I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but I think it’s time to have the Parachute Conversation.
Ever since I began my job search a few months ago, parachutes just seem to be popping up everywhere. It all began the day before my college graduation when, out of nowhere, my mom produced a gift bag overflowing with colorful tissue paper. “Here,” she said, handing me the bag. “We wanted to give you your graduation present now before things get too crazy tomorrow.” I gingerly removed the paper and pulled out a hefty tome entitled What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career Changers, by Richard “Dick” Bolles. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this text, What Color Is Your Parachute? is the seminal job-search bible that has been around for forty some-odd years and is actually part job-hunting advice and part therapy session.
Putting my gratitude in the form of a question, I looked at my mom and said “Oh… thank you?” thinking it was gag gift. I hadn’t even received my fancy new English degree yet, and already she was nagging me about finding a job. It had to be a joke, right?
It turns out she wasn’t kidding and it was a capital-A awkward way to begin graduation weekend.
My mom proceeded to defend her gift, though, telling me that she had also received What Color Is Your Parachute? when she graduated from college and that she truly believed it would benefit me to read through it. Fortunately, a few days after graduation I found out I had gotten a temp position working at my university for the summer so it was back off to school for a few months, where I could conduct my job search in peace.
One evening, after a few delightful weeks of procrastination, I decided I was finally in a good enough mood to sit down and read through my graduation present with an open mind. I promised myself that I would look beyond the cheesy self-help nature of the writing and seek out the concrete job-search advice Mr. Bolles had to offer. Unfortunately, I didn’t even make it past the table of contents before indulging in an exaggerated eye-roll as I saw the name of the first chapter I would read: “How to Find Hope.”
I know, I know, I’m being terribly unreasonable and defensive because, really, who doesn’t love to be force-fed positivity and optimism?
It is worth noting, though, that many books and blogs dealing with unemployment seem to fall into a few distinct categories. On the one hand, there is a breed of writers with a more inspirational bent to their prose, people like Mr. Bolles and Kerry Quinn, who wrote the ebook FUNemployed: Finding the Upside in the Downturn, which vows to spread the gospel of Ms. Quinn’s “FUNemployed philosophy.”
And while I find Quinn’s “FUNemployment” and Bolles’s colorful parachute metaphor to be fairly innocuous, if somewhat dorky, thorns in my side, I find myself slightly more bewildered by those who have written about their unemployment experiences comfortably tethered to a golden parachute. And believe me, it’s nothing personal; it’s just that as a recent college graduate with the tiniest of nest eggs, I can’t even fathom what it’s like to advertise your unemployment blog as one fellow blogger did with the tagline “Just another casualty of corporate layoffs looking for a good way to squander my severance” on her blog Adventures in Funemployment.
But who knows, maybe there was also a period of time when that blogger woke up every day and stared at the ceiling of her childhood bedroom and thought “I wish I could wake up to the ceiling of a place other than my childhood bedroom, but I have no money.” And so, for the purpose of maintaining a friendly blogging environment and keeping my jealousy in check, we’ll operate under the impression that my fellow bloggers’ golden parachutes and severance packages were hard-earned and that they deserve their funemployment.
So if it isn’t multicolored or golden, you might ask, what exactly does my unemployment parachute look like? I’ll leave to none other than Wikipedia to elaborate:
“Parachuting may or may not involve a certain amount of free-fall, a time during which the parachute has not been deployed and the body gradually accelerates to terminal velocity.” So there you have it. It seems that you and I both would like to know what my parachute looks like but while we’re in this seemingly interminable free fall, I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.
The Jubilant Job Hunter 