Rant #3,734: Let's Get It On

Today is a big day for my son.

In the middle of the afternoon, he meets face-to-face, live and in-person with a counselor for the latest part of his long-awaited assessment.

This assessment is critical, because it will help determine what direction we will go to related to his future enlmployment, as well as some other areas of his quality of life.

I pushed for this assessment for months, but, for whatever reason, no organization that is set up and designed to do these things wanted to take him on.

In fact, the organization that finally decided to do this apologized for taking their time in getting this ball rolling!

Go figure ... I certainly can't.

He had the first part of the assessment a couple of days ago, a Zoom meeting that I thought went well.

I was there for that one, but this time, I cannot be there.

It is taking place at the local library, and it takes about two hours, during which time I am going to make myself scarce.

I can be in the library, but not part of the meeting, so I will most probably stay there, and maybe i will bring my laptop computer with me so I can do some work while this thing goes on.

I know that the counselor is going to ask my son a lot of questions in order to determine his aptitude to do certain tasks related to working and to his overall quality of life.

When we spoke to the counselor via Zoom, the organization that set this meeting up did so without providing the counselor with my son's resume, which hindered the counselor in knowing much about my son and his work background.

When I found this out, I immediately sent the resume over to the counselor, who now has it, and can work from it if necessary.

Look, my son and I have done everything during the past six months to get him further employed.

We have visited every store and supermarket to try to find him work, and we have been rebuffed, with most of them telling us to apply online, which we have done, to absolutely no avail.

We have spoken to many organizations whose express purpose is to help people like my son, and they generally haven't.

We have been to job fairs, both real and virtual, and quite frankly, we have found that people talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk, if you know what I mean.

We have looked at volunteer organizations, but quite frankly, my son has been there, done that early in his career, and now is the time to get a paying job for his efforts--and one very prominent one even turned him down because they didn't believe he could pass their volunteer test.

We have even contacted Jewish organizations, and that has, I'm sorry to say, yielded absolutely nothing.

Heck, I am going to my high school reunion not to reminisce, but to try to connect with people I didn't even know from 50 years ago with the hope that maybe one of them can help my son in his job quest.

The Class of 1975 maybe helping a member of the Class of 2014!

And while well-meaning people suggest a variety of different ideas, when i tell them we have already explored these avenues, they get upset, without understanding the situation at hand.

This is not a situation where my son is simply looking for a job.

He is a special needs person, and we have found that since the minimum wage was raised earlier this year, companies are simply not hiring these workers.

Thst is why the job that he has cut his hours by 75 percent due to this increase--no matter what they say--which has put my son in this unenviable situation.

The odds are against him. There are so many people in his situation that are out of work and don't even bother looking anymore.

And there are others, my son included, who have had their hours cut by a substantial amount since the beginning of the year.

Even his counselor from the organization which finally got him this assessment--someone whose very job is to help and assist people like my son to reach their full potential--told me over the phone that my son "will never work full time" after I questioned her about the snail's pace that it was taking to find another organization to do the assessment--

This is even though, at one point a few years back, my son worked two jobs at once and was working hours that amounted to "full time."

So yes, the odds are against him, but you know what?

I have every belief that he is going to make the doubters eat their words, and he is going to succeed, as he always has, beyond the expectations of the so-called experts, who don't know very much of anything.

The first step is this assessment, so yes, today is a big day for my son--

And I know he is going to do well.