Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  According to Fox, no one is interested in my background or “career objectives”; all the companies want to know is what I can do for them—which means many more hours at the computer, researching each company in detail, identifying its problems, and dreaming up solutions. Another afternoon’s fishing produces the distressing information that employers, especially the large ones, no longer bother to read résumés at all; they scan them with computer programs searching for the desired keywords, and I can only hope that public relations and health are among them.

  3:00–4:30: Proceed to gym for daily workout, as recommended by all coaches and advice-giving web sites. I would work out anyway, but it’s nice to have this ratified as a legitimate job-search activity. In fact, I find it expanding to fill the time available—from forty-five minutes to more than an hour a day. I may never find a job, but I will, in a few more weeks, be in a position to wrestle any job competitors to the ground. On the downside, I have no clue as to how to use the gym as a networking opportunity. With whom should I network? The obviously unemployed fellow who circles the indoor track for at least an hour a day? The anorexic gal whose inexplicable utterances on the Stairmaster are not, as I first hoped, attempts to communicate but an accompaniment to the songs on her iPod? No matter how many inviting smiles I cast around the place, my conversations never seem to get beyond “Do you mind if I work in?” and “Whoops, I guess that’s your towel.”

  BUT YOU CANNOT spend all your job-search time at the computer. At the Forty-Plus Club, Joe exhorted us, “Get out of your caves!” so I resolve to make an attempt to network with the actually employed. Joanne alerted me to the monthly meetings of a local businesspersons’ club just a few miles from home in Charlottesville, at which, for $30, I can get a box lunch and the chance to mingle with current jobholders. I arrive a few minutes late, pockets filled with my business cards, at the hotel meeting room where the session is being held. About seventy people are seated around tables listening to the hotel manager welcome them with a rundown on the hotel’s attractions, should anyone decide to check in after lunch and stay for the night: 118 rooms, each with coffeemaker, blow dryer, and ironing board. I guess you could say he is networking too.

  A panel of three speakers on the theme “Funding Emerging Growth: Venture Capital and Other Strategies” is introduced, but I am too far back in the room to see them. So, from my vantage point, there are only disembodied male voices to accompany the PowerPoint presentations, all of which highlight the same trend: a dramatic decrease in venture-capital-backed IPOs throughout the state of Virginia since 2001. Everyone seems to handle the bad news with admirable stoicism. There are no interruptions from the audience, no whispers, groans, or attempts to sneak out early. Certain phrases keep recurring—“skill set,” “end of the day,” and “due diligence”—which I write down to add to my corporate vocabulary. The only other entertainment possibility is my box lunch, which seems to have been designed as a direct rebuff to the recently deceased Dr. Atkins: chicken salad wrap, macaroni salad, potato chips, and a giant chocolate chip cookie.

  Who are these people? Though I’m sitting against the wall in the back of the room, most of the assembled businesspeople are arranged around tables, so quite a few name tags are visible to me and most include company names: CVS, Moneywise Payroll Solutions, WBT Advisors, and a few realty firms. The attached humans are hardly intimidating; I see the same desultory coiffures and dulled, passive expressions you might find at the Forty-Plus Club. It must be that the same corporate culture embraces both jobholders and job seekers, and that it is a culture of conformity and studied restraint, maybe something like that of the Chinese imperial court in the heyday of hardline Confucianism.

  But I have to wonder what distinguishes the jobholders as a class. If they don’t look any better or radiate any more zest than the job seekers, how come they were chosen for their jobs? Of course, they no doubt possess skills I can barely imagine—in finance, for example, or accounting—and will go back to perform complex, even—from my perspective—occult, activities at their desks.

  One person attracts me. A panelist is indulging in a rare attempt at humor, telling us that an SBA (Small Business Administration?) loan cannot be used to fund “strip joints or porno,” at which a woman sitting near me mutters “or for overthrowing the government.” Funny gal—or hardened revolutionary? I decide she will be my first networking target, but when the program comes to an end she escapes before I can catch her. This leaves me standing near a scary-looking guy of about forty, who is turned out to resemble Michael Douglas in Wall Street —well-tailored suit, emerald green silk tie, hair slicked back to a curly fringe brushing against his collar. I should say hi and put out my hand, but he dismisses me with a look of impatience and strides out of the room. I should go up to someone else then, but they are all moving in clumps toward the cloakroom. I smile at anyone whose eye I can catch, but everyone is hastening to reclaim their coats. What do I do? Start thrusting my Kinko’s cards into their hands? Throw them up in the air and let people scramble to claim them?

  There’s nothing to do but get my coat and return to the car as friendless as when I arrived. Maybe Kimberly, if she had been perched on the cheap chandeliers lighting the meeting room, could have told me where I went wrong. But for now I only note with relief that the search part of the day is over and the time has come to repair to the gym.

  Lesson learned: I am not ready for the next step, the step that involves face-to-face interactions with people who might actually have jobs to offer. There’s the matter of my business cards, for example. It’s the end of January, and in two months I have managed to give away no more than five out of 100 of them. I understand that with respect to the cards, my job is like that of those guys on the streets of Manhattan who try to hit you with deli menus—the point is simply to get rid of them. Until the cards are out there, fluttering around in the world, I might as well not exist. But to hand out even a single card, I would have to engage someone in conversation long enough for it to seem natural to say, “Here, why don’t you take one of my cards?” Something is holding me back—maybe “lack of confidence,” as Kimberly and I agree to call it, though I suspect also a prideful resistance to “selling myself.”

  Other job seekers seem to suffer from the same reticence. Hillary Meister, for example, whom I met by e-mail through the Atlanta Job Search Network, says she has trouble with “the whole networking thing”:

  It’s personality. I’m very quiet, not very extroverted. It [networking] feels so fake to me, but I know that’s the game.

  It feels “fake” because we know it involves the deflection of our natural human sociability to an ulterior end. Normally we meet strangers in the expectation that they may truly be strange, and are drawn to the multilayered mystery that each human presents. But in networking, as in prostitution, there is no time for fascination. The networker is always, so to speak, looking over the shoulder of the person she engages in conversation, toward whatever concrete advantage can be gleaned from the interaction—a tip or a precious contact. This instrumentalism undermines the possibility of a group identity, say, as white-collar victims of corporate upheaval. No matter how crowded the room, the networker prowls alone, scavenging to meet his or her individual needs.

  These objections, though, are in the present circumstances only excuses. Whatever is holding me back—shyness or pride—it must be vanquished, and in this enterprise I can see I need further help.

  The Forty-Plus Club’s boot camp is not an option. On my next trip to D.C. for its Monday-morning get-together, Ted confronts me with the question “What’s holding you back?” I freeze, sure that this is a Joe-type query to which the possible responses include “procrastination” and “nonlinear career path.” “Money?” he continues, and I realize he’s asking what holds me back from enlisting in the boot camp. I say no, I can’t commute two and a half hours each way every weekday for three weeks of 9–5 sessions.

  “There’s a guy who commuted
all the way from Pennsylvania,” Ted reproaches me. “Or you could stay in a hotel.”

  If I went through boot camp, I would be entitled to become an actual member of the club, which might put me in a position to hang out with Merle, exchange views on the correct hanging of scarves over suit jackets, and absorb some of her executive aura for myself. But I have found an appealingly condensed alternative; or rather it has found me. One day when I was weeding through the Atlanta job possibilities, I came across an announcement for an “executive boot camp” to be hosted by something called the ExecuTable and scheduled to take exactly one day. It isn’t cheap, especially when you factor in airfare and a night in a hotel, but the difference between 7 hours and the 120-hour commitment required by Forty-Plus is compelling. So I go to Travelocity.com and, after about thirty minutes of comparative shopping, come up with a travel plan.

  three

  Surviving Boot Camp

  I’ve been to Atlanta twice in the last two years, just long enough to gain the impression that it’s a city without a heart. From one of the downtown hotels I stayed in on a previous trip, I could walk two blocks in any direction without encountering another pedestrian. I even asked the doorman where the Atlantans could be found, and he directed me to take the subway out to a mall in the suburbs, where indeed there were hundreds of people, none of them showing signs of having recently fled a neutron bomb attack. This could be the latest urban trend—the depopulated effect—since I’ve encountered it also in Dallas and Oklahoma City. What it means, for the unemployed, is that there are no public spaces in which to congregate, have a coffee, and maybe strike up a conversation. The only options are home, workplace, or mall; and if you have no source of income, the mall is not recommended. But the boot camp is to be held in the thriving northeastern suburbs, where life apparently goes on.

  I arrive in Atlanta with something less than a winning attitude. It’s already February, and I have precious little to show for my time. I’ve been laboring steadily away on my résumé with Joanne, which has become a project on the scale of a graduate thesis, and—after endless tweakings and arguments over how best to highlight my strong points—she has pronounced me “almost there,” maybe just because I’ve let her know I’m not willing to pay for another month of her services. I have furthermore posted this nearly finished product on Monster and HotJobs.com and sent it off to a dozen major pharmaceutical companies—from Abbot to Wyeth—that are looking for PR people and allow you to apply right on the company web sites. Confident, at this point, that my résumé includes all the requisite skills, I expand beyond the pharmas and leap to offer myself to any company seeking:

  [an] experienced and highly motivated Director of Communications. Duties include branding organization throughout local corporate community, creating general community awareness, media outreach and creation of promotional materials.

  Or perhaps:

  [a] skilled writer with solid professional editing and communications strategy skills (health care communicatins exp. is a big plus). You will have at least 2 yrs of exp. (w/sample portofilio) that includes working w/media. Must possess a BA degree.

  A couple of companies send me automatic acknowledgments by e-mail, and one—Wyeth—goes so far as to send me an actual postcard. That’s it, though; for the most part, corporate America seems willing to soldier on without my help.

  In my declining frame of mind, even boot camp has begun to loom as a test I may very likely fail. Do I have the mental stamina for the boot-camp experience? What if it’s conducted in incomprehensible corporate jargon? Is there a chance that, in the intensity of the day’s interactions, I’ll be exposed as a fraud?

  We sit, about fifteen of us, around a horseshoe-shaped table facing our leader, Patrick Knowles. Based on the number of times the word executive came up in the web description of the boot camp and in one brief phone conversation with Patrick, during which he requested a résumé as a condition for attendance, I pictured something a bit more imposing than a windowless meeting room in the ultraminimalist Hampton Inn. There aren’t even any water glasses at our places or free pads to write on. I am hoping we will go around the table and introduce ourselves, though there are only a few exceptions to the usual blank corporate look. I cannot help but wonder about James (identified by the name card in front of him), for example, if only because of his crazy overgrown crew cut, or Billy, a handsome man in his forties who seems a little too tightly wound for the occasion, almost straining to contain his excitement. And there’s the enigmatic Cynthia, a tousled redhead of about forty-five, who manages to look fastidious and slightly remote even in blue jeans. But there are no introductions, and we leap right in.

  Patrick, who had boomed confidently on the phone, is not the commanding presence I pictured. Partly bald, with colorless, protuberant eyes and a distinctly uncorporate paunch, he begins on an oddly therapeutic note:

  I’m going to make eye contact with you. You need to trust and see where this experience will take you. It’s based on experiential learning, which has three parts: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. There are four major questions: What do you want your life to look like a year from now? What challenges do you face to make that happen? What commitments do you need to make to face those challenges? What is the price you’re going to pay if you don’t make those commitments?

  Three parts and four questions—except for the eye contact part, it all sounds dismayingly Morton-like. The difference is that, despite his appearance, Patrick has charisma; the more he talks, the more energy he absorbs, apparently from the vibrations of his own voice in the room, since there is not the slightest stirring of response from the group.

  I want to tell you my philosophy. It’s very powerful. Every unit increase in your personal sense of well-being increases your external performance exponentially.

  This proposition is expressed on the flip chart as “EP/PSWB.” We’re only five minutes into the day’s work, and already I’m straining to understand. If EP, meaning external performance, varies exponentially with PSWB —one’s personal sense of well-being—why are we interested in the ratio of EP to PSWB? Over the course of the day, this central proposition will take various pseudomathematical forms, such as “EP 10+/PSWB” and “EP 10×/PSWB;” driving me nuts. Of course I am losing sight of the fact that neither EP nor PSWB can be expressed in numerical form; at least I can’t imagine how you would quantify your personal sense of well-being. But, although the room turns out to contain several IT and telecom guys who must have some glancing acquaintance with mathematics, or at least with logical, digital-type thinking, no one else seems remotely bothered. The point is to pump that PSWB up.

  PSWB depends on authenticity and congruency and these are reinforced by a journey of self-discovery. You’re going to watch people make changes in their lives . . . You have to trust that whatever I do will lead to this [self-discovery.] This is the Knowles group model of experiential coaching.

  So this is how the “Knowles group model” operates: We will go around the table, though not in any predictable order, with each person in turn going to the front of the room and addressing the “four questions,” under Patrick’s vigilant leadership. He tells us that he “has permission” to interrupt us at any moment and say “freeze,” upon which we are not to speak or make eye contact with others. Who gave him “permission”? Certainly not the people in the room, most of whom seem to have already been frozen into a state of dull acquiescence. As at the Forty-Plus Club, the prevailing emotional tone is depression, leavened with timid expectation. Anyway, this “freezing” business is called “pattern interruption,” and, Patrick tells us, “it’s very powerful.” The purpose is to “get value from experience,” as if experience were a novel new place to find “value.”

  First up is Richard, who is about sixty and has a kindly face etched with permanent wince lines. He had been in real estate but left that field for undisclosed reasons, seemingly having to do with its being “so high pressure.” Then he realized his li
felong dream of going into business with his son, but “that didn’t work out.” This is a trend, I’ve read: unemployed parents going to work in their grown children’s businesses. It can be a risky undertaking, involving, as it does, the overthrow of long-standing parental authority; and I can think of nothing sadder than to be fired by one’s own child on the threshold of old age. What Richard’s looking for now is fairly cosmic: “some direction for my life.”

  All this is delivered in a flat tone, without the slightest self-pity but with an expression suggesting that Richard is accustomed to having his utterances answered with slaps. I am afraid he’ll start to cry or at least put his hands up over his face to ward off oncoming blows, but, mercifully, Patrick “freezes” him before any more failures can be confessed, telling us, “I have to dig the pain out, but he’s very tender; I can’t push too hard.” We are all asked to comment on Richard’s condition, and the overeager Billy, who turns out to have spent most of his life in the military, observes briskly, “They want ten to fourteen hours a day now,” apparently referring to the high-pressure real estate job. “It’s a challenge.”

  “They?” Patrick interrupts. “Who are they?”

  It turns out that we are not to talk about “them”; we are to confine ourselves to speaking “experientially.” But Cynthia, the redhead, who turns out to be a real estate agent, makes the same mistake, commenting that “Richard’s taking personally the fact that the real estate market is so awful.” Patrick ignores this sensible interjection. The market is of no interest to us; it’s just another “they”—some external force or entity that can be used as an excuse for our failures.