Rat Race

Dancing on the Titanic

By Olive L. Sullivan

The economic news has been nothing but depressing lately. I’ve taken to reading the entertainment news instead, not that it’s much less depressing. Luckily, my oldest son, Jacob, has given me something else to occupy my mind.

He went and made me a grandmother. As if that isn’t dramatic enough, the whole pregnancy was fraught with complications; the mother, Amanda, went into the hospital early, ordered to spend the duration on complete bed rest. That was at 28 weeks. At 31 weeks, her blood pressure shot through the roof, and the baby was delivered by emergency C-section. Ashlynn Rose weighed in at 2 pounds, 8 ounces. Now Amanda is home from the hospital, but little Rose will be hanging out in NICU until her originally scheduled delivery date of March 28. I have yet to see pictures—I’m trying to give the kid a break; he did just have a baby and all, but when his lizards gave birth, I got pictures the same day. One of my friends lives in a nearby suburb of Denver, however, and she says the baby looks like a yam. I guess I’ll just have to go out there and see for myself.

Meanwhile, during all the drama leading up to the big event, I have spent a lot of time on the phone with Jacob and his dad, Jim. In between asking, “How’s that baby?” and hearing, “Okay, I guess,” we talked about the economy, just like everyone else.

Before Amanda became pregnant—something my son still seems a bit puzzled about—he was living in his dad’s basement, working part-time at a pet store, and going to class at the University of Colorado-Denver to finish the last year of his business degree. Suddenly, he needed a job, a good job. With benefits. In, as Spike says, this economy? Wow.

Jacob has always been good at getting jobs, however. He’s a hard worker and he has the sort of golden personality that can sell oil in Oklahoma. He was once given a 10-foot python that looked like it had just eaten a small pony. After keeping it in my basement for far too long, he sold it for an enormous profit. And here I had been thinking it would make a nice looking pair of boots. But I digress. When he moved to Pittsburg briefly during high school, he told me that he was going to get a job at the pet store. There is only one pet store, and to my knowledge, he had no contacts or connections there. It was the only place he applied. It never occurred to him that they wouldn’t hire him. By the time he quit to return to Denver, he was in charge of the fish and reptiles, and he knew most of the pet owners in town by name.

It took him a little longer to get the job he needed in Denver, but he did it. Within a few weeks, he was working as a dispatcher for a security company, full time, with benefits. He says it’s the best job he’s ever had. I mentioned that I, too, got one of the best jobs I’ve ever had during this economic maelstrom. But we know we’re the lucky ones. In fact, Jacob’s job gives him a firsthand look at the carnage. He says he knows when companies go out of business before anyone else does—sometimes even before the staff knows. If a business doesn’t open, the dispatcher—Jacob—has to call a manager. One day the alarm went off at one of the businesses he covers, so he called the contact person on his list.

“Why are you calling me? I just got fired,” the man said.

“You’re on my list as contact person,” Jacob said.

“Doesn’t matter. Everyone got fired. The place is closed down.”

But of course Jacob’s company is working on a contract. Until someone in authority calls and cancels the contract, the dispatchers have to keep calling the contacts on their list. I guess it’s job security for Jacob, which is good, in light of recent events. But he says businesses are falling like a rain forest clear-cut. Like the decimation of the rain forests, it’s a bad sign for the rest of us, even if we’re not ready to pay attention.

The news is full of similar stories—people who show up to work one day to find the business closed. People getting laid off, with mounting bills to pay. People who thought they were okay until their life savings disappeared in the stock market crash. People who are losing their homes.

And yet, there is a lighter side. I was talking to my ex-husband the other day—he is still having a little trouble with the moniker “Grandpa”—when he mentioned that his employer, an international computer giant, might be laying off many of its Colorado employees. “Oh, that’s too bad,” I said.

He was as giddy as a schoolboy. “I’m gonna be so mad if I don’t get laid off!” he said. “I’m gonna lay around and do NOTHING for an entire year!” How can he do that? Well, the man hasn’t spent a dime in 30 years, so he’s feeling fat and happy, regardless of the rest of the country.

The only sad note in his story is that the poor man did not get laid off. He’s still a wage slave like the rest of us. If you call in for technical support, you’ll still get him, but you may notice he’s a little more Eeyore-ish than usual. Poor guy. Poor me. We’ve still got jobs. AND we’re grandparents!

We couldn’t be luckier.

My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on February 9, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.