Write down, in no particular order, your friends. They don’t have to be close friends, just all the people who you interact with on a regular basis: clubs, organizations, church, work, your kids’ school, etc. Get ‘em all down.

Then take out a different a marker or highlighter™ or a different color pen and somehow designate the people on that list that you currently work with or who perhaps you used to work with but who still work in the same company or organization that you do. Then take out a different marker and put a check mark next to all the people on that list who you do ‘other stuff’ with (go for coffee, movies, drinks, clubs, etc. ).

How many people on your list are people you work with AND also socialize or do ‘other stuff’ with? If more than half of them are, then you’ve got work to do….hard work…adult work…work you probably have not had to do in decades.

You’ve got to make some friends.

Don’t laugh. Making friends is hard work. Think of how kids make friends at school or in the neighborhood – there are delicate negotiations (would you like some of my cookie?), deal making (I’ll trade you this for that), and diplomacy. Most of us end up with most of our friends from work because – those friends don’t take any work on our parts – they are just there. And we become very comfortable in terms of making them part of our lives. I know people who have literally been friends with the same people at their work since they joined the company decades ago; they and their families do everything now as families: vacations; their kids go to camp together, date one another. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

Until there is a mass layoff. Then..it sucks..big time.

“After a major downsizing among municipal workers in Finland, the risk of death from a heart attack went up fivefold for those who lost their jobs….. evidence in the United States has been mixed, but research has found that people who lost a job in their 50s were more than twice as likely to have a heart attack or stroke in the next decade.
It’s not just those who lose their jobs who are at risk of serious health problems or premature death. In Finland, even those municipal workers who weren’t actually downsized were more likely to die sooner, says Hadler. In the United Kingdom, the “Whitehall studies” included a glimpse of a group of civil service workers whose jobs were threatened by a planned Thatcher-era privatization. The research found declines in both physical and mental health after the announcement, says Sir Michael Marmot, professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London and the principal investigator for the studies. Research in the United States led by Sarah Burgard, a sociologist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, has shown that job insecurity can be as bad for your longer-term health as a bout with a serious illness or even an actual job loss.

Job Loss and Health

Now, what these studies looked at was stress and job loss, but I know, because Aunt Toby has been through two swings on this job loss door, that one of the major stressors and depressors is ‘social loss’. If you lose your job and most of your friends are people you work with – they won’t be your friends any more. Instant Leprosy.

Trust me – it’s like getting a divorce; your spouse’s friends are not your friends any longer either. And if there is a mass layoff, then there are two factors going: you all will have lost your jobs, your social culture and will be under those stressors plus– there will be hundreds of you out there scrambling around, looking for a job. That does not make for charitable behaviors, believe me.

Which brings me back to friends.

When you lose your job or if you are in danger of losing your job, the people you need to consult with, talk with, ask for help from, get your resumes into the hands of, network with – should definitely NOT be the people you would have to compete with for jobs. This is not to say that joining a professional society in your local area is not a good idea – as a matter of fact, it is a great idea because you will meet people who do what you do up and down the scale and they are many times your best avenues to getting your resume into the right hands.

But the guy who you share cubical space with, who is married, with three kids, a mortgage, car payments and a three year orthodonture program for his 15 year old? He is definitely NOT going to call you up and say, “Hey, Fred; I heard about a job that I think you’d be more perfect for instead of me.” Trust me – survival of the fittest never included “love thy neighbor”.

So, look at that list. When was the last time you did something new? Joined a new organization? Joined a professional organization? Joined the local branch of your college alumni organization? Checked out Meetup.com? (no, it is not a hooking up site – it’s a way to meet people who are interested in the same stuff you do, whether it is college alumni, professional and technical groups, religious groups and so on – the DC area one, for example goes on for pages and pages and includes everything from knitting and sewing, to college alumni groups, people interested in getting jobs on the Hill, IT professionals interested in fraud investigations, etc. )

Remember what your mom used to tell you on your first day at school? Riiiight…”go make some friends.”

Great for your career – great for your health, too.

(photo courtesy of carf )

This posting can also be found at: Oxdown Gazette at Firedoglake.com

You have a job and you are determined to hang onto it like Indiana Jones hanging off that cliff. But what I really want you to do right now for the next five minutes is this: Imagine…

– it is another day at work – you walk in, exchange pleasantries with the receptionist, and go to your desk.
–you have an email or voice mail on your phone from the boss asking you to ’stop down this morning’.
– you do that, walk into his/her office and you are asked to close the door and sit down.
– you are given a packet of materials, a cardboard box for your belongings and told that you need to be out within thirty minutes.
– when you get back to your desk, your computer access has been cut off completely.

Quick. What do you do?

If you are like most people (and I’m with you here because Aunt Toby has been through this experience twice in her working life), you are numb/angry/lost. You don’t know who to call first: your spouse/SO, your lawyer, or the State Labor Board. All you can think about is your mortgage, car payments, your kid’s orthodontia bills, and your other kid’s college tuition. You want to cry, but notice that there are others with cardboard boxes on their desks also. There are also company security people milling about making sure that everyone who has ‘gotten the sack’ gets their time, gets their stuff crammed into a box, and gets out the front door without there being any blood spilled, loud words expressed, or physical damage done to the facility.

I want you to wallow in those feelings right now. Get right down to the bottom of them – you are lost; you are in major debt; you don’t have a current resume and if you did you still would not know what to do with it; you don’t want to go home and have to face the rest of the family to tell them “I’ve been sacked”, and you are feeling just a twinge desperate(you will feel a lot more desperate later). If you are feeling more than slightly nauseated or have the urge to run for the bathroom — Aunt Toby feels she has done her job.

Come back…come back…it was all just a dream, Dorothy. You actually still have a job.

Today.

And the thought I want to inject into your brain matter right now is this: Even if you love your job. Even if the job loves you. You could wake up tomorrow and go to work and go through that scenario that you just ‘rehearsed’ for your brain.

Brain rehearsal is very important activity. It prepares us for all sorts of things. This is why, for example, we get sent to Lamaze classes before babies are born. This is why, for example, guys stand in front of mirrors preparing their pick up lines. This is why girls stand in front of mirrors rehearsing various looks. Rehearsing helps us to get through experiences and it also puts thoughts into our heads that we can act on.

I’m hoping that this little drill put some of the following thoughts into your heads and and that you will take steps to act on them:

– I don’t have a current resume. I need to sit down and update mine.
– I haven’t written a resume in years; I need help to write a resume. Where can I find ideas on how to write a resume now(rather than the style of resume you might have written 10 or 20 years ago. Like hemlines, resumes can change with fashion also).
– I have not kept my network and contacts current. I need to get back together with people who are like me. Or with people who use my sort of knowledge and skills.
– I don’t have a network at all. How do I go about meeting people who might be helpful to me? Where can I find ideas on doing that?
– If I were to lose my job, would owning my own business be an option? is this something that would be right for me? How would I find that out? Who would I talk to? Where can I find information on starting and owning a small business?
– If I lose my job can I get Unemployment Insurance? How long will that last?
– If I lose my job, how will I pay bills? How much money do I have in the bank? How long with that last? How much in the way of outstanding bills do I have? How can I get help paying them – can I negotiate with people I owe money to?
– If I lost my job who would I call? Have I ever spoken to my spouse or SO about my job and the chances of losing it? What would happen to us if I did? Perhaps it is time for a family conference to get people thinking about these issues.

Your local area will probably have some resources to help you:
Local library
State job center
Chamber of Commerce (ours does monthly get togethers for networking – get the suit out, get your business cards and get out there)
Local business tips clubs
Local professional society meetings (engineers, accountants, etc.)
Local college career offices and alumni groups

All of these offer opportunities for you to meet people, tell people who you are and what you are doing now and leaving them with knowledge that they will save. You never know when it might pay off.

We’re back in the kitchen (because that is where the food, the heat and the good seats are). We’ve talked about (to review, in case anyone is taking notes here and no – there are no essay questions on the final) saving money, starting a garden, “doing one thing” to improve your situation, and finding out who your network is.

Today, we’re going to grasp the wriggly monster with both hands: The country is in the toilet. Really. The news gets worse every day. It looks as if we are “staring down the barrel of a gun” and “hitting the wall” – simultaneously. (Being able to do both at the same times is going to take the skills and physique of a contortionist, but I digress.)

And now Elliot Spitzer gets out there and basically says that all the money that has been used to bail out the banks and AIG was wasted – like we didn’t know that already.

But he did talk about something that we WILL talk about which is:
“government investment in the long-range competitiveness of our nation, not in a failed business model…”

What I want you to do, right now (and you know I am all about the “right now”) is to take that phrase “government investment in the long-range competitiveness of our nation” and replace a couple of words so that it reads like this:

“personal investment in the long-range competitiveness of ME” or “family investment in the long-range competitiveness of family members.”

Recently, I also wrote a diary about the cost of higher education and what it is doing to American competitiveness (you know the shorter version and frankly, our competitiveness is in the shitter too). How are you going to improve your and your family’s competitiveness with THAT?

I’d also like to remind folks about a couple of things from the Great Depression and from bad times more recent: Companies that invested, whether it was for advertising (during the Great Depression) or in developing new products (even when Corning, Inc.’s stock went straight into the toilet, landing finally at $1.80, they still invested in developing new products, which is what keeps them competitive), invariably come out the other end of an economic mess in better shape, more profitable, and more competitive than those who hunker down, cut spending, lay off staff and hope to still be there when the sun shines again.

So, what does this have to do with you, bucky? And your fam? You need to look at yourself and your family as your own little economic unit, your own little company, if you will. And we are in the bottom of all toilets right now. Time to cut costs to the bone? Hunker down? Hope things will get better later?

Mmmmmm, no.

Yes, you can cut your operating costs at home – plastic on the windows, more effective nutrition, not eating out. But you need to, like those successful companies from the Great Depression, invest and position yourselves for the future.

Advertising and Marketing:

Get out there. Let people know you guys are still around and about. Attend school functions; go to your local Chamber of Commerce “get togethers;” talk to the folks at church. Let people know who you are, what you do, how you can help THEM, too. Do good stuff. This goes triple if things at your work start to look shaky. Do not hide. Don’t let anyone hide.

New Product Development:

Companies look ahead and if they are smart, do the stuff that needs doing to position themselves for the next wave up. Corning pays the scientists and engineers to cast their minds into the river of the future and you and your family members can do that too. Talk to your kids – find out their dreams. I know people find it funny when I write: “Be a patriot: take a degree in accountancy,” but it’s true – have everyone think about what is good for the country AND for themselves and talk about ‘how do we get there?” If you have college or education benefits at work – USE them. If they will allow you to use them for other family members, then do so. Explore programs that might be available at your children’s schools – perhaps there is a tech high school and one of your kids is technically inclined. Don’t allow all the chitchat about college to get in your child’s way – go talk to the people and find out what they’ve got and how your kids can take advantage.

Be a creative thinker. CAD-based machinists in my area START at $40,000 a year and our local Vo-Tech high school trains for that. In some areas, they are so hungry for them, the companies will hire them and then pay for college for them to move on in the technical field.

Use the internet, books and tapes from the library and learn new stuff – invest in yourself and in members of your family. Perhaps you will make a mistake – perhaps learning some particular computer program will not help you when we come out of this, but the more you do it, the better your chances of having the products that will sell when we come out the other end of this tunnel. Every product development that Corning does is not a hit “out of the park” – think about this that way.

Another thing is – if you have a small business and need money, you need to look for money. I realize that the meme out there is “there is no money.” Here’s a story:

The DH and I were working on the house once when the kids were little. We’d just gotten started and had paid the first payment to the contractor when I lost my job. I remember coming home that day and realizing that the contractor had picked that day to rip the back of the house off and dig a 15 foot hole in the back for a new basement, which was now filled with water. I put my head on the steering wheel of the car and wept. At dinner that night, the DH and I were in a panic: How could we possibly get a loan from a bank now that I had no job? All that stood between us and the great outdoors was a big blue tarp.

A small voice from a chair next to us piped up, “Ask Grandma and Grandpa – they have money.” Our 5-year old had cut through the muck and mire to the nub of the issue – we just had to find someone with money. There are all sorts of people out there who have money and who have been getting shittier returns from the market for a long time.

Your job, if you need money for a new business, to expand your business, etc. is to find those people. Go back and see: Advertising and Marketing. You need to meet and find people who a) have money to invest, b) are willing to invest locally and c) are willing to invest in YOU and your family to do whatever it is you want to do. Don’t be shy and don’t think they aren’t out there because believe it or not, they are. Just go to the internet and do a search on “angels” – they are out there and they are looking for a better return and better control than they can find in the market. In your case, you need to find your local versions of angels – believe me, they are out there.

Above all – FDR and Frank Herbert (Dune)were right: FEAR IS the mind-killer. Now is not a time for fear: It is a time for thinking and planning and doing.

(originally published at Oxdown Gazette)

You will need: Paper, pencil, and however you keep your contacts going: Roladex, PDA, address book, file cards, the old scraps of paper on the refrigerator with the grease stains on them, etc.

Divide the paper into three columns: People I Know, People the Spouse/SO/Partner Knows, and Everyone Else. You can organize the people alphabetically, by where they work, or what they do or any other way you so choose. But get them ALL down there under some column along with a note for “what they do in life.” It doesn’t matter what exactly they do in life; just that you put it down and if you do not know, then you need to find out.

You can be as blatant or as discrete as you want to be – ask directly, check around, whatever you want, but you need to know a little bit more about this person than merely, “Joe Dokes, phone number.” And here is the reason why: One of these days, something is going to happen to you or the Spousal Unit/SO/Partner/Person Who Shares Your Bathroom Cabinet or your kids or your dog/cat/pet unit and you will want to be able to put your hands on a bunch of people who you can call. Because there is always someone who a) knows more about the issue than you do or b) knows SOMEONE ELSE who knows more about the issue than you do.

“My kid needs braces – do you know a good orthodontist who won’t spout Christian theology while he’s got my son under the wires?” “I need a plumber who can work with a house that was built in 1865 – know anyone?” Or, and in this economy, this is a biggie: “It looks as if my unit might be downsizing, so I need to start making contacts with people who need skills in XYZ.”

I’m not going to get into the “you should have been doing this all along” stuff. Or, “you should have been taking courses at your local college to upgrade your computer skills in CAD or C++” or anything like that. No matter how this reads, I am NOT your mother. But I can tell you that picking up the phone, talking to people, telling them that you need to find someone you can talk to (especially if you are not asking THEM for a job) can yield you big results. Trust me, ask Jane Hamsher. I’m sure she’s got a Roladex the size of a side-by-side fridge.

Once upon a time, as some of you might know, I was an accountant. Not a very good one, mind you, but that is what I made my living at until the DH and I got pregnant for the second time and I realized that if I continued doing the same thing for the next 20 years, I was going to slit my throat and make a very large mess in the bathroom for someone else to clean up. And what I really wanted to do was get into marketing (don’t ask me why I chose marketing).

What right did I have to decide this? Well, given that I’d had a couple of marketing classes in school, that was it. But I did not have any experience with marketing; I did not have a portfolio of anything. In a word, zip.

But I did know the DH (a lucky thing since we were pregnant for the second time) and he knew someone in the publications office where he works and gave me her phone number. I called her and told her I was looking for information about getting into marketing and asked if I could get her coffee and talk to her about it. We met. We talked. She gave me the phone list from the local Advertising and Marketing Society with instructions for me to call the first guy on the list, tell him she’d told me to call and make an appointment. And she also told me to ask him at the end of the talk, “Do you know anyone else on this list who you think would be willing to just talk to me?” She said to work each one the same way – at the end of the conversation, ask that question. If the person said, “No, can’t think of anyone,” then just go back to the list and start again, “Hi, this is …and so and so said for me to call you.”

I went through three people before I got my first job offer. Yes, I Got A Job Offer. Was it the perfect job? No and looking back, if they’d had their heads screwed on straight and had not been in a bind because their marketing director had just left to start her own business, I probably would not have taken it. But they did hire me. And in that job I learned about printing, contracting for design, trade shows, trade show booths, pre-show marketing for trade shows…and a lot of other stuff. And yes, I sent thank you notes to everyone I’d spoken to who had helped me along the way.

This technique works. It’s been written about numerous times in magazines and books (What Color is Your Parachute is numero uno on this).

The thing to remember TODAY, though is this: Shit Happens. One of these days, your kid will need an internship, or your SO is going to tell you s/he wants to change careers, or God help us, your boss is going to call your department in and tell you that the jobs are being moved in 6 months to Duluth, MN. As the book says in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, DON’T PANIC.

The place to start is: Who Do You Know? And then…Who Do THEY Know? You never know who someone will know..or who someone’s kid is in a play group with. Or where someone you met went to camp and oh, by the way, do you know that so and so was at camp with him? Or who someone once worked with who now works for the company you really really want to work with now.

OK? So, take out the paper and start writing and pick…up…the…phone.

(originally published at Oxdown Gazette)

I’m here to point out something that tells me that it’s actually going to be worse for a lot of people.

There were major differences between where and how people lived in 1930 vs. how and where people live NOW, especially with regard to where we get food and how it is produced and how much access people have to actually producing food on their own. I will use the example of New Jersey and “rural” areas and populations as surrogates for having access to and being able to grow your own food.

On an overall basis, in the United States:
1930……………..43.8% of the population lived in rural areas
2000……………..21% of the population lives in rural areas

In New Jersey:
1930……………….3.2% of the population lived in rural areas
2000………………. .2% (That is right…two-tenths of a percent – 17,283 people out of the entire population of New Jersey, live in rural areas.)

Now, just living in a rural area does NOT mean that you either a) are working as a farmer now, nor does it mean that b) you have the skills to do so. But it DOES mean that you have access to land around you that you could either lease, buy, or use to grow food if you wanted to do so.

In terms of the amount of land in farms in New Jersey:
1930………….1,758,000 Acres (In case you are wondering, this IS where the name “The Garden State” comes from. New Jersey was the market garden for New York City for a very long time.) The average size of a farm was 69 Acres, which is an indicator that there were a heck of a lot of extremely small, individual farms.
2000……………805,682 Acres and the average size of a farm is 85 Acres..still a lot of small farms around.

In terms of the percentage of land in farms in New Jersey:
1930……..36.6% of land was in farms
2000……….17%

So, what happened to all the rest of that land? Think: Sprawl. Malls, parking lots, retail and housing development in all the counties that snuggle up to New York City, with all the rural activities going on in the counties much farther away.

Something else to think about is sheer “skills of living” – for the last 40 years, the American Consumer has been encouraged to…well, consume. Not “make,” “grow,” “fix,” “repair”…just go out and buy. In 1930, there were still several generations of adults around who knew how to do those “make,” “grow,” “fix,” “repair” activities, whether they lived in rural areas, or had learned them in their youth and had moved into the urbanized areas, but they still knew how to do those things and survive.

How many people who do not live on farms do you know who know how to do: carpentry, plumbing, welding, clothing repair, shoe repair, glass and window repair, electrical work, grow and process foods, etc.? If you had to sit down and write down ten things you know how to make, grow, or fix…how many could you write down? If you had to write down what would happen to you and your family if: you lost your job, lost the house…would you know what to do? Where to go? Who could help you? Who would be willing to help you?

It might be a good exercise to go through … sooner than later.

(originally published at Oxdown Gazette)