Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich Read Free Book Online Page B

"I set the alarm for the same time I did when I was working.
    bother with resolutions; lecture over.
    I get up, shave, dress, just as if I was going to work." Another But things pick up when he asks us what obstacles we face in solution: enroll your spouse as a "supervisor," to remind you "you our job searches. A half-dozen hands go up, offering such said you were going to do such and such today "
    obstacles as fear, inertia, embarrassment, procrastination, This advice comes as a surprise: job searching is not joblessness; it is money, "nonlinear career path," and the mysterious challenge of a job in itself and should be structured to resemble one, right
    "staying up." I catch Ted, who is standing against the wall, nodding down to the more regrettable features of employment, like having to vigorously at each of the obstacles, suggesting that he knows each follow orders—orders which are in this case self-generated.
    of them all too well. Joe is doing his best to keep up on a flip Something about this scenario carries a whiff of necrophilia. I think chart. I throw in that I get overwhelmed by all the things there of the fabled resident of old Key West who somehow had his are to do, lack priorities. This is recorded as "scheduling."
    beloved's corpse preserved in a condition congenial to continued At this point I am expecting some solutions from Joe, but physical intimacies for years after her death. So, too, we are not to accept joblessness but to hold on desperately to some faint be especially prone to Calvinist angst. We often credit some simulacrum of employment.
    activity with the phrase "at least it keeps me busy"—as if busyness Everyone agrees on the necessity of managing oneself much as a were a desirable state regardless of how you achieve it. As I later real boss might, although this presents immediate conceptual learn in Harvey Mackay's business best seller We Got Fired! . . . And problems: if "selling myself" had seemed like a tricky form of It's the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us, job searching, self-objectification, "managing myself" takes the process even properly undertaken, should be far more time-consuming than an farther, into the realm of mental cloning. I picture the actual job: "If you have a job, then you might have the luxury of Barbaras splitting off into worker-Barbara (the one who sits at working 9:00 to 5:00. If you're getting a job, then plan on twelve to the computer and searches for jobs), product-Barbara (the one sixteen hours a day." 18
    who has to be "sold"), and now manager-Barbara (whose The alternative to manufactured busyness is flat-out de-responsibility is to oversee the other two)—all contending for pression, as a large gray-haired man seems to confirm when, in an dominance in the same cramped office space. I recall that one of apparent non sequitur, he raises his hand to caution that the mysterious "Core Competencies" in the scheme developed
    "introspection can be very powerful if you do it in the right by Morton, my first coach, had indeed been "Managing Self."
    frame of mind. Otherwise it can get you down." One wonders But the theme here, I am beginning to see, is pain manage-what dark nights of the soul he has endured in the course of his ment and structured grieving. If you have been spat out by the search, but for Merle and Joe, his comment serves only as a great corporate machine and left to contemplate your pre-segue to "staying up," which amounts to maintaining a win-sumed inadequacy, it makes sense to fill the day with micro-ning attitude, even in the face of despair. Here the grim Calvin-tasks, preferably supervised by someone else. Imagining one's ism of self-management suddenly gives way to a wan search as a "job" must satisfy the Calvinist craving to be doing hedonism: We should go to the gym, networking with other gym-something, anything, of a worklike nature, and Americans may 18 Mackay, We Got Fired!, p.56.

    goers while we're there. Have lunch with a friend.