Ed. note: Welcome to the latest installment of “Janet Raiffa’s Recessionals,” a column by a laid-off recruiting manager in New York. Prior columns are collected [here]. You can reach Janet Raiffa via LinkedIn, leaving a comment here, or emailing 405club@gmail.com.

After having had months to study every aspect of unemployment, I have come to the profound conclusion that Friday is the best day to be unemployed.  Monday is depressing because the world is heading back to work and I am not.  Although I dreaded Monday morning as much as anyone else in the working world, there was always a slight thrill for me like having the first day of school repeat itself on a weekly basis, and I was leaving my weekend widowhood for a return to one of my many beloved office husbands.  Weekends aren’t as thrilling anymore because every day is a weekend for me, and I cannot enjoy being lazier on Sunday than on any other day.  The bevy of facebook updates I receive complaining about the shortness of friends’ weekends, and commenting midweek about how many days are left until they are liberated, leave me cold.  On that note, I also think there should be a ban on people using facebook updates to complain about how miserably overworked they are until the recession is over. On Friday, the worlds of workers and those of people desperately searching for work collide; the casually dressed may be either 405ers or those taking advantage of a relaxed office dress code, the employed are taking long weekends or leaving early so there are more people of indeterminate status milling around, and the number of odd jobs I am able to secure increases exponentially.

This past Friday I believe that I set a new world record for the amount of movie trailer checks completed in one day, and earned the most cash yet for participating in a science experiment at my alma mater. Friday is, of course, the day that most movies open so the number of trailer checking assignments increase and as New Yorkers we have a distinct advantage in securing these assignments over folks in the “flyover” territories between our city and Los Angeles. I went to 7 screenings between 10:30am and 9:00pm – 3 of “Julie and Julia,” 2 of “500 Days of Summer,” and 2 of “GI Joe.” Now that I’m an old pro at the trailer check business I’m barely even tempted to stay for the movie, but after a day of running between theaters I was relaxed enough to stay for the 9:00pm show of “500 Days of Summer.” Joseph Gordon-Levitt is adorable, but looks like he is 18 to me.  In between movies at the Chelsea theater and the Lincoln Square on 68^th Street I rushed to the Café Metro opposite my old office, desperately trying to avoid bumping into any former colleagues, to secure my favorite chopped salad which is now on sale for a month if you order online.  I’ve been eating salad practically every day now in an effort to counteract the low self esteem that unemployment brings by sporting the body of Gisele Bundchen, and this is the best salad deal in town for a large bowl with unlimited mix-ins and no additional charge for the protein ($6.00 for the small and $7.00 for the large if you order at www.cafemetrony.com in advance).  I also grabbed a 2:00pm-4:00pm slot for an experiment at Columbia I’d seen advertised the Friday before when I was wandering between rooms at Schermerhorn Hall completing short visits and psychological tests for $5.00 each.  Although you usually have to schedule a time in advance, many of the studies offer open houses on Friday since students may not have classes, and it is possible to walk right in and earn a decent amount of cash by going from experiment to experiment.

This experiment listing had caught my eye because the $12 advertised per hour rate was considerably above the ones I had done the previous week, and the advertisement said that it was a pain study but involved pain no worse than holding a hot cup of coffee.  I’ve endured every type of psychological duress possible during unemployment – taking temporary jobs where my co-workers are largely college students, watching the majority of my former colleagues secure jobs more swiftly than I’ve been able to and some secure jobs that I’d interviewed for, having well meaning relatives and neighbors continually ask how the search is going – so a little physical pain seemed like a welcome change of pace.  I should have realized that psych experiments are never what they appear to be, and never are really testing what they appear to be studying.

I was first instructed to fill out a battery of online questionnaires focusing on my mood and personality by rating how strongly particular sentences related to me (I feel confident.  I feel jittery.  I consider myself a strong minded person. I would like to commit suicide, etc.)  I often wonder what would happen if you said you wanted to commit suicide on one of these studies, and were in fact planning to do so immediately after the experiment concluded.  Would the authorities be called? Would the experimenter later shrug and say “We saw it coming, but were primarily focused on how well the subject completed word puzzles when compared to students from different majors.” After the general psychological assessment I was asked to rate myself on both my verbal and math skills, and had to complete a number of questions regarding how much anxiety I would feel during certain academic events like writing a paper, taking a test on a humanities subject, or completing a pop quiz in math.  I began to get very worried that no hot cup of coffee awaited me, but that I would in fact be forced to take a math test.  Should I make a run for it?  Could the results be turned over to potential future employers as evidence of how much high school math I had forgotten and college math I hadn’t taken?

When the experiments began it became clear that it was about measuring not only my performance on a battery of tests but the level of anxiety I felt in taking them, receiving the results of my performance, and the reaction to certain incentives I was offered to enhance my scores.  One test involved remembering a sequence of letters that appeared on the screen, and then assessing how well I remembered them when given either a number of sentences to review or mathematical problems in between.  After each round I was asked to chew a cylinder of cottony material that would be analyzed to determine chemical and hormonal reactions in my body.  I discovered that recalling random letters is much harder when completing tasks in between, and tried reciting the letters aloud and forming words with them to try to save face with the experimenter.  My final task was the most difficult and potentially embarrassing.  I was ushered into a small room where I had an electrode hooked up to my clavicle, and two mounted under my ribcage, and had to place my chin on a rest so that my eye movement could be monitored while completing a series of subtraction and division exercises.  I was asked to subtract the second number from the first, divide it by the second, and then press either a right or left button based upon whether the result was a whole number or not.  This would have been difficult for the math phobic at best, but became considerably more challenging when the element of speed was introduced.  Near the end of the experiment I was told that an unseen partner and I would receive an additional $10 if my results on the second round of math torture bested the first.  My score was not recorded on the screen for this round, but I can only assume that my desperate desire to secure another $10 trumped my abject terror of the flashing numbers.  I made $40 for this experiment (2 ½ hours plus the incentive reward), had a cottony taste in my mouth for several hours afterward, and received a number of strange looks from people on the downtown 1 train based on the fact that I had forgotten to remove the anchor for the electrode device from my clavicle.

Friday is also a particularly good day because employed colleagues are more likely to be free to have lunch with me, providing the opportunity to catch up on office gossip for the office-less.  On this particular Friday, however, I had a lunch scheduled with a former colleague who is also a laid off Human Resources type juggling odd jobs in between interviews.  She’s a 30-something married woman who has been babysitting and working as a shampoo girl while searching and trying to control her desire to shop. She ended up cancelling our lunch because she got an interview with an ad agency, and also told me that she had a callback from a pharmaceutical chain and a good lead for a role at an investment bank.  I congratulated her, resisted the fleeting desire to contact all the firms she mentioned, and envied the success her week had ended with.  I had gone another week without hearing back from the headhunter about the result of my law firm callback, and got another call from a headhunter I’d never heard from again after a positive meeting about a recruiter job in Jersey City.  She had called to apologize for not following up, and to convey the decision that I was (yet again!) simultaneously underqualified and overqualified for a position.  “They were focusing on someone with 5 to 7 years experience,” she said.  “I have that,” I answered.  “I just happen to have 11 years on top of it!” I’m really beginning to wonder which is more detrimental to my search – the years of experience or the titles?  Would it be better to remove 10 years and make myself into an intimidating overachiever, who became a manager and director at a younger age, or to leave the experience and downgrade the titles, making myself into an unthreatening underachiever who worked for many years and never made it to the manager level?

Despite the lack of career progress, my week did wrap up on a positive and musical note.  Before my busy Friday, I had a Thursday that started off with a television interview on unemployment in the borough with Brooklyn’s BCAT television, and ended up in Prospect Park where I sang Prince tunes badly and at the top of my lungs.  The television show featured officials from the Brooklyn Public Library and the Chamber of Commerce, and highlighted me as a “Brooklyn Blogger.” During the interview the host – a gentleman whose hair stood straight in what looked like a run-over in a cartoon Afro – told me that the new wisdom is that it takes one month of searching for every $10,000 you want to earn.  I had never heard this before, but like how it explains the difficulty of finding jobs for those at the mid-career level or who had been employed in high-paying fields like banking or law.

That evening I had the most fun I’ve had in a very long time for $3, the type of fun that for several straight hours almost made me forget about all the burdens of my adult life and the stresses of the job search. The “Celebrate Brooklyn!” series ran a sing-along to “Purple Rain” and brought out thousands of people sporting violet tints, pimp-like hats, ruffled shirts, and unpronounceable symbol tattoos.  I hadn’t seen “Purple Rain” since it first screened when I was a teenager, and now can’t believe that it was ever shown in a theater where people sat calmly in their seats.  The campy film, like “Rocky Horror,” seems tailor made for public singing and dancing, and the recent spotlight on Joe Jackson and his abusive ways made the father’s violence somehow more resonant with the audience.  On this beautiful late summer night I danced with abandon, shouted with my peers on the blankets at the people standing up in front of us, and was actually not at all dismayed by the couple next to me who had brought a small child to an R-rated movie.  The beautiful little blond boy of around 2 clearly was having a hard time understanding what was transpiring on the screen and the crowd’s wild reaction to it, and kept calling out in a tiny, plaintive voice “What’s going on?” You know that some type of magical mood alteration has taken place when a child’s crying during a movie seems cute. By the movie’s conclusion everyone was out of their seats and off of their blankets boogying and singing with the words on the screen, and I felt as good and carefree as I had the first time I saw the tiny dynamo spinning around years ago.  Thank you “Celebrate Brooklyn!”for this transporting treat, I could have spent this week being really blue but you made me feel happily purple.