by Mark Schultz
3/1/2014

I had a great week last week. I have been out of work for 12 weeks. The job market is hard, most web sites advertise jobs that are four months old or are no longer open (including official sites). You don’t learn this until you have spent 30 minutes applying for them and all you get is emails about the same non-existent jobs. If you are really lucky, they ask you to spend $ 12.95 a month to apply for a job that closed three months ago. I’m not complaining.

In April I’ll be 62. I have over 35 years experience and no one wants to talk to someone like me because I’m “over qualified” (or “too old”) or they assume I don’t have the skill set they want because I don’t speak in “text” abbreviations. I have been making 20-25 applications a week and have had some interviews. Some have been really excited about having me work for them. However the “jobs” offer no benefits and no pay. I have had two unpaid internships offered, three positions where I would have to pay them $ 5,000 to work for them. Plus several commission only jobs where I could work 40 hours a week for with no pay at all. What great concept for people to support themselves.

Finally, after many calls and a lot of help from good people, my family is now covered by Mass. Health. It has taken 12 weeks to get this far. I had have to reproduce a mountain of paperwork and hours on the phone talking with computers. At least our medical is covered, now on to the dental. That provides some peace of mind. Again, no complaints here. But even with all of those issues, things couldn’t be better. Why?

Everything I ever wanted is in my SPAM email filter. In the last six days I have been notified that I have over $643,700,000 waiting for me. WOW! I have emails from the IMF, the Nigerian government, the CEO and CFO of Citibank, BMW, and HBSC Bank in the UK. All I have to do is give them my personal information, which is 100% safe. After all it’s Citibank, the IMF and foreign governments; it has to be safe. If it wasn’t they couldn’t put it on the Internet, right? How could it get better?

I have listened to the carping of conservatives telling me that I’m a “taker” because I’m on unemployment. They should only be this successful. They think I should be forced to take a job at Wal-Mart for $17,160 a year. Not me. Now I can actually afford to buy three New England states. Yep, I can buy them and all of the politicians I want. How great is that? What a country.

But then I thought, “ if I could get $ 643,700,000 in six six days (I took a day off to rest), that would be almost $2.6 billion in a month or $30.9 billion a year.” Take that Wall Street! Who needs your investment gambling? I just respond to these generous emails and live in the style to which I have never been accustomed. Who needs Social Security? With this kind of power I can buy the White House in 2016 and still have plenty left over to buy 20 states.

Before I lost my job I never knew how much money I could make doing nothing from home. I have all these business deals, rewards and relatives that I must have forgotten about. All I have to do is wait for the cash to pour in. It should be transferred any day, right?

Tomorrow morning I’ll wake up and resume my job search with the same outrage and frustration of a system rigged to take advantage of the people who need help the most. I’ll be ripped at “kids” telling me that I “don’t fit the youthful profile” of their company. I’ll scream when all my life experience no longer allows me to make a living. I’ll rail endlessly about people not willing to lift a finger to help anyone. I may be faced with some impossible choices very soon. But I will also look in my spam folder. Before my intelligence kicks in, I’ll dream for a moment. In the real world the day will end with me asking how this could happen. If you work hard, play by the rules and try to be a decent person, shouldn’t you get closer to your dreams than to a nightmare? Why it is so damn easy for everyone to scam us, commit frauds, identity theft and the like with no one trying to protect the victims. I guess there is no money in it. All that money is sitting in my spam filter waiting for me to cash in.