Carpets and Crossroads

It’s the first thing I notice when I go for a job interview (an increasingly rare occurrence lately). The carpet. The thin, industrial weave that covers the floors of nearly every office in the U.S.

It can be tan, light blue or dusky green. It always must be a neutral shade. Nothing too

exciting. Corporations want bland. Bland, bland, bland…

They all look the same whatever the color. All are stained with outside dirt and coffee spills. (Seriously, when was the last time the carpet was cleaned?)

There is something else, something more ominous that gives the carpet its beaten-down appearance. It seems caked over with the deadened career dreams of anyone who works there or has worked there. It’s as if the vapors from the chemicals concocted to make the proudly artificial mat have sucked out the souls of the people who work above it. I wonder how many workers have walked over those carpets as they are led away after a layoff.

Then, I notice the long lines of cubicles. Some have workers hunched over computers. Others are empty. Are they out to lunch, or was the person who once worked there laid off? There's an pervasive, palpable undercurrent of sadness, defeat. The carpet, the floors seem to sag under the weight of dashed hopes, of lives lived only for a paycheck, never questioning...and of corporate oppression. Having a full-time job provides the marshmallow security of a steady paycheck and employer-sponsored health insurance. But that passivity comes at a price—it can be snatched away at any moment.

Each time I step onto that carpet, the same thought swirls in the back of my mind: Do I really want to go back to this? Do I really want to again be a pawn of some Machiavellian managerial maneuvering that throws me out of a job with no warning? If working hard is no guarantee of job security, then, well, why bother?

You see, I’m at a crossroads. I’m not sure I want to take a full-time job again. Admittedly, no company has offered me full-time employment. So, the decision may be forced upon me. Will I ever be hired again? And if not, what will I do? How will I support myself? Which path do I take?

When I first started looking for a job back in January, I got numerous calls for interviews. So my optimism had some solid footing (please indulge me another carpet metaphor). As the months have passed by, as winter stretched into summer and now into late fall and still no job, I’m beginning to wonder if my quest for full-time employment is as much a fantasy as my dream of seeing Giancarlo Stanton in a New York Mets uniform. Was the job I fortunately was offered in 2011 and held for nearly three years a serendipitous happenstance, a momentary blip on my extended road to long-term joblessness?

I also wonder if I was too quick back in January to revamp my resume and immediately get back on the job-hunting trail. To be fair to myself, there were financial imperatives behind that choice. I jumped right into freelancing as well. I don't regret that. It allowed me to do something I love and gave me a chance to evaluate whether it could be a career path. It also earned me extra cash.

Yet perhaps I should have stepped back and taken the time to really think about what I truly wanted to do. Part-time work combined with freelancing? A new career? Should I have gone to the unemployment office for career counseling? Because right now, the path I'm on clearly is leading nowhere.

Most important, should I have realized I was never going to get hired again at my age? Did keeping busy blind me to the reality of my situation? Could it ever compensate for my shame over two layoffs in four years? Why was I so hellbent on speeding back to my old life that I ignored the possibility of building a new one?

Yet as I said, I got interviews, so I had hope. But that hope is rapidly fading, like the worn carpet in so many offices.