Good Boys And Girls Get Stars

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Let’s start with true confessions! I never really liked school. Oh, I did well in it, and when I was in college I did more hours than were reasonable, plus took outside courses, too. But the goal there was to graduate faster and also to have diverse enough credentials to get a good job when I finished. (Turns out this was nullified by the one simple trick of marrying someone from another country and moving there.)

The reason I didn’t like it was that the information they were trying to put in my head was never the stuff I was looking for at that particular time and/or was weirdly slanted, or worse, the things they graded me on were senseless to me, or worse mostly what they graded me on was being nice and compliant. Those people always got good grades, even if they knew nothing of what we studied. Unfortunately I couldn’t make myself over into a good girl even if I tried. And boy did I try for years. (And no, I wasn’t the classic bad girl. I never engaged in juvenile delinquency (or at least none of the conventional juvenile delinquency) and never really had trouble with the law, unless it was stupid law about political expression. Even then I never got in trouble, though I came close enough it was a matter of luck.)

I just couldn’t help speaking out or showing my feelings in my expression. And that was enough to stick out.

But even so, I found that enough of the “form” of traditional schooling lodged itself in the back of my head, so that I would approach life in the real world as though it were a school assignment.

Take trying to break into writing. I didn’t — for years and years. Over a decade — understand that it wasn’t a matter of writing things “well” or “getting it right.” Rather, it was a matter of writing something that just happened to hit an editor on a particular day as a “must have.” (This is why, btw, it’s easier to sell — to the public too — something that hits the time period, touch-feel or themes of a popular movie or game. (Visual media always sells better than books. Deal.))

However, even now when I mentor people, it’s really hard to make people understand this principle: it’s not if you got it right. It’s not if you did all the right things, according to the latest instruction of how to write, it’s not if you finally got “good.” (In fact “good” in writing is so highly subjective that you really can’t tell if you got there. I find most bestsellers stultifyingly boring and lacking in individuality.)

What actually makes you sell/hit big etc. is a combination of having a product a lot of people want to read, and having a certain luck in word of your product spreading enough to sell substantially. (Whether you’re indie or traditional. If traditional, somehow convincing your publisher that lots of people want to read your product helps. However one does that.)

Note that while this is true in publishing, it’s also true in the business world, politics, getting a job. It’s just that in that case, you are selling yourself/making yourself into a saleable product.

I keep running into people on X — and sometimes in my friend’s group — complaining that they did everything by the book to have a secure job, but are now being laid off or fired by DOGE and how this is unfair and an injustice.

It’s only an injustice if you’re in school and you were promised an A if you do x, y and z. And “unfair” is one of the characteristics of life in the world. In fact the whole “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” never works because it fails on the most fundamental level: the world doesn’t have an all-seeing teacher. It’s all a chaotic, fractal network of humans evaluating other humans/their works on insufficient information.

Over all, the free market works best for everyone because it allows people to hire/be hired/sell/buy according to their own, individual percevied interests.

Which doesn’t make it fair. Because the “luck” or “random chance” has a say. I have been approached by writers no one knows, including some whose work was never published, who are absolutely amazing and knocked my socks off. But they were hit so hard by rejection early on that they never tried again. Or they published once, failed through no fault of their own, and never found the courage to try again. Or a dozen other circumstances.

Their work is wonderful. It’s other circumstances keeping them from being bestsellers, and some of those are things they can’t overcome because they’re part of who they are.

In the same way, you might have done all the work to be the best designer of agricultural colonies in Mars, but since the job doesn’t exist yet, you can’t do that. And heaven only knows what you’re doing to survive.

In fact most of my friends — perhaps most people — do not work or make a living int he things they studied in college, the things they prepared to make a living in. Why not?

Well, there wasn’t a job in that field at the time, or they got into the field and found out they didn’t like it as much in reality as they did when they studied it, or–

Because life isn’t school. there isn’t “complete this study, then study this thing, then receive this degree, then–“

It’s a chaotic interaction of abilities and needs. In many ways unpredictable.

More unpredictable when idiots are playing with the over-structure of government and distorting the economy for their own agenda.

In the last 30 years which of us hasn’t experienced a sudden redirection, found him or herself without income, lose a job or a position we loved out of the blue and in a way we couldn’t have anticipated?

Most of what shocks me about the government employees losing their jobs now is that they’re experiencing this with the newness of a child who still thought the world was a giant, and “fair” schooling experience, even though some are my age or even older. It just tells me they have been insulated from the real world. Perhaps it’s part of being embedded in the over-structure of the planners that you have faith in it. This mostly astonishes me.

Yes, I feel sympathy with those who aren’t crooked or corrupt. Because I’ve been there. We’ve found ourselves going from a two-income household to a zero-income household suddenly when we had toddlers and the economy was problematic for job-finding. I’ve found myself suddenly without income in a year when we had sudden and unexpected demands on our income. I think we all have. All of us adults. So we feel empathy. We know what it’s like. Who doesn’t? (Though let me tell you, the eight month deal is better than anything I got or anyone I know got. And don’t be a fool. Of course if you take the deal they’ll pay. They have to. The only thing that would stop it is a complete collapse of the economy and at that point we all have problems.)

All of us.

So, for those caught in this: Yes, it sucks. I do realize it sucks. But you know what? We can’t go on the way we’ve been. We simply don’t have the money for this. At some point we have to retrench and shrink government, because government is not the productive part of economy. It’s parasitical on the real economy. And at this point the economy is dying of being sucked dry by the government. And the government is suffering from too much money, which is why it comes up with the idea that it’s up to it to finance transgender operas in Serbia. Or even crazier stuff.

To the rest of us, yes they will push the hostage puppy at you. The hostage puppy being the cute sweet puppy that the government is feeding and looking after, as well as doing a lot of things that would look good on a demon’s resume.

Yes, the puppy is real, and the puppy will suffer, but behind it are all the things that would really buff up the demon’s resume.

While it’s not fair (that word again) for the puppy to suffer and die, and all good people will hurt over it, the fault for the puppy’s death is not on the people who stopped the government leeching on working people and creators. It’s on the people who use the puppy and its cuteness to hide their heinous crimes. In fact, in war hiding your fighters behind the innocent is what’s known as a war crime.

This is not schoolwork. There is no such thing as “I’ve done the thing, I’ll get the grade.”

Life is chaotic and unpredictable. And the only way for good people to avoid pain (or at least excessive pain) is to look to themselves and their interests.

Do not — ever — whichever side of this you’re on, sit around bleating that you got laid off, or something bad happened and it’s not fair.

Fair is a market where they sell cattle.

There is no fair in life. There is doing what you can and fighting for survival.

Do that.

Your survival, your success is up to you.

Go do so. And keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

78 thoughts on “Good Boys And Girls Get Stars”

  1. Uh oh. Caffeine not kicked in yet. Tried to type with my keyboard upside down. No, not with the keys on the table.

    Anyways, school thing. Parts of school were exactly like you describe for me too. However interactive classes, like those for language art or music, were interesting or at least held my interest because I had a chance to hone my innocent but smart ass remark skills now so useful in comment sections of social media. Also due to this skill, I got assigned to independent study for three different subjects with a few other like minded and skilled smart asses last few years of high school, which made it very tolerable. At least made it easier to skip out for a trip to Dairy Queen in middle of the day.

    Job thing. Two best things that happened to me early in life. I quite one postgraduate program to go to another (something quite rarely done even nowadays, from what I understand) as I could tell there was no future with the first. Caused all sorts of consternation with the group of folks I really liked at the first program. .Second, I got fired from the second one’s job opportunities shortly after finishing the training. I had to set up my own shop and learn from scratch how to run a business while practicing a profession.

    I was lucky to find a few folks willing to show me the ropes in those early years. Made adjusting business situation multiple times easy as I was becoming skilled at rapid adaptation and not wedded to a particular process.

    If only I had been as lucky and skilled at romantic partnerships…

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  2. I’ve been fired twice, once for being wrong, and once for being right too early.  I remember the first time vividly, we were living abroad and my parents were visiting.  I got off a phone call that signaled the end of my employment at that firm was inevitable.  I must have been a sight, we were living abroad, the wife wasn’t working, and we had three young children.  My Da asked me what the problem was, I said I’m gonna get fired, he asked “so, I got fired any number of times and we were OK.”  My Da worked on Wall Street too and getting fired is part of it.  I answer him “Da, did you ever think the fact you were fired any number of times might be the reason I’m so worked up about it.”  Unfair, perhaps, but sometimes stress reveals. 

     Turns out we were alright and I have no regrets, but then again I was prepared for it, mentally and otherwise, since the possibility was always there.  Every damned day, in fact, could be your last day at the firm.  These folks have never thought that way, they’re not prepared, and they probably can’t do anything else.  I do feel slightly sorry for them. 

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    1. Yeah, my kids are more traumatized by the near-layoff experiences than we were. Also by our other investment strategy of buying and living in fixeruppers then buying up while finishing the touchups on the last house (Things you don’t want to do with kiddies around. ) This last often had us so tight we’d have gone under if we didn’t sell in time. Sons interpreted this as “almost starving” I found recently. What it actually was “Almost losing one of the houses.” Starving wasn’t on the program.

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  3. It helps if you always keep in mind:

    What would I do besides this?

    Never Quit.

    …

    Persistence makes progress. Sometimes change the tactics/methods, but don’t quit.

    Sometimes life is change. You better adapt. So what else would you do?

    Note – make them fire you. This can be both -fun- and career enhancing.

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  4. If someone has been living in Virginia and working for the government for 17 years, but their house is not paid for and they have no savings, my sympathy is low to non-existent.

    You could sell your million dollar house and retire. Instead it’s woe is me, I shall die.

    You could have been saving a good chunk of your 300k salary, but you chose instead to make all those trips to Europe. Oops.

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      1. Yeah, as of a week ago, house prices are down 20% from Election day (oh, the Schadenfreude–I keep wanting to substitute an ‘r’ for the ‘l’ in Election), and about 8-10% from Inauguration.

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    2. All the co-workers would laugh at them for not keeping up with the Joneses. And why not? Perfect job security!

      Hindsight is wonderful.

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  5. I both do and don’t have sympathy for the folks that DOGE is biting. I do, because like you said, suddenly finding yourself adrift in the job market sucks.

    But at the same time I don’t, because it’s the policies enacted by some of these same people that have ME staring down the barrel of the same situation after nearly forty years in information technology thanks to the rampant and continuous abuse of H-1Bs. I’m not done yet, and I still have a job (for now) but there’s no job market for a 58-year-old White guy when half the hiring managers and almost all the recruiters are hiring nothing but their own and the DEI bureaucracies are clapping seals cheering them on. So the lesser angels of my brain are saying to them, “well, let’s all just go to Hell together then, at least we won’t be lonely.”

    Still, your reminder applies to me as well as to the DOGE “victims.” Fair ain’t got nothing to do with it (I’m pretty sure that’s a line from a Western but I can’t remember who said it) and we’re responsible for our own fates, or at least a significant portion of them.

    Plus if we force a diaspora from northern Virginia of displaced ex-government workers and disperse them, then maybe my beloved Commonwealth will actually become worth loving again. I kind of doubt it, but a native Virginia boy can dream big.

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    1. “Plus if we force a diaspora from northern Virginia of displaced ex-government workers and disperse them, then maybe my beloved Commonwealth will actually become worth loving again. I kind of doubt it, but a native Virginia boy can dream big.”

      From your lips to His ear!

      And we took the deal (although fortunately assigned outside of NOVA). Spousal unit is eligible for voluntary early retirement as part of the buyout, so it was a no-brainer financially. He’ll have a good situation for looking for another job, and we can put the pension away until we actually retire.

      Yes, it sucks for all the folks that decided they were going to wait to see if the union/court was going to get them a better deal and suddenly got the rug pulled out when the judge reversed himself and they shut down the option 20 minutes later, but they’d already had an extra week for what was basically a s#!t or get off the pot deal. If you were probationary and didn’t take it, you have only yourself to blame when you get fired instead, when you knew damn well you were an at-will employee and thus the low-hanging fruit in any RIF.

      And unpopular opinion here (well, not here here, but you know what I mean), the “good honest hardworking” GS people that everyone is so worried about losing their jobs are likely the ones most in favor of the audits and cuts, because they’ve seen how the sausage is made, and are tired of doing the work for the lame and lazy while watching the money flying out the door with zero accountability.

      We’re thrilled despite careers (mil and civ) leaching off the government teat.

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  6. I’m quite aware that my spouse or I or both of us could be laid off at anytime. We almost got the ax from our separate employers for refusing the Covid vax kill shots. They both backed down due to the number of refusals and legal implications.

    With all the current disruption and changes, we still are not secure. That’s life.

    Been laid a few times before. At one job I had great reviews and had saved the company millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours. Didn’t matter. At another role I got caught in inter-departmental politics and the company went under because they destroyed all of their IT documentation because it wasn’t important to the winning managers. “IT is a cost center, yada, yada,…” Whatever and good riddance, f-tards.

    I’ve been real close to homeless multiple times and had several months long job searches with hundreds of resumes and very few interviews. Nothing makes a decent working person feel worse than being unemployed and trying to get a decent role only to be ghosted again and again. It pushes you closer to the abyss.

    So the people that were knowingly employed through ill spent tax dollars, in slacker roles, in DEI or at NGOs, I’m not going to cry for. You helped steal my money that I worked decades for and destroy the best country in the world. Learn to mine coal. Or flee to Europe. Bye, Felicia!

    And for the innocents, hang in there, it sucks, most of us have been there before. You are a temporary causalty of the Great Culture War. Hopefullly this too will pass.

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    2. I was going to comment on the typo but you saw it.

      Anyway, yeah, I’ve been there. A hundred applications for a dozen interviews. A dozen interviews and one job offer. For scutwork at minimum wage. (Back when minimum wage was six an hour, which tells you something.)

      And I’ve always been laid off for being too slow. Nevermind that I did it RIGHT the first time, and the Flash over there often has to go back and redo. Management LOVES employees who work ninety miles an hour, no matter how many errors are involved.

      No sympathy here either. My current husband and I were simultaneously laid off early in the marriage. And there was some paperwork technicality that meant NO unemployment. People ASSUMED that if you were laid off you were getting unemployment checks. Not necessarily.

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      1. I’ve had companies shut down on me, bought out from under me, rescheduled away from me… I even lost one job because I asked for a day off after the boss’s fave ball team lost a game. The only thing certain in life is uncertainty. I’ve gotten quite good at tailoring my resume to the application. All you can do it keep putting one foot in front of the other.

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        1. We have had to deal with the “total lack of tax records because company went under” TWICE. Since this was prior to doing taxes online, this involved much digging through the records to come up with a tax ID in order to file.

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      2. I have had six jobs since graduating from college the first time. I’ve left 3 voluntarily. First because hubby was transferred 100+ miles south (internship which was coming to an end anyway and no job offer, so did I really quit?). Second, maternity leave, firm small enough they were not required to hold the job (also, downsizing was happening and they kept me on until maternity leave so would have been gone anyway). Third time … I retired. Otherwise, the terminations were unexpected. Getting back to work, took work. It sucks. It isn’t fair. It takes work. Government jobs have been “secure” jobs for generations. They shouldn’t be.

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        1. Four jobs, though #3 had the company get spun off, but it was the same job. First one left was “I need to work through the recession and get skills so I can get the hell out of here”. The second, a good opportunity knocked, and I really wanted to work for HP. Lasted a couple decades.

          Got laid off from the spinoff in 2001 coincident with the Dot Com bubble (V1.0) bursting, plus Silicon Valley companies moving to SE Asia. Final job, consulting gig and the client went toes up, partly due to Dot Com, plus Edifice Complex. (Protip: the start of a recession Is A Bad Time to build a shiny new factory/HQ.) Retired early, scraped by until retirement money was accessible. We’re doing OK, though the February storm(s*) will be expensive. New kennel framing needed, plus it’s a golden opportunity to redo the barn’s chimney stack correctly.

          ((*)) Multiple snowstorms over a course of a week. 36″ equivalent snow, a little bit of powder snow and a lot of Cascade Concrete. (Sierra Cement’s evil twin.)

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        2. The original deal was, accept a job that didn’t pay very well, but was regular and secure. That deal got modified, and the modifications have generated resentment.

          And it should be easier to fire people.

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  7. Oh, I’ve had plenty of unfair things happen to me over the decades. Some of them were even self-inflicted. Duh. The Universe doesn’t owe me squat. And God gave me the grace and the tools to rise or fall on my own, and all He expects is recognition and thanks. That’s as good as the deal gets.

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      1. Considering the randomness of the universe, someone else with the same circumstance might come out smelling like roses, instead of the cesspool, so in that case, yes, even self-inflicted things can be unfair, even when it balances out statistically.

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  8. I have worked for government contractors off and on for my entire working life, including as a NASA contractor. The iron rule of working as a government contractor is you are going to get fired. Sooner or later and whether you did a good job or a bad job. Contractors are the sacrificial anodes used to keep civil servants employed good times or bad.

    You can imagine my sympathy for civil servants who are finding that the contractor shield no longer guarantees employment. (Although I bet most of the “Federal workers” reported fired over the last few weeks were contractors and the only civil servants fired are either probationary hires or political appointees.

    In between jobs working for gummint contractors I have worked pure private sector jobs. Which have just as little job security. You eventually get fired there, too, again independent of the quality of your work. Projects get cancelled, companies go out of business and you are out.

    The only real job security lies in being able to get the next job. (Or to make your own by providing a product or service people will pay for.) It took me a while to figure that out, but once I did I was never out of work for more than a month between jobs.

    It is time for the former civil servants to learn how to do that.

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  10. I have empathy and zero sympathy. I’m imagining the cursing and rage in the posh hallways, the rosewood desks being pounded in fury.

    All I can do is build my own life, and be as resilient as possible.

    I woke up with Mel Fisher’s “Today’s The Day!” in my head. I’ll go with that. Plus, It’s kitchen art day: making bagels and cooking milk for Greek yogurt. Pure joy.

    He is good.

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  11. Where I am having difficulty in feeling sympathy for laid off/fired fed employees is…we were told this was coming and offered an extremely generous buyout. They were told. And while i totally get the whole “Oh, surely it won’t be ME” outlook…we were told. And while, to be sure, no one in my field office has been laid off (well. We’re already btw 30-40% understaffed, so at most they just won’t fill those jobs. Until drilling for oil and gas takes off and they realize that, gosh, this IS one of those areas that DOES need fully staffed, lol) there were absolutely no guarantees, particularly for people still on probation. I’m still hoping they fire our field manager who, technically, is new enough in the official job that he ought to be on probation. And he SUCKS, and we all knew it, and yet the powers that be still put him in the job because he’s a yes-man. Guy is useless as they come. I was not one of those on probation, but why wouldn’t I take such an offer??? I don’t have kids, and even if I were to lose my house I wouldn’t end up homeless.

    But at the end of the day…it’s on them if they chose not to believe when they were told, very bluntly, that odds were high that there would be big time layoffs. ESPECIALLY amongst people new to the job. The fact that a parachute was offered with no caveats as to time in service or anything else (barring military, ICE, and a few other national security type areas) was a huge clue that it was coming, but that they were trying to be as kind as possible in the execution and make it easy for people to choose to leave. So…yeah. It’s part of the FAFO. I’m glad I didn’t FA (although I am 95% sure I’d have kept my job no matter what. But hey, why NOT do my part to shrink gov??)

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    1. Yeah, my well of sympathy is about drained dry as well – Been fired twice myself, for a time patching together five part-time gigs, had two employers fold under me. No one ever offered me a generous buy-out like they are getting.

      That all the apparent scamming of gummint funds was going on, right under their well-paid noses is just another reason for lack of sympathy. You can find it in the dictionary, though …

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  12. I am one of the aforementioned people that does not work in the field I studied in school. The reason for this, despite 3 internships, all with the same company (the HR director was trying to set me up with guys and kept asking me when I was going to graduate so she could give me a ‘real’ job), was that when I called up the company I was anticipating working for I got told that they had just laid off 200 people and could not justify hiring a brand new college grad.

    Oh well, sucks to be me. I had no other jobs lined up, hadn’t even done any interviews because I -knew- I had this in the bag. Mea culpa. I learned my ‘just in case’ lesson the hard way. Now my degree is over 20 years out of date (and in STEM, that’s a game stopper) and I’ve really only ever used it to explain to engineers why they need to stop playing with the cool stuff long enough to give me the monthly data I need to send to the government so that they can continue to play with the cool stuff on someone else’s dime.

    Life isn’t fair. I’ve got a nephew who laps up the ‘living wage’ and ‘wage gap’ garbage and other leftist stuff like that. He wants the world to be ‘fair’. He wants everyone to be taken care of. We have tried and tried to explain to him that wanting the world to be a perfect place where everyone is happy and fulfilled is wonderful, but impractical. We’ve argued ourselves blue in the face explaining that understanding the world isn’t perfect doesn’t preclude one from wanting to make it better. He’s so stuck on what the world ‘should’ be like, that he keeps running face first into reality in a blind attempt to disbelieve it away.

    His twin, the other night, was up in arms over DOGE ‘firing thousands of park rangers’. We had to explain that was unlikely as park rangers aren’t generally actively involved in trying to enforce DEI initiatives on the squirrels. Then we had to explain the voluntary separation deal that was being offered and just how many perfectly competent people were taking it. My very best friend is taking it and is going to use the time it will provide her to finish gaining new skills she’s been working on for a while. This will allow her to get a job outside the Bureau of Land Management where she does the job of two people because the local hiring policies are truly insane, and her father (who is also availing himself of the voluntary separation) does the job of 3.

    Yes, a lot of the dead wood will get while the getting is good, but more than a few of the 20% who actually get work done are also going to get the heck out of dodge because they are sick and tired of being the only ones holding things together and constantly having abuse heaped on their heads for making the rest ‘look bad’.

    I’ve lost track of where I was going with this, but I want to say Thank you, Sarah, for reminding me that I’m not the crazy one for seeing what’s really there, for pointing out that you, too see that the emperor not only has no clothes, but also a teeny little )(&*.

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    1. Right there with ya on the job not what I studied for. Twice over. I loved physical anthropology, sure. Digging in the dirt, patient and careful analysis, reconstructing what limited view we have of he past through physical medium? Yep, right up my alley. But that job didn’t work for me, even if I worked for it.

      Worked construction for years. Went from volunteer to laborer to straw boss and trainer before the company went belly up. Kept at it, got hurt, then couldn’t go back to it anymore. I’ve been laid off for the dumbest of reasons. Boss got caught by his wife philandering and lost his company during the divorce. Company fired all employees because the boss got caught dealing drugs on company property. Company building didn’t keep up with its maintenance, went out of code, cost more to get it fixed than it was worth, so fire everybody and move upper management to home office. Left just before one company went under, wherein over 60% of the workforce got fired for testing positive for drugs on the job (in a job where random drug tests were, in writing, routine and mandatory).

      I’ve seen nepotism gone rampant, cronyism, sleep-your-way-up the chain, backstabbing, backroom politicking, betrayal, teenage angst that had no place in a forty-year-old’s body, out-and-out lying to the government, and more. But none of that holds a candle to working for the state.

      State employees come in two flavors, and only two. Competent and incompetent. The former are all too few, invariably overworked, indubitably unappreciated, and absolutely essential for the continued operation of their area. The latter are varied, though all of a piece. The lazy. The utterly useless. The delusional. The petty tyrant, The boss’s kid.

      The place I worked in, it rewarded laziness and passing the buck. If you could get someone else to do it, you did and got rewarded for it. If you could make yourself look good without doing anything at all, better. The disgust is what drove me out. If you so much as pointed out even the little, minor ways to make things suck less, you’d get singled out for causing problems for everybody else.

      Where I’m at now, I use barely any of what my education was supposed to prepare me for. The official education anyway. What grandad taught me, what my uncles taught me, that stuff mattered more. Hard work, self discipline, honesty, diligence, time management, basic mathematics, self awareness, and good judgement. That sort of thing should be the foundation of any professional, be they cook or colonel.

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      1. Those are the things kids learn in entry-level jobs. The 5 essential qualities of a worker:

        1. Show up for work
        2. Every day
        3. On time
        4. Sober
        5. DO THE F*KING JOB!

        Unfortunately, the opportunities for youngsters to learn and apply those important lessons have been blown away by the ‘caring’ Leftroids’ insistence that every unskilled, inexperienced slacker be paid a ‘living wage’ sufficient to support a family for life without any need to ever learn anything. Along with ‘worker protection’ laws that prevent employers from firing their incompetent lazy asses.

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        1. There’s a nearby “private” school that actually teaches those skills. The fees are paid by businesses in the area, many of whom also offer internships to kids at this school.

          All of the students are taught how to dress and interact appropriately for jobs, and what job expectations are, and those skills are part of their grades.

          And this school is in an area where there are often several generations who do not have those skills, and therefore do not know how to pass them on, so that’s what the school is doing. I gather they have a pretty decent success rate of turning out graduates who can actually perform a job.

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  13. The best possible response these people will get from ordinary Americans is “Suck it up, buttercup; nobody else gets the security you think you’re entitled to, and there’s nothing unfair about you losing it.”

    And a lot of them will get told “count yourself lucky you’re not going to jail for 10 to 20 years for defrauding your employer; that’s what would happen if life were fair.”

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    2. I tried to post a Babylon 5 clip from Yoo-Toob, of Marcus explaining why he takes comfort in the unfairness of the universe, but it went to WPDE Purgatory. That has happened the last 2 or 3 times I’ve tried to post a link. ONE link.

      WPDE also seems to not like short comments of just a few words. I’ve had a few of those vanish into the aether lately.

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  14. All the empathy in the world.
    Sympathy well has about run dry, though.

    (I once left Iowa for a job in Maryland that turned out not to exist, and ended up homeless in Boston, I’ve been there)

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    1. My husband drove two days for a job opportunity that evaporated while he was on the way. He slept on the floors of friends for two months while getting employment, and I stayed with his parents and the cats.

      Mind you, the second job he got after that debacle turned into an actual career (unheard of for our age cohort), so all is well. (First job was music store; he kept that one day a week for a year or so after obtaining the second job, so was working six days a week.)

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  15. So, apropos of nothing, is anybody else seeing that the titles on the response list is Capitalized weirdly? Just for this Blog post, none of the others. I know it should not bug me, but it is.

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      1. You fixed it! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

        Such a small thing should not have been giving me the twitches so badly, normally can ignore. I blame Canada leaving the dang gate open and letting all the cold to come visit.

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        1. No, I know. It’s the type of thing that drives me nuts too. I’d just noticed it when you mentioned it and it was driving me bonkers as well.
          Thing is, when I’m writing, it just shows me all caps. WP delenda Est.

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  16. Fair? Ha.

    Unexpected unemployment? Ha.

    I spent decades working in a field so volatile you could be out of a job in an instant. Of course you could be hired by a competitor just as quickly. Meet the new boss same as the old boss.

    Then I did 15 years as a contract employee overseas. Same-same, except you may have to repatriate yourself after dealing with local Third World red tape.

    My sympathy for these people isn’t non-existent but it is very, very, limited.

    I’ll leave some pithy advice my Father gave to me an a few occasions when I was in my single digit years…

    “Looking for Sympathy? You’ll find it in the dictionary, between sh*t and syphilis”. Then there was this gem, “You ever get the feeling that the universe is cruel and uncaring and doesn’t give a rat’s a** if you live or die? <I nodded my sad little face> Enjoy those moments. That’s when it’s giving you an even break.”

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  17. my advice to new grads would be get a job as close to your prefered industry as you can … BUT get a JOB no matter what … then keep your head on a swivel and l look too either 1) gain experience that helps you move towards something you prefer or 2) see if you can get really good at the job you have and see what opportunities it opens up …

    In the end I believe that the some of the most important decisions you make in life are things you DID NOT PLAN … now having a plan as a baseline is required … but always be thinking about what you REALLY want to do (if its not what you are now doing) and about what skills would help you get there … and develop those skills in your current job … head on a swivel …

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  18. Years of construction taught me layoffs were part of the process, and when I finally worked up to upper management, layoffs were still part of the process. Even managers can find they’re looking for a job. The market dictated some of the layoffs, but there never was a guarantee the company I worked for would always be the low bidder, When the market was tough, many smaller companies couldn’t survive, or were forced to keep only their core employees, which sometimes wasn’t the group I was in. The results led to times of having a hard time paying the bills, and even a foreclosure on a home I was buying. I made it through without losing the house, but had to work in the worst of weather, while dealing with a bad case of influenza.

    I have compassion for the good people dealing with the uncertainties of future employment. I don’t have compassion for those that knew they were part of an unsustainable process and abused their position with laziness, vindictive use of power, or outright thievery.

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    1. Timber. Whether we got on with the USFS, at least initially, or the company we ended up working for. Annual layoffs. We were told the at least the first 10 years. USFS unless worked your way into department management it is possible to never work your way up into no annual layoffs. As it turned out, the private sector job meant one of us could continue on that career path. I was the just far enough down on the seniority list to not be that one. As it turned out, hubby worked his entire career for them, got a layoff notice every single year. A few years the notice was revoked, but he got them (1979 – 2012). Company went from 279 field personnel in ’79 to 50 or 60 when hubby retired. Last I’d heard the company employs 40 – 50 now.

      Company learned that if he got an act-of-god-fire-season layoff during the summer when he couldn’t get vacations during the summer, that we were taking off. Revoking while we were gone, still allowed two weeks to return to work (I couldn’t be gone from my job longer than that). No downside to taking off.

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    1. The demolition derby portion of the Fair is the most real-life experience of said Fair.

      You drive frantically around a small area trying to avoid collision as long as possible while at any moment an attack from an unwatched direction can take you out of the game.

      My life in a nutshell.

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  21. Yup. Show me your warranty on Life. Point out the clause that guarantees Life will be Fair. Is life Fair to a wildebeest calf that gets eaten by a crocodile? A newly hatched sea turtle carried off by a seagull? Why should it be any more Fair to you?

    The universe is constantly trying to kill you, and one day it will succeed. Ain’t nuttin’ Fair about it.

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    1. What kind of idiot gets into a fair fight when there’s another option? Of course the universe is unfair. Fair gets boring, real fast. Fairest of the fair is the silence of the grave that awaits all life, the cold sleep of the universe once the last flame is snuffed, the great pause before the big bang when all things cease to be.

      Yeah, no. Bring on the chaos. At least it’ll be interesting while it lasts.

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  23. I recall losing an online acquaintance (I forget now what circle, but iirc it was LJ, maybe Balloonatic might remember her, or it may have been ElfLife/Shadowfall or Winger. I’ve slept a bit since then) who got quite angry when we were saying we needed to clear house of the deadweight in Gov’t, because her hubby worked in Gov’t and we said if his job was not one of the few vital positions, that yes, sorry but he should go. She got quite mad at us for not being willing to carve out an exception for him.

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  24. I was the Good Girl growing up. Had my homework done (usually), read the assignment, knew the answers, had my hand up for every question….and was lucky if I only got shunned by my peers. And didn’t understand why.

    Didn’t they want to learn everything? I could talk to teachers. I had no idea what to say to my fellow students.

    The end result was the feeling that since I was myself, and I couldn’t be anyone else, I would have to be myself, even if that meant being alone. Things got better in high school, but I still have the scars.

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    1. but I still have the scars.

      Oh me too! Me too!

      *waves hand wildly

      I am eternally grateful for the experience because I learned early on not to listen to or trust “the cool kids” when they are self-serving jerks.

      It has certainly helped me to be able to keep my own council and follow where I could see the data leading more than going along with the crowd helped them.

      see also: the last half decade

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      1. I could not be a cool girl. It wasn’t in me. I paid for it, but now? I’m glad I went my own way and did my own thing, even though the experience left serious damage.

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      3. Being a small and geeky boy in a family of popular girls made high school… difficult. I discovered metal shop and cycling, got good at both, and even got a job as an apprentice at a local aerospace firm.

        And was promptly laid off.

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    2. oh, I was like that in the double-secret gifted form. (It’s a long story.) By then though I knew how bad school could be. (Fifth and sixth grade, it was mostly juvenile delinquents, and maybe a dozen of us who actually worked.)

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  25. I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
    Ecclesiastes 9:11

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  27. Back in the Billy-Jeff era I know that a lot of military folks, with actual contracts in writing, were “peace dividended” right out the door because history had ended and stuff. “Out you go, thank you for your service, NEXT!”

    These GS- folks have no such contract. They just assumed what could not go on forever would nevertheless would go on forever, at least until they wanted to retire.

    As a proud rider of the tech rollercoaster from 1988 until 2012, in response to the wailing and gnashing of the GS- (and I assume SES-) set, I quote that great philosopher, John McClane: “Welcome to the Party Pal.”

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  28. I’m an outlier, as I was fortunate enough to work in a field I was very good at and enjoyed immensely while in state government. Although a boss from heck, plus telling the truth to a huge packed audience at a national conference where a very high-up Federal person didn’t quite like what I said, made the final 6 years less pleasant. But my early years overlapped the early 90s recession, and I saw many people RIFed. So for my entire first career we lived within our means, put away as much as we could in deferred conp, and lived with the expectation that it could go sideways at any time. And in our state, governmental salaries are below market rates. And when my wife was fired, this frugality allowed us to absorb the hit so she could stay home with our son, born soon after.

    These days, we’re much more financially secure, but I still won’t splurge unnecessarily (much). Because there are no guarantees.

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  29. The “classroom with an all-seeing teacher” is a crock, too. The “all-seeing teacher” is more like a vindictive harpy who cultivates pets, and punishes her chosen goats, and there is nothing the goats can do about it, more often than not.

    What the lifelong pets are whingeing about is that things are no longer unfairly tilted toward them, which they think is their right. (And a few want to be the teacher, so they can lord it over everybody and punish “bad” people who don’t fit their whims.) (OK, not a few, it’s basically all of them, just that most of them settle for being special pets of the ones in power.)

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  30. The other thing this brought to mind is Scott Adams’s idea of a “talent stack”. Get enough different talents in your stack, and you become unique in the market place.

    My main problems are that I suck at networking because I’m an introvert, and I suck at marketing because basically ever aspect of modern marketing theory strikes me as either false, or such evil sociopathic manipulation that I can’t bear to even consider doing it.

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  31. I also got the “do this, and youll have jobs begging for you” early 90’s the Golden Field was biotech. I was a fair hand with biological sciences, so I got the degre.. And notbing.. I was stuck in the job that paid my way through the degree.. Loans paid off before graduation. But still, I remained a flunky. Until I tried to become the Boss Flunky over the Pet Flunky that was the manager’s neighbor. She got the spot, then made up stuff to get me fired for Daring to compete with her. She even went to the unemployment hearing to get my unemployment denied. I eventually found a job working in a physics lab.. Way out of my field, but it kept me afloat.

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  32. Hi Sarah

    O/T and for your contemplation

    FWIW – Re the “free speech” news from Germany –

    You’ve likely not read the books “Trail Sinister” and “Black Boomerang” by Sefton Delmer

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sefton_Delmer

    gives you an idea of the scope of his knowledge of things German both pre-WW2 and post.

    In one of those books (likely the first) he mentions that legal powers (in his opinion undesirable) were allowed to spill over into the post WW2 West German constitution from the pre WW2 one that gave it some extreme powers.

    Which are likely to be being invoked now.

    I didn’t make detailed notes when I read the books and haven’t yet been able to get library copies again as yet to refresh on that.

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  33. While it’s true that our oversized government must be pared back because it’s more than we can afford, the more important point is that it must be pared back now because it’s at the point of swallowing democracy whole.

    The unelected bureaucracy is making more of the rules we must live by, by an order of magnitude, than the representatives we elect specifically to make rules. In many cases, they have usurped the role of adjudicating disputes as well, three branches of government in one, without an elected official to be seen. They’re making the rules by which they spend our money. They’re making the rules by which they themselves may be hired and fired.

    The scary part is it may already be too late. If Trump succeeds with his reforms, it seems like it may be a near thing. If the bureaucracy may block the reform of itself – and use our own resources to do it – then democracy is effectively over, a fig leaf for an unelected and self-serving new ruling class.

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  34. I worked at the same job for 27 years. No real benefits (tiny company) combined with a median income for my degree and experience, it still worked well with my…issues. And the flexibility in schedule that let me work with my daughter’s medical issues were a big benefit. Unfortunately, between the economy and the aging of my boss, well, my boss went into semi-retirement and let the rest of us go. So, while I’ve been looking for work, as it happened I got an offer, with a start date, from the Patent and Trademark office as a Patent Examiner. That was great, a government job I could take with a clear conscience (patents and copyrights are explicitly listed in the Constitution)…right up until Trump’s EOs, including the hiring freeze. And the offer was rescinded.

    And so I shrug and move on in the job search. While it sucks to have the job pulled out from under me , particularly as my scheduled start date was two days after the cutoff where I would have been fine, this kind of “clear the decks” is necessary to fix the mess that is the federal government.

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