Hi there. My name is Chris and I’m one of those guys you read about in the local paper everyday. You know one of those technology workers whose field took a dive after the economic downfall in the wake of the events of 2001. Two years ago I was on top of the world. I’d been working in my career path for two years and the future looked quite bright. Two years of working full time in the grocery industry and going to a local technical school at night earning my degree were finally paying off. Little did I and approximately twenty some thousand other technical workers in my area see what was going to happen to us over the next two years.

Years of school and reading journals taught my ilk that the best way to survive and prosper was through knowledge and schooling. I knew like most of the high school students that you have to have some sort of degree in whatever to truly prosper in this day and age. I got accepted to one of our prestigious universities out of high school. However my parents who were blue-collar workers most of their life didn’t understand that a high school diploma didn’t mean as much today as it did when they were my age. So they refused to cosign my student loans. So I went into the workforce doing what anyone with my level of education has to do. I took the first job I could and stuck with it for seven years. I discovered later that I could sign my own loan when I was twenty-four and did so. Thus did I find myself getting ahead for the first time in my life. Confidence in skills and myself was high. I graduated from my technical institution in 1999. Promptly retired from my job of seven years and entered into the booming world of information technology.

Two years and some odd months later, on a cold January afternoon I get called into my manager’s office. "We’re making cutbacks and you’re one of the ten initial cuts." "I don’t like it, because you’re one of the best on my team," he said. "If only we could have got you into a management position sooner they wouldn’t have cut you." No big surprise there, my company had recently lost the project manager of two years and had to promote someone from another team to project management over us. We didn’t know him and he didn’t know us. So all this guy knew was the figures on paper. The ten highest paid people not in a management or coordinator position on the project got slowly laid off over a two-week period. Later the whole project got cancelled due to too many cutbacks of all the folks who were certified and actually knew what was going on.

Like any good out of work worker I then found myself in an unemployment line for the first time in my life at age twenty-eight. High hopes in mind that the market is going to recover soon and that the setbacks are temporary. I remember setting at my PC with a cup of coffee in hand tweaking my dusty resume that I hadn’t updated in two years. Weeks flew by, forty sometimes fifty copies of my resume sent out via fax or via email. Nothing, no feedback, no "We’re sorry but you don’t meet our qualifications." Seven weeks later sitting in a cubicle, not unlike my old one, at unemployment speaking with a councilor about what I could do to promote my skillset proactively. Three months later my lease is up. Do I try to stay in Raleigh? No I move back home with my mother, my father died in June of 2001. Ok my bank account won’t drain, as quick with no rent payment. So back into my box I grew up in. My thoughts at this point are ok by moving home that I’ll have more resources to wait this thing out. Then out of the blue there are less ads for jobs in the IT field.

My twenty-ninth birthday and Christmas roll over. I rewrite my old Webpage out of boredom. Then in January of this year I finally get my first interview since being laid off. Wow maybe things are going to turn around for me. I went and found a lobby full of other applicants, most with five or six years experience above mine. Seemed more like a Cattle Drive than an interview environment. Did I get the job? No. Was it a good experience? Depends on how you look at it. I pick up my newspaper and it’s still full of doom and gloom for technology based industry in the Triangle area. Fast-forward a few months. Taxes paid on unemployment. Taxes paid on my vehicle. Periods of despair and then periods of optimism start. The unemployment checks stop coming. Great, I think. I cash in my almost nonexistent mutual funds, I lost almost half from stock market drops and such. This was the money I had been stashing away to buy my first home, which I was supposed to according to my five year plan be buying at about the same time I was cashing them out.

A few job interviews come and go, most not in my field. I get asked this question about why I’m not afraid of the IT field. I state that my belief is that computers are here to stay and the market will eventually recover, and people with my training will again be needed. Apparently this wasn’t the answer the trainer who was hiring network technicians for a training unit out in Morrisville wanted to hear, Because four days later I got my first rejection notice in the mail. I was perversely happy about this, finally someone committed to paper that I wasn’t accepted. I almost framed the thing. I guess the train of thought was that if I took the job that I would be gone the first job I found more in my line of expertise.

In the meantime I’m talking to some of my former colleagues over Chinese food on Capital Boulevard. Two of them had gotten contract work and we traded off some recruiters’ names and contact information. I start making calls and writing emails. A few hits and quite a few misses. I get calls and email every week now about this or that job. So far nothing has panned out.

I read today that a recent job fair in Raleigh only had fifteen companies in attendance. That’s not good. The last one of those I attended had over a hundred companies in attendance. Even those that were there weren’t really hiring. One of my friends I worked with is moving to Canada, he finally found a job but had to leave the country to get it.

Mentally and spiritually the last two years have been the worst of my life, so far. Some days the feelings of worthlessness beat you down so bad you don’t even want to roll out of bed. The phrase what next comes to mind too. Soon my bank account will be empty and I have no idea what I will do when that’s gone. Oh yeah I found out that retail chains in my small town don’t hire people in their late twenties with degrees, the manager told me it was bad practice because they will leave when the market gets better.

At what point did we all become statistics on a board some where? People aren’t simply numbers and figures, we’re people. We get the work done. Civilization didn’t build itself, the people did. Numbers are nothing but concepts without a human being to crunch them into something more.

Like everyone else in my shoes all I want is a chance. A chance to live, a chance to prosper, and a chance to do my part in pulling my weight. What does it take in today’s society to just get your foot in the door? I don’t know, if I did I wouldn’t have written this.

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