Unemployed dinosaurs

Photo Copyright 2008, Bruce W. Lord, Esq.

We’re sitting in the cafeteria of the Museum of Science. My son is enthusiastically eating a lunch of chicken strips and basking in the pleasure of being an inquisitive kid, free of his younger sister for the day, in a museum filled with interactive exhibits and one of the world’s only complete triceratops skeletons. My dad and I are talking about the economy.

Specifically, we’re talking about my job search, which has largely consisted of me re-typing my resume — sometimes with a cover letter, sometimes without — into a computerized application form and sending it off into the great unknown. I have yet to speak to, or receive an email from, an actual human being. Will someone other than a computer ever read it? Will they look at my list of newspaper credentials, sigh, “another unemployed journalist,” and hit the delete button without noticing my editing skills, flair with words, Web experience, adaptability, and health expertise?

“Resumes say absolutely nothing about a person,” says my father, who has watched my mother cull through stacks of resumes for her start-up companies for years.

“At least there’s no shame in being laid off when everyone’s been laid off,” I grumble.

The Boston Globe had a story just that morning about the long waits to file unemployment claims and the state’s insistence that filing by phone was actually an easy process — despite the fact that I’d constantly made my way through the phone tree only to be told “we’re busy, call back Thursday” by a recorded voice.

Dad, of course, remembers the days when you didn’t get to answer your “did you seek employment this week?” questions on the computer. Back in the day, you had to wait in line at the unemployment office, worried all the while that someone you knew might see that you were on the dole.

Back in the day, of course, you didn’t have to worry that your job would be sent overseas, or made obsolete by the Internet, or cut because someone you’d never laid eyes on wanted to show a larger profit so he could get a bigger end-of-the-year bonus so he cut a bunch of positions without looking at the people who held them. You also didn’t get reassuring emails from your now-former co-workers that they were miserable now that they were doing your job as well as theirs.

But here’s proof that unemployment is the new hip and happening thing: according to statistics released today by the U.S. Bureau of Labor, there are now 39,400 more people unemployed now in Massachusetts than there were at this time last year, with a 5 percent unemployment rate for the month of October, compared to a 3.9 percent rate at this time last year. That’s still under the national rate of 6.1 percent, compared with 4.4 percent in 2007.

You know, in all the years I’ve written stories using these statistics, I’ve never had them apply directly to me before. Here’s one of my favorite finds recently, in a dark humor sense: a map showing all the (announced) U.S. media layoffs and buyouts, which tallies 13,748 in 2008 (Yeah, I even found “my” pin).

Back at the museum, we read a timeline of mathematical discoveries and marvel at the mythic creatures exhibit. We talk about the changes we’ve seen in computers over our lifetimes — in Dad’s time, from a mainframe that would fill a building to a keypunch machine during his days in Vietnam, in my time from the TRS-80 I learned BASIC on in high school (10 PRINT “This class is boring”; 20 GOTO 10) to the thin-screened wonder I’m typing on now.

And we look at dinosaurs. The new T-Rex is wearing a scarf for Christmas. The kid poses, only somewhat reluctantly, by Cliff the triceratops, one of the last remnants of a species that once ruled the earth.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if I should just hop on a podium alongside him.