Hope: please apply here

I’m dying here in Louisville and I need a job.

I’m a round peg trying to fit into square holes.
I pour over the job listings, daily, from three sometimes four online employment services

I delight when I see “Communications Specialist” listed. I apply and I wait. I wait and then call. Its public relations or marketing- really, they don’t want a television producer, they want a PR person with a proven track record. That is not me. I am not so delighted.

Then there are the “little jobs”: receptionist, administrative assistant and front desk clerk. These are the jobs that make businesses work. I’ve never been afraid of hard work. So I apply. Along with the thousands of others who are unskilled labor, I apply. I don’t know why they don’t call perhaps one of the other thousand had an iota of experience in that position. I remain not so delighted.

The latest of these positions is as a studio photographer for Olan Mills. I got an interview but not the job. “Would you be interested as a ‘floater’?” Would I mind driving to locations in a 50 mile range for $9 hour and 20 cents to the mile (but only past the 30 mile mark)? “Yes”, I say with a grimace into the phone, because I have a mortgage and mouths to feed. It sounds like a losing proposition. I see a lot of those lately. I give a half hearted prayer that she doesn’t call back.

I do not answer my home phone without checking the caller ID. I am tired of telling people my story over the phone. They only really want a check by phone and to never talk to me again.

What I have is twenty years of television experience.
And I feel like a dinosaur.

I spliced film in college. I toted an Ikegami on my shoulder that needed a recording unit on my hip. I ran studio camera on the launch of the first Fox News at 10 in the country. I climbed the lighting grid at the local PBS station. I produced a kid’s show for the local Pulitzer affiliate in my down time from running studio camera for news. I left there to become a local cable origination producer. We did great work there and earned some awards for our efforts. I left the position to freelance and be more available to my kids. The freelance market wasn’t so hot but I found jobs to do here and there. In the last couple of years, I returned to the cable company to freelance: running studio & field camera, producing a couple of shows and eventually learning instant replay for high school sports. Things were picking up when last March the cable company ditched the entire department and its freelancers. That’s about seven full timers and an auxiliary cast of about 15 freelancers who are out of work.
The only local jobs now are television stations and sports gigs. At the stations I’m competing with kids who can work for minimum wage (although I wouldn’t turn it down) and have stars in their eyes. The sports gigs usually go to the guys who have twenty years plus following the ball. They need and deserve those gigs.

So last year I bought my own camera, got Adobe Premiere software (learned it on the fly) and launched a couple of shows on a local channel. I ought to get points for chutzpah but I was just trying to avoid being a greeter at WalMart. Turns out the shows were pretty good given my resources but launching a small business relying on other small businesses in this economy was not such a good idea. The shows are on hiatus due to sponsorship issues.
So now, I’m beating the bushes for a “regular” job and can’t even find that WalMart greeter job.