Rant #3,185: Dreaming

Since I lost my job nearly four years ago, I periodically have work-related dreams, that are kind of like nightmares, that haunt me at night.

I had another one yesterday night, but this time, it reflected as much on my wife as it did on me.

My wife retired some time ago--she had just had enough of what she was going through as a teller in a popular bank, which shall go nameless.

The bank has an anti-older-worker youth kick, and an anti-white manifesto that they actually had the guts to publish a few years ago so anyone could read it, so I will let you figure out what bank I am talking about.

Anyway, she was able to get a job in a restaurant, and regular readers of this column know what happened there—she had a workplace accident and hasn’t worked since that day, three months ago. The case is in workman’s compensation, so who knows when it will be completed.

Anyway, while my wife is not yet 100 percent, she is beginning to get a little antsy, in particular with no money coming in other than Social Security, so she has applied for a couple of cashier jobs at local retailers—

And she has found out, as I did, that the proof is in the pudding, because she has had very few call backs, most probably because of her age—but go prove it.

Anyway, she applied to a retailer around the corner from where we live—who also shall remain nameless—and she actually has a job interview coming up tomorrow.

So I went to bed last night, and I had a dream/nightmare that reflects on my wife’s situation as much as it does mine.

I am in a big room, along with dozens of other job seekers, looking for a cashier job with, of all companies, JCPenney.

I am sitting there dutifully, and I have my resume in hand plus a ticket that they gave me with a number on it, and when my number is called, I [presumably will be called up for an interview, as the numbers are going in order, and I think in the dream I had number 125.

As I wait for my number to be called, I looked through a glass end table where I had rested my arm while waiting, and lo and behold, I see that there are a couple of coins—dimes and nickels, no quarters or pennies (yes, I do see the connection to the name of the retailer there)—on the floor underneath the table.

I go down to the ground, and reach for the coins, of which there must have been at least a half dozen, and I put the retrieved coins in my pants pocket.

But as I get up,, I notice that I don’t have the ticket that they gave me with the number on it, the one with number 125 on it, the one I need to get called for an interview.

I look all around, but I can’t find it, as they call up the person ahead of me, number 124—I don’t remember if it was a man or a woman—to be interviewed.

So I am in panic because I waited so long to be interviewed—125 was my number, so I presume that 124 people were called before me—and I don’t have that ticket.

It has vanished into thin air.

But for some reason, they never call number 125, skipping over me for 126, 127, 128 and so on.

I run up to the front desk of the room, and I question the ticket caller, but the caller does not reply to me, keeping on his brisk pace of calling numbers way beyond 125—but he never called 125, skipping over me whether I had the ticket or not.

When I see that the ticket caller was ignoring me, I turn to the crowd and tell them the following (or something very much like it):

“This is a phony job recruitment,” I yelled out. “They don’t really have any cashier jobs available. They just post these jobs to see what is out there as far as the talent pool is concerned. They don’t really have the jobs … they are phony, and no one here is going to get a cashier job.”

I yelled this as people pressed past me as their number was called—and then I woke up in something of a sweat.

Look, I know for a fact that companies do post supposedly open jobs that don’t really exist, just to see what is out there as far as talent is concerned.

They have no intention of hiring, but want to collect resumes just in case they do have a job opening in a particular area. They pick and choose from the resumes they already have, making the talent search, and the eventual hiring of that talent, that much easier for them.

And some of the major job search engines—including the one whose name starts with an “I”—do post phony job entries to entice the company which is mentioned in the phony ad to take out a paid job ad with then.

This happened with my old place of business where I brought up one morning to the COO that as I was searching for jobs—it was kind of accepted at this point in time that all the six employees we still had were looking for work elsewhere—that I found a job ad for an editor’s position on this search engine listing my employer as the business having this job opening, and the COO explained it all to me, so I know that this type of action does exist.

(We went out of business about a month later.)

None of these actions are illegal, by the way, and looking back, of the more than 1,000 jobs that I applied for from mid-October 2019 to when I was about to fall off of the unemployment roles about a year later, I would estimate that 75 percent of the jobs that I applied for actually did not exist; most of my job searching took place when the pandemic was in full force, companies were not hiring, but they could see what was out there by putting up fake job ads, and the information they gathered could be used when the pandemic was over and they were actually hiring again.

So there is some sanity in my insanity, and I guess that it all adds up to the fact that I am worried that my wife is going to fall into the same work abyss as I have been in for nearly four years—if she isn’t in it already.

I wish my wife well on her interview, but I know all too well that there is a lot of monkey business that goes on with advertising for jobs, and I just hope that everything goes well and she actually gets this job.

She needs this job mentally, emotionally, physically and financially, and maybe she will have more luck than I have had.

I have run into brick walls; maybe she will be able to run right through those same walls!

We can only dream … .