This Carbon Based Life

(Job Hunting for Boomers 101)

©2019, MJ Ostrander

It’s seven in the morning on a Monday in December.  I fill my mug with Folger’s and pause to gaze out the window.  The Colorado sun begins to rise and paint the eastern face of the Rockies.  For me, the view is a power symbol of stability and somehow an ethereal icon of resolute hope.  I take a few slow breaths and turn away.

I flick on the gas fireplace and hear the slight yet comforting whoomp-whoosh as it ignites and plop my sixty-one-year-old tush onto the couch.  As I take my first sip of bitter caffeinated elixir, I can already feel my lower jaw clenching, my palms growing moist and my heart rate intensify.  I flip open our aging laptop and hit the power button.  Suddenly a downpour of negativity beats against my brain so powerful that I want to scurry back to bed, pull the covers over me and succumb to a full-blown panic attack.

But I don’t.  I need a job. Because we have bills.  Because I don’t want to let my husband down.  Because we have goals that require another thirty to forty thousand dollars in income per year to meet.  Because I still have the need to help others and contribute in a meaningful way. 

I open Gmail.  Oh hey – I have a job alert!  “My name is Laurie and I am working with ABC Machinery in Denver, CO to fill their Diesel Mechanic role.  Upon reviewing your profile, I believe your skill set and work experience are a close fit to what they are looking for in a candidate.  Check out the details below and be one of the first to apply if you like what you see!  I look forward to reviewing your application! Regards, Laurie – Indeed Automated Job Advisor” And there I was, thinking Facebook’s algorithms are messed up.  But maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe there’s some obscure link between a resume full of collections and customer service lingo and mechanical expertise.  Never-the-less, thanks Laurie for giving me what might be my only laugh of the day.

Our cat butts her head against my arm as I begin my job board routine.  It’s odd, but she seems to know the days when my serotonin and dopamine levels are near the empty mark.  I ignore her but she keeps nudging until I tickle her cheek.  But she knows she’s not going to get the full adoration a feline of her class deserves.  She leaves me for the fireside where she stares at me with revolted golden eyes as if to say, “You’re not going to find anything, you know.”

Cats do not understand the concepts of restrictions in commute time, experience level and desired company culture.  Nor do they apprehend red flag mandatory keywords like must be bi-lingual, must possess MA (or MBA), start your career with us, great opportunity for recent grads, three years experience strongly preferred on every program you’ve worked with except the ones that came into vogue during the six years I pursued marketing my art, and I can’t afford to take classes.  The little furball doesn’t know any of this stuff.  But I do.

The list runs on, but two particularly bother me.  Since when do positions such as collection representatives or administrative assistants require a four- or six-year degree?  Has scheduling appointments or making travel arrangements become that complex?  In these days of user friendly, Windows-based software, are these new programs that hard to grasp?  Of course not.  I search for these red flags for one purpose.  To determine how likely a company is willing to hire older workers. Some days crimson flags are all my vigilant eyes find.

In May 2019 the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published a stat that both encouraged and depressed me.  Forty percent of people 55 and older are working or actively looking for work.  It encouraged me because it lessens my paranoia that I’m the only sixty-one-year-old searching for the needle in the haystack.  It distressed me because the figure represented a segment of the US population who lost their jobs, 401K’s, and homes in and after 2008.  Many found themselves at the mercy of bankruptcy trustees.  Some found themselves in divorce court.  By the time the economy began its groaning, creaking, listing turnaround, we Boomers were told our experience inexplicably irrelevant.  Still worse, the hiring process had morphed beyond recognition. 

Simultaneously, Fannie Mae began to take its debt-ratio seriously, and hordes of twenty-somethings spilled forth to a still ailing job market, a sweltering desert where their expensive degrees were the first things to melt beneath the unrelenting student debt sun.  Ah!  The reasons my job search is largely failing is revealed.  The battle line formed.

I’m big on research, so I turned to the Internet.  In the beginning I searched sites about how to get hired, sites designed to make the forty plus crowd take heart.  Do this, don’t do that.  No wait, that was last week.  Don’t do what we told you to do, do this instead.  It brought out the OCD in me.  The glittering find of my early search?  Leave your graduation dates off your resume!  Of course!  Why didn’t I think of that?  So, I snipped the offending dates from my numerous customized resumes because the enlightened job seeker can no longer just have one or two. 

Armed with this new age-defying weapon, a conspiratorial chuckle escaped my lips.  I may even have wiggled my eyebrows as I tapped “Apply Now”. With cocky assurance, I uploaded my resume.  I scoffed and passed over the date of graduation field.  I triumphantly hit enter.  Fools!  How easily you are defeated!

But wait.  What was that red font that hovers above the blank graduation date saying?  Required field?  I tried inputting zeroes to trip the thing up.  Then I tried hitting enter again just to be sure it wasn’t a system glitch.  Through the fevered swirling dust of my defeat, I can almost hear the application scoff, “I’m a required field, you idiot!”  I choked in disbelief.  This is discriminatory!  Don’t these people know the ADEA was passed in 1967?  Where did I put my protest sign supplies?  This type of lowdown thing was the very reason for the act!  In desperation, I hit enter one more time before typing 1-9-7-6 with a forefinger ala Schroeder playing Lucy’s version of Jingle Bells.  For the first time in my white life, I experienced overt discrimination.

For those in the same Titanic as me, I say leave your graduation dates on your curriculum vitae. Or not.  Ignore those content writers who say don’t go back more than ten years and add the extra ten years of valuable experience in an Additional Experience section of your resume.  Just be sure it’s relevant experience. Or not.  Until they get around to enforcing the ADEA, it doesn’t matter.  Because if you land an interview, you can skip into that HR Manager’s office knowing they understand receding gray hair does not mean atrophied gray matter.

This Monday was one of the empty-handed days.  My coffee went cold hours ago.  My ass is numb and my hair uncombed.  The winter sun is way passed the yardarm.  The mountains are no longer a sign of hope, but a sullen symbol of impassable, immovable despair.  I look in the mirror and my dazed reflection reminds me of a Meth-head’s mugshot.  The cat sashays into the room, her predator eyes gazing up at me with an I-told-you-so look.  YouTube is playing A Charlie Brown Christmas.  Just for a moment I’m Snoopy the WWI flying ace, shaking my fist at the sky.

Curse you Red Baron!

Next Up:  More application quirks and the dreaded ATS.