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.

Dear God, please let me get some type of job this week.  I don’t even mean a job with health benefits, business cards, a subsidized cafeteria and colleagues whose clothing choices I can ridicule.  All I need is a new odd job for a few hours that is just degrading enough to provide good fodder for my column, and keep me from applying to any more of the old jobs of people who used to report me. I’ve only been able to land one new odd job recently – four hours of cater-waitering where I served college age interns who are apparently more employable than I am – and I had to stand next to a guy serving lasagna while I was on Atkins.  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the smell of it very much, and I appreciated that I was allowed to wear all black as opposed to the unflattering-to the-apple-shaped white cotton shirt look.  It just wasn’t very much work.  I’ve done everything that I can, God, to generate some extra cash and human interaction. I’ve volunteered for every focus group in New York at findfocusgroups.com, including one specifically for anesthesiologists. You’d think that actual anesthesiologists would have something better to do than participate in focus groups. I’ve submitted for every “extra” gig advertised by Central Casting for “Law and Order” and the movie version of “Eat, Pray, Love” including one that required the applicant to be of a different race and gender than my own, and several that would require me to spend more than I would make in a day to purchase a baby carriage, scuba diving equipment, or a full police uniform.

September is approaching, the thick fashion magazines full of things I can no longer afford to buy are arriving (although they are all slightly less thick this year due to a decline in ad pages), and I’m neither going back to school nor back to work.  Late August is an ideal time to take a vacation, but I can’t really justify taking one when I haven’t been working for five months.   I’m probably out of the process for the law firm since I never heard anything after the second round weeks ago, the recruiter for the bank moved to Florida after my first round and has said nothing but that I’m still under consideration, and I’m still waiting to hear about an in-person interview at the university after two phone screens.  I can’t do the mystery shopping for the bank anymore because bankers now keep calling me at home hoping to get me to invest with them, and I can’t disclose that I was only soliciting their advice for the promise of $15 up to 5 times a month.   Although it’s made a wonderful impact on my figure and rapidly deteriorating sense of self esteem, I’m also growing weary of going to the gym every day and pretending that I’m a Victoria’s Secret model diligently preparing for a lingerie runway show.

God, I got turned down for inclusion in the “New York Times” article on dramatic decisions people were making because of unemployment because my desperation wasn’t even desperate enough.  Should I email them and say I’m thinking about selling a kidney or moving into a neighbor’s doghouse? The only call I’ve gotten from a headhunter in weeks was about an interview with the scary hedge fund that tape records its interviews and demands that candidates pick a position on a topic and argue with them.  The most excitement I’ve had recently was receiving an unexpected big Fedex envelope.  When you are unemployed the delivery of mail can be the highlight of your day, and the appearance of anything large or unexpected can be as thrilling as the arrival a of thick Admissions envelope during senior year of high school.  It turned out to be from the university I’ve been working for part-time and remotely, and informed me that I am now eligible to participate in their retirement plan.  I haven’t seen any type of payment from them yet and have no idea of when one is forthcoming, but they are already concerned with my retirement.  Dear God, I’m in a late summer, late recession rut.

Alright, I’ll admit to not being particularly religious.  Most of my few displays of faith have been for the benefit of family or ex-boyfriends, and even the promise of an elaborate themed party with a troupe of paid dancers couldn’t persuade me to do the Hebrew study necessary for a bat mitzvah.  Desperation is, however, beginning to set in.  I’m approaching the six month mark, the barometer that’s used in the press these days to measure particularly long-term unemployment.  It took me six months to find my last job, but that was when I was gainfully employed already and I had many, many more interviews and options to choose from.  My tenure in the last job, of course, was barely longer than the exhaustive process I went through to get the position, my arrival as the new Director of Legal Recruiting being somewhat badly timed to coincide with the cessation of all demand for attorney recruiting.  I’m beginning to think that I’m going to have to be more entrepreneurial, although the last entrepreneurial business plan I had was my burning pre-teen desire to open a restaurant in my bedroom.

Luckily for me, I’m finding more friends who are becoming entrepreneurial, and I’m working to hitch myself to their wagons.  One such opportunity came up recently, and although I’m not certain how attractive the service will be in this economy, the startup costs seem relatively minimal and the tasks fairly simple.  My former banking colleague, Jen, is starting up a lifestyle management service to help busy professionals and small businesses with tasks ranging from event planning to correspondence to cleaning out their closets.  She’s lucky enough to be employed now by an executive headhunter, but the work is part-time, and her husband’s finance career (like almost everyone else’s in the industry) is not as lucrative as it once was. “Take a look at the list of services we can provide and tell me if you can think of anything to add,” she asks at lunch.  “Is there anything that you can do that should be on the list?” She’s given me a preliminary description of what tasks will require liability insurance and trigger certain tax implications, but I ramble off a whole list of anything I can and am willing to do to generate business.  There isn’t much that I won’t do these days.  “I can birdsit and babysit, walk dogs, feed cats, and read to the elderly.  I can plan and host corporate events, create and review resumes, sell your gold for cash, distribute flyers, go to people’s houses and help them with dinner parties, and give tourists walking tours of Brooklyn.  Do you think there’s a market for non-sexual escort services, or is that too gray an area?”  She dismisses many of my suggestions, but jots a few down enthusiastically.  “There is one thing I won’t do,” I say, piquing her interest since I’ve basically offered everything short of outright prostitution.  “I won’t clean out anyone’s closet.  I’ve been out of work for nearly six months and I haven’t yet cleaned out my own.”

Jen makes a point of telling me that the service will help support charities and be environmentally friendly; it will help individuals and companies donate unwanted goods to nonprofits, suggest online ways to cut down on paper usage, and aim to accomplish all tasks through mass transit.  That gives me an idea.  “Why don’t you make a special effort to contract with laid off people who have skills in certain fields?  That could get the company some good press and make people want to sign on,” I suggest.  She likes the idea, and tells me about several layoffs that have impacted members of her extended family.  I think about the talents of my laid off comrades, and throw out some possibilities.  “I know someone who can give blogging lessons and help businesses with online media communications.  He could probably even tweet for people who are too busy to do it for themselves.  I also know a really good comfort food caterer.  And I can cater-waiter for her!”

The next day I hook Jen up with the folks I’ve mentioned via email.  She follows up quickly expressing interest in meeting them, and pitches a first project to help get the company off the ground.  She tells them that she’s looking for a writer or an English major type who can condense and polish the copy for her web pages.  A response comes back soon after from the blogging guru.  “Janet’s a great writer.  Have you read her Recessionals series?” There’s no way that I can say no after that, and I send Jen a note telling her that I’d be happy to take on the assignment.  “What will you charge me?” she asks after expressing delight that I’ll be helping with the writing.  I tell her that the cost is one chicken Caesar salad, and that she’s ended up paying in advance based on lunch the previous day.  She’ll hear none of that, and demands an actual rate above and beyond a low carbohydrate lunch.  Unemployment hasn’t done much for me in terms of knowing what my services are worth.  Am I worth the $100+ an hour I was earning in my professional career, or what I’m willing to accept now for the types of odd jobs that feel more like what I used to do during college?  I’ve always been made salary offers based on the job I was in while interviewing, and the idea of coming up with a figure for something I’ve never been paid for before is a bit bewildering.  We finally settle on a rate that is far from what I got as a recruiting manager, but enough that I can cover the cost of a chicken Caesar salad and a diet coke at a relatively high end restaurant with an hour’s pay.  I’m looking forward to beginning my first ever paid copywriting gig!

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(Ed. note) Janet and The 405 Club love to read your comments and feedback.  If you all can relate to Janet’s “Recessionals” please share your story via the comments link below. Thank you.

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.

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.

I have just cancelled my membership to TheLadders.com, Inc., a company offering an online job search destination and content for $100K+ jobs that I could see and apply to, but unfortunately come nowhere near securing.  The fee for the premiere membership was only $30 a month, a small sum when you consider that I am already managing nearly $4000 a month in fixed expenses on an income of about $2400 (unemployment insurance and the interest I’m receiving from savings accounts I’m too afraid to transfer into higher yielding vehicles), but I’ve found a better target for the money.  I have decided to devote my burgeoning free time to dining my way through New York Magazine’s top 20 pizza places, and I have 14 more restaurants to go.

I know what you’re thinking.  How exactly is eating at 14 more pizzerias going to help me manage the frightening inequity between my new income and expenses, and reach my diet and exercise goal of fitting back into a single digit sized interview suit?  The answer is that the pizza quest isn’t helping me in any career directed or self improvement oriented way, but it’s relatively inexpensive. Eating my way through the list is also an easy enough goal to reach.  I need to start creating satisfying accomplishments other than finding a job or garnering press for being an unemployed former yuppie.  Despite doing everything I can to keep the depression and sense of hopelessness at bay, it’s beginning to set back in again.  I think it may have something to do with the fact that it rains every day now, and with a former colleague telling me that she’s incredibly depressed about turning 29 and being out of work for one month.  I’m at the point now where I barely remember my twenties – despite the fact that my newly revised resume may suggest that I’m still in them – and I think I slept through my entire first month of employment.

Have you heard about the group of guys who go around eating at burger joints and then rate their meals on a blog? They are seven white collar professional men in their 30s and they started “Burger of the Month” (burgerrankings.com) or “BOTM” to highlight their rankings and solicit suggestions on the next burgers they should try.  They’ve now been featured on several television programs and have been profiled extensively in print. I’ve even heard that a movie is being developed about their story. Wouldn’t it be great to develop an unemployed version of this where a group of laid off gourmets set out to visit every pizzeria on the top 20 list, and perhaps all the well loved places that have caused such controversy based upon their exclusion?  Why should the gainfully employed be getting all the fame and fortune for eating the same thing over and over again? There seems to be a unique convergence between the escalating number of unemployed people and the proliferation of upscale pizza places, and there may very well be an opportunity to use this synergy for marketing purposes.  “Nine out of ten laid off investment bankers prefer Neopolitan to Sicilian,” or “downsized first year attorneys who may never get a legal job because they will be competing with several classes of deferred summer associates protest the exclusion of Grimaldi’s from the list of top pies of the moment,” could be sample advertising slogans.  At the very least, couldn’t someone sponsor one laid off recruiting manager for an expedition to try all the best examples of this recessionary favorite?

Now let’s go back to the list.  I had already tried Franny’s in Park Slope/Prospect Heights (#3), Co. in Chelsea (#4), Adrienne’s near Wall Street (#14), and Luzzo’s (#6) and Artichoke Basille (#18) in the East Village when the rankings were published. This was a respectable number, but certainly nothing to brag about for a lifelong New Yorker with an Italian sounding last name. I had enjoyed all of them in different ways, and Adrienne’s in particular still fills me with warm memories of the Stone Street corridor behind Goldman Sachs where bankers and traders go to see and be seen, and others go to hook up with these masters and mistresses of the financial universe.  On a Sunday in August when I was convinced that half of New York would be out of town, and the other half would be huddled indoors because of the torrential downpour, I set out to try the #1 rated spot, Kesté.  You have to love an upstart that makes it to the top of the list only a few months after opening, and at this point my rejection bruised ego is so fragile it’s a boost to say that I’ve reached #1 in anything.

Kesté did not disappoint.  Unlike Grimaldi’s it did not have a long line of guidebook clutching tourists at the door, and unlike many of the new hot spots it is open for both lunch and dinner (on more than four days in a week), doesn’t appear to shut down immediately when the dough is gone and accepts credit cards.  I was seated right away too, although distressingly near a couple who was committing what I consider to be the cardinal sin of discarding their crusts.  I thought about saying “Hello, I’ve recently been laid off and would like to have your crusts,” but thought better of it.  While I couldn’t understand one word of what the waiter said due to the combination of his accent and the noise level in the small space, my pizza arrived piping hot and so quickly it appeared that they knew I was coming.  At $12 for a Margherita it’s also a bargain compared to many competitors in the top-ranked New York pizza world and thus a boon to us 405ers; Franny’s charges $16 for the standard pie, Veloce (#7) runs $15, and Di Fara (#10) in Brooklyn will run you $5 for just one slice now.

The superlatives accorded to the restaurant run by the American chapter president of the Associazone Pizzaiouli Napoletana also proved justified.  Top 20 listmakers Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld wrote that “never in this town have oozy blobs of melted buffalo mozzarella and brightly flavored San Marzano tomatoes frolicked in such ecstatic harmony,” and added that “a few bites in you are struck by the sensation that life, such as it is, may have nothing more to offer.” I’m no food critic, but beside the aforementioned deliciousness, I was particularly struck by the perfect size of the pie for one hungry customer.  Some of the less cheesy and puffier artisanal breaded variations at highly rated places like Co., for example, will leave you desirous of ordering a budget busting second pie for just one mouth.

It was still raining miserably when I left Kesté, but I felt refreshed, exhilarated, and ready to take on the world.  I was pleasantly full, but still had enough room to wash the pie down with the contents of nearly two pints of Turkey Hill ice cream.  I know this sounds rather glutinous, especially when you consider that I ate both of them without a spoon by pushing the contents up to the top, but there was a 2 for $3 sale at Key Food that week.  The calorie content of the lower-fatted brand is actually one half of a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and they cost less than one pint of the Vermont-based competitor, so it was a prudent choice for both the price and the heat units.  I’m going to continue with my goal of visiting all the restaurants on the list, and may even have some remaining time to continue sending out resumes and telling headhunters that I’m willing to take a step back.  I may even find a new job by the time I explode.

Kesté  is located at 271 Bleecker Street near Morton St, a strip that seems to have more good pizza places and ice cream/gelato shops per foot than any other area in New York City. You may also stare lovingly at the menu at kestepizzeria.com

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.

During my tenure in unemployment I’ve developed a number of bad habits and tics.  Not sending out more resumes because I’ve had enough rejection to last a lifetime is clearly the worst. Developing a morbid fear of networking is certainly close behind.  Flagellating myself for choosing a profession that was destined to be hard hit by the recession is not healthy or helpful, deciding twenty years too late to change my undergraduate major is pitiful, taking odd jobs with no career development potential is not great but somewhat excusable, and expending serious thought about how many Diet Coke bottles I’d need to recycle daily to pay my mortgage is downright execrable.  I am, however, very proud of myself for not developing a serious daytime television habit, an easy distraction for those with practically every minute of the daytime free.

I have not watched one soap opera since I was laid off in March, and I try to limit myself to watching only the first two hours of “Today” unless an important update on Jon and Kate is scheduled for the third hour.  Many gainfully employed people watch “Today” before heading off to work so this does not seem like a particularly unproductive viewing pattern of the unemployed.  I allow myself to watch Kathy Lee and Hoda in the fourth hour only if I am simultaneously trolling a job board or working on a blog post.  The one major television diversion I do award myself is during the 4:00pm-5:00pm hour when I watch “Deal or No Deal.”  There is something remarkably therapeutic about this show and watching contestant after contestant pretend that there is some skill or strategic acumen involved in choosing an assortment of random cases.  While shows like “Million Dollar Password,” “Who Wants to be A Millionaire?” and “Jeopardy” involve significant and higher levels of literacy, “Deal or No Deal” can be successfully navigated by anyone with the ability to call out numbers loudly.  The show even once highlighted its own wide accessibility by having one of its contestants compete against a chimpanzee.

In many ways I find “Deal or No Deal” analogous to the job search.  Contestants have the option of settling for a smaller sum in the way that I might settle for the first available job I’m offered, or rolling the figurative dice and risking that guarantee for a bigger payoff (or the harder to attain dream job or one not involving a 50% paycut).  Even if the contestant claims to be employing a strategy, the game really depends on luck in the same way that so many successful job searches involve a lucky break or a fortuitous connection.  While the geekiest contestants can win huge sums on other game shows, getting on “Deal or No Deal” and engendering the support of the audience is contingent upon having a good packaged story or “pitch,” and showing boundless levels of enthusiasm and passion is as essential as it is in interviewing.  Well, perhaps I am pushing this too far, but I need to justify why I am watching a game show for an hour every day rather than doing something more constructive.

Recently the daytime version of “Deal or No Deal” advertised for aspiring contestants in the NY area, and I filled out an application online and decided to give it a shot.  I was recently rejected for jury service and the alluring opportunity of earning an extra $40 per day because I frightened the lawyers with my unusually high level of enthusiasm for service while my fellow prospective jurors were tripping over themselves looking for ways to be excused.  Auditioning for a show where the average player’s behavior ranges from mildly overcaffeinated to alarmingly manic would give me a chance to put my fervor for extra cash to good use.  The online application was simple enough and clearly designed for people like me who have extremely low levels of reticence when it comes to discussing odd ways to make money and humiliating things that have happened to them.  It requested responses to inquiries such as “What is the most interesting job you’ve ever had?” and “What is the most outrageous thing you’ve ever done?” “Tell us an embarrassing story about yourself” and “Tell us something nobody would know about you just by looking” provided additional opportunities to offer interesting tidbits for public ridicule.  My responses included the story of how I accidentally groped David Schwimmer from “Friends” when one of his movies filmed outside of my office, the revelation that half of my front tooth is fake because I cracked it with a prop liquor bottle while performing in a play in college, and the tale of backing into a wall when Robert Redford tried to shake my hand.

After receiving an email inviting me to participate in an open casting call, I joined a group of about 200 others at a midtown hotel ballroom to try my luck.  This was a surprisingly sane set-up – no lines around the block or people camping out in tents for the chance to be seen.  Our host for the event, a producer of the show, told us that were extremely lucky to be comfortably seated while 500 people were already in line in New Jersey that morning to be seen the next day, and that over 10,000 were expected for the Garden State casting session.  If we were lucky compared to the folks gathering for the next day’s session, we were told that we were already trailing our potential competitors to the North.  The aspiring contestants in Boston had apparently been smiling and outgoing – perhaps buoyed by the unemployed attendees making $200 a week more than many in the NY group – and the New Yorkers seen the previous day had been “too cool for school” and exhibited a regrettable lack of “cheesiness” for the taste of the casting directors.  As we filled out our information sheets, which contained the same questions as the online application, he gave us additional advice on how to succeed when we were given “30 seconds” to prove ourselves.  “Be the happy, smiling fun person,” he said.  “If you can’t spot the boring person in your group it’s you!” He also told us what would happen after we met with a casting director.  A number of people would be held back for additional auditions that day, but if we were released it didn’t necessarily mean that there would be no opportunity for us during callbacks to be held in the future.

I was confident enough that I wouldn’t be boring, but the information sheet reinforced my fear that I wouldn’t be the most sympathetic contestant for middle America.  In addition to the questions we needed to answer, we were asked to check off if we belonged to any groups that might be the subject of a special show.  The boxes included a number of professions and types of people with better visual recognition and clearer comic potential than HR directors.  Fireman, policeman, flight attendant, chef, garbage man, welder, taxi driver, nurse, lunch lady, cheerleader, biker, college student, senior citizen, bald, men named Howard or Howie, and people with names of celebrities were among the categories. The only box I was able to check (and it was a stretch) was “impersonator” for what I consider to be my rather unfortunate resemblance to Bette Midler without having the benefit of any singing ability whatsoever.

We were divided into groups of nine and lined up to go to the table of a casting director where we’d each have the aforementioned 30 second opportunity to display infectious excitement and describe who we were and what we did.  I decided that my best hope was not describing my years of corporate recruiting experience – “Hi, I’m Janet and I wined and dined the highly compensated people on Wall Street most of you blame for today’s economic crisis” – and focus on my hopefully more sympathetic state of unemployment and all the colorful ways I’m trying to make ends meet.  I was one of the last people in my group to go, and I already sensed that I was dead in the water before I got my turn.  The first potential contestant to pitch was an adorable college student there with her future mother-in-law.  She described how she’d met her fiancé on MySpace and noted that she and the future mother-in-law were the best of friends. She was planning to get married in two years, and wanted the money to plan their future together. The next to go were a husband and wife team with six children, and the husband described how he fixed septic tanks and said “When I get to your house you really want me there, because something smells BAD!” The next contestant was an older man who got a laugh when he said that he was frequently mistaken for George Clooney.  When my turn came I got out as quickly as possible “Hi, I’m Janet.  I got laid off in March, and since then I’ve taken all sorts of odd jobs.  I’ve worked at a carnival and a sample sale.  I birdsat and got bitten on my first day.  I’ve gone to the movies and rated reaction to the trailers, I’ve walked the streets soliciting signatures for political candidates, and I’ve participated in mock juries and sold gold for cash! And if I can’t make ends meet doing this, I’m going to get a job as a Bette Midler impersonator!” One person on my team looked at me and noted that she saw a “slight” resemblance.

The session wrapped up quickly, and as I suspected I was not in the group selected to remain for additional sessions that day.  There may still be hope, and I did sign up to be an audience member when the show starts filming in Connecticut.  Why hasn’t someone created a game show where all the contestants are unemployed?  Who needs money more than laid off New Yorkers, and haven’t we already shown our collective potential in participating in activities like “Pin the blame on the boss” and “Office phone skee-ball” during March’s first ever “Unemployment Olympics”?  Perhaps I should devote my energy to coming up with the premise for a good job search related game show with activities like determining “how many candidates applied for that job?,”  playing “hiring manager phonetag, “ and “name that resume action verb.”  Either that or I should look for a job where I get to wear a cool uniform that increases my chance of getting selected for “Deal or No Deal.”