brunt of its impact on myself and my family.
 
Kinda sad, wouldn’t you agree?