The Jurassic Job Hunter

THE JURASSIC JOB HUNTER

Lately, I've felt a lot like Gregor Samsa.

Gregor, the central character of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," woke up one morning to find he'd been transformed into a gigantic bug. I awoke one morning to discover I had somehow become a dinosaur.

For more than 30 years, I'd been in the newspaper business. I learned to report the who, the what, the when, the where and the why of thousands of stories. I owned and operated two weekly newspapers and I developed a flair for creating print advertising.

Then, one morning, I opened my eyes to find I'd become little more than an interesting oddity in the fossil history of the American workforce: a kind of duck-billed dinosaur, plodding along the high-speed highway of today's job-hunting world.

The ability to write a series of clear and concise sentences, (including actual verbs and nouns), had suddenly become an infinitely less valuable commodity than the ability to "twitter."

It was not a good start to my day and things were about to get worse. 

It dawned on me that if "tweeting" on Twitter.com was a hot commodity in the job market, then "blogging" was an even hotter one.

Admittedly, blogging is an incredibly democratic form of communication. Anyone with a computer, (or even a cell phone), can now post a blog on the internet.  Trivial little details like grammar, spelling, fact checking and editorial supervision are no longer prerequisites to reaching a mass audience. That scares me. The poor spelling, bad grammar and the absence of fact checking unnerves me but it's all the bad writing out there now that really scares the pants off me.

And, speaking of scary things, by the time this particular dawn's early light had filled my bedroom; the George W. Bush Memorial Recession was hitting the economy with all the sound and fury it could muster. Clearly, I thought, this was more than just a tale told by an idiot. It was an economic tsunami created by one and four years earlier, I'd actually voted for the idiot-in-chief.

At this point I decided I'd better take a cue from Kafka's character and count my legs. Fully expecting the worst, I was relieved to find I still had only two, but I couldn't help noticing a kind of squishy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Like a cricket about to enter a ballroom full of flamenco dancers, I suddenly had a premonition that my life was not about to get any easier.

The Bush recession had already hit my business so hard that I had been forced to close it down. My employees and I were all out of work in a less-than-receptive job market.

I had been able to land a job as the "creative director" for a small internet retailer, but it was not a match made in heaven.

For starters, I am a dyed-in-the-wool Macintosh computer guy and they were an all-PC operation.

Gertrude Stein may have been right when she wrote that, "a rose is a rose is a rose," but unless she'd been munching on some of Alice B. Toklas's famous brownies, good old Gertrude would never have said that a computer is a computer is a computer.

(Most of us in publishing had opted for Macs decades ago because the best publishing software at the time was written for Macs only. Add to that the fact that they are elegant, streamlined and intuitive. PCs, even on their best days, are clunky and counter-intuitive. I mean, when you want to shut down a PC, you still have to click on the start icon!)

In any event, my life at this on-line retailer's PC-dominated world was, in a word, miserable. The job lasted only a month and now I'm looking once again.

As I search the internet job sites each day, it has become painfully obvious to me that while the journalism and publishing worlds may still be Mac-based, neither one of them is hiring these days. In fact, the newspaper business appears headed towards outright extinction at something approaching light speed.

The rest of the business world appears to be doing only marginally better but like that little on-line retailer, it too has embraced the evil empire of the PC and that's not good news for me.

(Truth be told, I can deal with the actual PC itself, but all the subsequent software that evolved for that particular platform leaves me buffaloed.)

Take, for instance, the spreadsheet.

To me, a spreadsheet sounds like something I'd expect to find in a linen closet. Somehow, I had managed to run a publishing business for 30 years, employed dozens of people, bought a home and generally eked out a decent living all without the benefit of an Excel spreadsheet.

I'd also written thousands of articles, read by millions of people, without ever knowing what a PowerPoint presentation was.

In today's job market, however, employers are demanding expertise in Excel, PowerPoint and a host of other programs I never knew were out there.

Then there's the foreign language thing.

While I took four years of French way back when my fellow dinosaurs and I roamed the schoolyards, today's employers want people who are fluent in something called HTML.

For the uninitiated, HTML is the code that tells your computer how you want it to display your blog, website or any other on-line content: what you want in bold type, where you want your paragraph breaks, what images you want to display and so on.

If you're 30 years old or younger, you can probably read HTML code faster than you can read a billboard as you zoom past at 55 mph. If you're over the age of 40, that same HTML code probably looks like the results of some office prankster sticking a Cyrillic alphabet ball onto an old IBM Selectric Typewriter.

If, like me, you're over 50, HTML code looks far more like what you'd REALLY get if you put the proverbial one hundred monkeys in front of one hundred typewriters, hoping to re-create the collected works of Shakespeare. It makes no sense at all.

I'd have better luck attempting to decipher the ancient Mayan hieroglyphs at Tikkal.

Still, I suppose I've got a somewhat better situation on my hands than poor old Gregor Samsa. As his metamorphosis progressed, he was no longer able to communicate at all with anyone around him and in the end he died. Alone.

I still have a chance to make my voice heard.

Granted, it might sound to some like a distant echo from some duck-billed dinosaur of the early Jurassic period, but it's just possible that there's one employer out there who remembers the days when actual words were the HTML code or even the text messages of their day.

Should I be that lucky, I'd probably try to come across as a somewhat more modern variety of dinosaur and send this simple message:

<span>

<p><b>

<font size="3" face="Times">

</font>

Dude! R U hiring?

<b></p>

<span>