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MY SEARCH FOR A JOB

I never worked during the 23 years of my marriage, mainly because my husband was European and he didn’t believe that a wife should work unless there was financial need. However I volunteered regularly in my daughter’s school, at church and in other places, I also went to school; so in general I kept myself busy enjoying a busy and happy life.

Unfortunately my wonderful husband died all of a sudden and I found myself totally lost, I was awfully depressed in spite of my lovely daughter efforts to console me, we help each other very much but I realized I had to do something to make me snap out of my misery, besides that, I did not want to deplete my savings, so I decided to look for a job.

We were living in a small town in the south, where the “Wanted” ads in the only newspaper did not show many job openings where I could use my experience; before I got married I used to be bilingual secretary, with computer experience, etc.

While waiting for the right job I thought it would be alright if I would just walk in any small business in the square and asked if they had a job opening.

I used to go regularly to the library and the librarian knew me very well so one day, whispering and in a nervous and shaky voice I asked her if they had any job opening there.  Oh no dear! She said, the only way somebody can work here is if one of us dies, but you can volunteer if you want to.

My next stop was at the dry cleaners, where I asked to the lady at the counter, she was friendly enough and she said yes, there is going to be one opening next week, but, my niece is going to get it.

The following day I stopped at the personnel department of the hospital, the receptionist asked for my resume, which I handed hoping that she would keep it and call me later on for an interview, but she said I will look at your resume right now, she looked at it for a second and she said, Ms., I can see you are overqualified and we do not have a position for your experience, besides, we like to hire younger people so we can train them in our ways.  Overqualified? I thought that was a poor excuse for not hiring older people.

This went on for a while until I saw that one of the local factories had openings for sewing machine operators to make pillows for garden chairs,  I will try that, how hard could that be? I have made several wedding dresses, prom dresses and other stuff that looked very professional.   So I put an application there.  I was hired and started to work on a Monday morning, I was so happy.

The first day, when I went to the sewing room area, I saw hundreds of sewing machines, they were rusty and very noisy; the supervisor gave me some instructions and I started to sew. When I pressed the foot pedal I heard the thread in the needle snap, I tried to thread it again, over and over, in the meantime the person next to me had sewn already stacks and stacks of pillow cases, The supervisor saw me struggling and she said, Oh, I forgot that machine doesn’t work, and she gave me another one, which was as bad as the first one.   After one hour or so I managed to finish 4 (four) pillowcases.  Wow! Four pillowcases.  It was lunch time by then.    When I came back from lunch I found a note asking me to come to the personnel office. My supervisor was already in the office and she told in a very stern voice that I was not good at sewing and asked me to take my things and leave because they could not train people that could not sew.

I forgot to mention that when they hired me I had to buy a pair of scissors, which I was supposed to pay from my first pay check.  The supervisor said, since you have sewn just four pillowcases that will pay for the scissors, so you don’t owe us anything, and we don’t owe you anything.

That was a new record, hired and fired in the same day. Well… at least I got a nice pair of scissor.

I am happy to tell you that after all of these problems, I moved to another town, and on the first day I went to the unemployment office I got a job as

bilingual secretary, I continued going to school pursuing a career in early childhood education and kept advancing in my job, after many years I became the director of a child care center with 80 children.   Now that I am retired I still keep in learning, I love to take internet courses.