This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal
By JOSEPH DE AVILA
July 2, 2009

For many Americans looking for work, the first stop is an online job board. Now job seekers are finding that prospective employers increasingly are looking elsewhere to find new hires—the companies’ own Web sites.

To draw more applicants to their sites, companies such as software makers Intuit Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc. are revamping their online career pages, including making them more interactive by adding videos and employee profiles. Companies also are trying to reach job seekers through social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Sodexo Inc., which provides food services to institutions, offers online “widgets” at its Web site, which send alerts to job hunters’ computer screens when the company has new openings.

Companies say they are scaling back advertising on online job boards, which saves them money. By focusing more on their own career pages, companies also reduce the number of applications they need to sift through. And, they say, people applying through a prospective employer’s own Web site are on average better-qualified than applicants coming through job boards.

The developments mean job seekers may have to change tactics. Craig Halfman, a chef in Lynchburg, Va., began looking for a job seven months ago after being laid off from a previous position. He set up profiles on about seven online job boards and created a personal Web site to publicize his accomplishments and resume. “A lot of the [job boards] gave me stuff that had nothing to do with me,” says Mr. Halfman, 37 years old. “I’d get responses for nurses and medical stuff and jobs that didn’t apply to me whatsoever.”

About three months ago Mr. Halfman joined a group on LinkedIn hosted by Sodexo for former, current and prospective employees. After seeing his LinkedIn profile, a Sodexo human-resource representative contacted Mr. Halfman and suggested he apply for an opening as executive chef at a university in Virginia. He applied through Sodexo’s Web site and was hired last month.

Human-resource experts say job hunters shouldn’t give up on job boards, but should use every tool available to them. That includes making a list of companies that meet their requirements for a desirable employer and researching the companies to understand their business. “You should really tailor and target your cover letter and resume to the needs of the company,” says Mark Stelzner, a principal at management consultant Inflexion Advisors LLC.

Networking Online

He adds that many successful job seekers are finding luck by first networking with employees at the company via social media like LinkedIn and applying directly with the company instead of through the job boards.

For people wanting to check out companies and industries, www.hoovers.com/free, offers a good starting place to do basic research. It has information like company overviews and the names of major competitors. Another site, google.com/Top/Business, has a large directory of businesses organized by industry.

Despite the recession, many companies continue to hire new employees, at least to replace departing staff. Sodexo, for instance, which has 350,000 employees world-wide, says it expects to fill about 5,000 management and professional jobs in North America this year.

Flood of Applications

As unemployment soars, applicants are flooding traditional online job boards like Monster.com, Careerbuilder and Yahoo’s HotJobs. In May, 22.9 million unique visitors searched for work on job boards, according to comScore Media Metrix. That’s up 37% from a year earlier. Company career sites also are seeing greater traffic. Adobe says applications are up 30% since it revamped its career page about four months ago. Intuit says online job applications also have increased.

That makes it harder for companies to screen the best applicants. Companies are asking, “now that we are overwhelmed with talent, how do we attract the right talent?” says Mr. Stelzner, the consultant.

Sodexo this year added a page to its career site called Network With Us that links to the company’s Twitter and YouTube pages and to its LinkedIn groups to interact with potential job applicants. The page has helped build a database of 137,000 people who have shown interest in working at Sodexo, the company says.

“Our strategy has been to build this targeted talent pool and to reduce our reliance on job boards and advertising,” says Arie Ball, vice president of talent acquisition at Sodexo. She says cutting advertising at job boards, and seeking out applicants directly, saves the company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and has improved the efficiency of the job-hiring process. The company says its career site had about 161,000 page views in May, more than twice as many as when it revamped the site about a year earlier.

For many companies, beefing up their online career pages is part of a larger strategy to boost brand awareness to compete for the best employees.

Intuit last month launched a new interactive portion of its career site where visitors can see a short virtual representation of what the Intuit offices are like along with pop-up videos and photos.

“Part of it is letting people know who we are as a company,” says Melissa Rutledge, an employment-branding manager at Intuit. “We are getting away from the job boards a little bit,” she adds. “We will probably never get away from it completely, but we are moving more toward viral advertising.”

Adobe also launched a new career site, which features a professionally produced video chronicling a day in the life of several Adobe employees. One shows a designer in San Francisco beginning his day surfing in the ocean at 6 a.m. and then follows him through his work day.

Selling the Culture

In a competitive job market, “all things being equal, our key differentiator is the culture and our core values,” says Jeff Vijungco, senior director of talent acquisition. Adobe does only a small amount of advertising on traditional job boards, “but we find more success on our own job board,” he adds.

Among the most successful new hires are those referred by existing employees, some companies say. “One of our main philosophies is to get smart and talented people. They tend to be connected,” says Molly Graham, manager of human resources and recruitment at Facebook Inc. About 50% of Facebook’s new hires come through referrals, she says.

Employing Algorithms

Zappos.com, an online shoe retailer with 1,300 employees, is tapping social-media sites to find more such referrals. The company last year hired Jobvite Inc., one of several firms that manage companies’ career sites. Jobvite also provides software that allows Zappos employees to tap into their LinkedIn and Twitter contacts to make referrals for job openings.

The software uses a matching algorithm to sort through those contacts to find which person might be best suited for the job. Employees can then get in touch with the people who are selected and invite them to apply.

“It opens up a larger sized window to people and potential,” says Rebecca Ratner, Zappos’s director of human resources.

By Laura Gassner Otting

You’re called in for an interview for the job that could launch your encore career. The standard advice would be to promote your achievements, but that may not be the best strategy. Instead, voice your passion about this new stage in your life and share the “aha!” moment that set you on your new path.

Job seekers transitioning into the nonprofit sector are often filled with assumptions and expectations about the sector itself, some true and some not. Likewise, the nonprofit sector is teeming with assumptions and expectations about these job seekers. To avoid being stereotyped, encore careerists need to stand out in a different way.

There is no doubt that many nonprofit hiring managers staring at any would-be encore careerist’s resume think that they have seen it all before: another for-profit refugee looking to “give back.” The best way to avoid being pigeonholed by these assumptions is to confront them head on. Encore careerists should be prepared to hear them, and correct them, throughout the job search process.

For example, your cover letter can discuss how you have sent your children to college and are more financially able to make the sacrifices necessary to give back to your community. Or you might use your résumé to list the volunteer work you’ve done throughout the years to allay concerns that you prioritized moneymaking ahead of your passion.

Networking provides another chance for you to learn about and discuss how work in the nonprofit sector is different, and demonstrate that your expectations are aligned with reality.

The chief stereotypes you must confront all orbit around the idea that for-profit employees are interested in themselves instead of their community, their country or their world. However, we all are forced to live within certain economic realities. Sadly, the mortgage company won’t give us back any points for helping the homeless, nor will the supermarket comp us groceries for feeding the poor.

Working for the private sector is not and was not a sin, and you should be proud of the work you did there. This work has prepared you for the nonprofit sector in ways that will benefit the nonprofit for which you ultimately work.

Yet a nonprofit hiring manager may not see it that way and might need some additional stroking. Take care to craft your story about when you discovered you were unfulfilled by the pursuit of money and became dedicated to a cause. Nonprofits love to hear about corporate denizens who wake up one day and realize that they want to do more meaningful work.

If you wear your heart on your sleeve, you’ll always get compliments about your fashion sense from nonprofit coworkers.

Laura Gassner Otting is president of the Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, which helps increase the capacity of nonprofits and their staffs. She is the author of Change Your Career: Transitioning to the Nonprofit Sector.

This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times
By Emili Vesilind
June 14, 2009

The LA Times really nailed it in this article. Being ready for an interview is absolutely essential these days; from being prepared to answer questions, to knowing the questions you want answered, to the shoes you wear into the interview…read on.

Hip jeans and a cool T-shirt get the nod at some trendy companies, but for conservative firms, nothing but a black suit will do.

Flip through any how-to book on job interviewing and you’re bound to run into the same timeworn tenets on how to dress when facing the hiring squad.

“A conservative two-piece business suit” is appropriate for men and women, according to “The College Grad Hunter” (2008) by Brian D. Krueger, with women clad in pantyhose “at or near skin color.”

Susan Britton Whitcomb, author of “Interview Magic” (2008), suggests that men wear “a sharp navy blazer and dress slacks” when interviewing at companies with a casual atmosphere.

Slacks? Pantyhose? Are we still getting gussied up the way they did in “Mad Men” to get hired?

The short answer, in many fields, is yes. But this is Southern California, where more than a few creative-minded companies consider board shorts or cropped jeans appropriate business attire. Significant swaths of the local job market have their own dress codes — which makes choosing a solid interview outfit all the more difficult.

And with unemployment in California at 11% in April, employers often find themselves choosing among candidates who look nearly identical on paper. That’s when looking impressive in the flesh can tip you right into the catbird seat.

We asked executives from the creative, business and entertainment fields which looks work — and which ones don’t — for job seekers in their areas.

First, they agreed on a few universal rules:

Be well groomed: This would seem to go without saying, but based on employer comments, it’s worth repeating. Don’t even bother walking through those double doors with a ratty pedicure, dirty shoes or clothes or greasy hair.

Kimber Maderazzo, senior vice president of global product development for personal-care juggernaut Guthy-Renker, said she notices chipped nails and grown-out hair roots — and though she frowns upon drag queen-heavy makeup, “even women who don’t usually wear makeup should wear a little on an interview,” she said. “They need to look polished.”

Pay attention to the details, because it’s the little things that seal the deal: Sure, you’ve never worn a sweat suit on a job interview — but employers agree that it’s almost never the core outfit (the suit, the skirt) that makes the big impression.

Thomas McCullough, executive vice president and chief operating officer for First Regional Bank, remembers an experienced banker who interviewed for a position at his office whose small — but significant — sartorial snafu ended up costing him the job.

“He was dressed very nicely and expensively,” McCullough said, “but he had a big poufy Hollywood scarf hanging down from his pocket. As soon as I saw him, I said to myself, ‘He’s not going to get the job. He’s gone Hollywood on us.’ It’s a small thing, but he just went a little outside our comfort zone.”

Karine Dubner, chief operating officer of fashion companies Joie and Current/Elliott, once escorted an overeager job candidate to another part of the office, only to find that the interviewee could barely walk in her towering stilettos. “It made me feel uncomfortable,” Dubner said.

Dress for the conference room, not for the club: Think modesty. For women, low-cut shirts, too-short skirts and bare upper arms are no-nos. Skirts should be knee-length, jackets should have the capacity to close (even if they’re left open), and second-to-top buttons on shirts should be affixed. Men should leave the bedazzled jeans at home and refrain from showcasing their chest hair — at all.

Remember that polish counts: Don’t show up for an interview looking like you gave zero thought to your ensemble. It’s better to risk being overdressed than look as if you just stopped by on your way to the beach.

“I’d rather see someone be a little more polished and conservative than too casual,” said Karine Joret, president and co-founder of lifestyle and fashion public relations firm HL Group, “like, ‘I’m too cool, I’m too hip for this meeting.’ ”

Playing to win: Beyond mastering those basics, the real key to success is discovering as much about the company’s corporate culture as you can before sitting down for the interview. By donning the office “uniform” — which may be dark jeans at MTV or a Gucci suit at a legal office — you make it easier for potential employers to envision you integrating seamlessly into their team.

How to go about getting the skinny on the sartorial scene? Peruse the company website for photos of staffers in action, call the human resources department to tactfully inquire after the company’s dress code or — for super- sleuths — send a “lost” friend into the office ahead of time to ask for directions and report back on what people are wearing (but remember to dress a tad more formally than the staffers do day to day).

Our interviews with the executives yielded these general guidelines for dressing to kill in various fields.

Finance, law and banking

One word: conservative. This means donning a dark, well-cut suit for guys, a skirt-suit or pantsuit for gals and black, polished dress shoes for all (and guys, skip the unflattering sneaker-loafer hybrids from brands such as Skechers and invest in a good pair of black lace-ups). The dreaded nude pantyhose would be in order for women. But a briefcase on the first interview was deemed unnecessary — and might even come off as an affectation.

The days of dressing casually in the banking business “never were,” noted McCullough, who also wears suits on the weekend out of habit.

A senior manager at a major international financial services firm in L.A., who was only permitted to comment anonymously, said anything other than a plain black suit — for men and women — would be inappropriate for an interview at his company. “We all wear black suits and blue shirts,” he said. “It shows that you understand the corporate culture if you dress the same.”

High-level sales, marketing and real estate

Sartorial codes tend to be slightly less rigid in these pressure-cooker fields — but not by much. Jay Luchs, executive vice president of commercial real estate and office leasing company CB Richard Ellis, said he likes to see men interview in suits — any dark hue will do — and women in skirts with blouses or dresses and heels.

“The Internet days changed things big time for a lot of people,” he noted. “People were dressed more casually for a while. Now they’re going back to realizing it might be better to show up dressed more ‘business attire.’ It shows you’re more serious.”

Creative fields

Fashion, publishing, architecture, graphic design and lifestyle public relations firms usually boast more lax dress codes. The general rule is that the more creative the job (think fashion designer, graphic artist), the more liberties you can take when dressing for the big interview. And showing that you’re in the dark regarding certain fashion nuances is more likely to count against you in these visually driven industries.

Tammy Hammond, director of recruiting for action sports brand Quiksilver — where the top execs wear flip-flops to shareholder meetings — said, “Professional means something else to us. If you show up in a suit, it’s apparent that you don’t understand the culture. And for us, cultural fit is 80% of what we’re looking for. There are a lot of people who can do the job.”

For men, clean jeans and a collared shirt, “and even a nice T-shirt,” is plenty gussied up, Hammond said. “Girls can wear jeans and a cute blouse or sandals, or a cute T-shirt that’s layered with something fashiony.”

But T-shirts wouldn’t fly at the majority of fashion companies in SoCal. Joie’s Dubner, for example, is OK with nice dark jeans, as long as they’re dressed up with a blazer, “nice shoes and [for women] a beautiful bag.”

Adam Watson, a freelance Web designer based in Glendale, regularly scores gigs in a uniform of dark jeans or khakis, clean Pumas and a dark-hued collared polo shirt. “If you go in with a suit or tie as a designer, you’re not going to be perceived as a very creative person,” he said.

Kim Calvert, editor in chief of lifestyle magazine Singular and website SingularCity.com, said business casual is the right note to strike when interviewing at the publication’s office, which the staff shares with pet dogs and a bird. Nice jeans and a button-front shirt are appropriate for men, she added, and ensembles that “show you’re paying attention to fashion and staying abreast of the media” work for women.

Entertainment industry

There are as many types of jobs in the entertainment industry as there are kernels in a bucket of popcorn, but even if you’ll be heading to a film editing suite — where you could easily spend all day barefoot, if you wish — the rules for interview dressing for office and production jobs are similar. The nice-jeans-and-blazer look will cut it, but you’re far safer in a pair of flat-front pants, casual button-front shirt and a blazer (for guys) and a dress or blouse-and-skirt combo (for gals).

Still, in a few Hollywood offices, personal style trumps formality.

Ryan Patterson, supervising producer for celebrity news show “Access Hollywood,” said her office recently hired a guy who came to his interview dressed in a button-front shirt thrown over a rock concert T-shirt, jeans, a newsboy cap, tons of silver jewelry and Puma sneakers because “he looked cool,” she said, “like he’d be hanging out with stars he’d be interviewing.”

Patterson recommends a blazer and jeans with nice sneakers for men and “a cute dress that you accessorize with funky jewelry” for the ladies on interview day.

But too-cool-for-school won’t work at film company Apartment 3B Productions, said Jennifer Klein, founder and president. “I would never wear jeans to an interview. I don’t care if they are $200 jeans — no way. Why risk it?” she said. “I’ll remember the geek in the suit over the guy with the T-shirt with food down the front.”

Klein recommends keeping an interview ensemble “basic and professional,” which boils down to well-fitting suits for men and a flattering skirt-and-blouse ensemble with nice heels for women. She warns against looking fashionable to an intimidating degree. “You feel like that person might be competing with you,” she said. And keep super-pricey bags (like Hermès Birkin bags, which start at around $6,000) at home. “I’m going to hire the girl from Oklahoma who seems more hungry instead of the girl from Bel-Air who might have a great work ethic but she looks like she doesn’t need a job,” she said.

With so many nuanced rules in each industry, your best bet for striking the right tone in your interview ensemble is by doing your homework — researching the company’s corporate atmosphere. Because you don’t want a pair of inappropriate Nikes to hamstring your chances. You’re better than that.

This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal
By Kyle Stock
June 9, 2009

A few months ago, Andrea Kornfeld was working on a computer program to shave milliseconds off of transactions at Merrill Lynch.

Now, she’s a Peace Corps volunteer teaching computer skills to high-school students in Cameroon.

Ms. Kornfeld, 26, applied to the program in August, before the worst part of the financial crisis. Her acceptance arrived a few weeks after she was laid off in January. “Honestly, getting laid off was a good thing,” she says. “Merrill Lynch just wasn’t a good fit for me and it gave me an opportunity to do something different.”

The recession is proving a boon for volunteer programs and social-enterprise groups, which are swamped with midcareer applicants like Ms. Kornfeld. Some lost their jobs, others are planning to change careers. Many of the organizations say the applicants, and their business backgrounds, will be welcome additions to their causes.

Applications to the Peace Corps, a U.S. government initiative launched in 1961 to strengthen diplomacy and help developing nations, are up 16% over last year, says spokeswoman Laura Lartigue. Among those ages 50 and older, applications are up almost 50%.

Teach for America Inc., a nonprofit that places recent graduates and professionals in low-income public schools, received 42% more applications this year, according to Kerci Marcello Stroud, national communications director. Nearly one-quarter came from people working, as opposed to attending school, an 80% increase from a year earlier. “This pool of applicants is more qualified than ever,” Ms. Stroud says.

Regional programs are also in demand. The Appleseed Foundation, which enlists lawyers to work on social causes in 16 cities, has seen a surge in queries about its fellowship program, in which law firms typically pay employees $50,000 to $75,000 a year to take sabbaticals. Executive Director Betsy Cavendish says law firms are showing more interest because it allows them to retain employees at a fraction of their usual salaries. Midcareer attorneys and recent law-school graduates are applying to Appleseed to log work experience and gain expertise as paying jobs are drying up. “We’ll give them an edge when they go back to a firm,” Ms. Cavendish says.

Some applicants are walking away from good jobs. Abbas Manjee, a 24-year-old Melrose Park, Ill. native, said he turned down a promotion from Merrill Lynch in favor of a Teach for America classroom. Mr. Manjee says he’s learned a lot from banking, “but I’m not fulfilled.”

With applications surging, these groups can be more selective. The Peace Corps, which pays stipends of $150 to $400 a month, typically accepts a third of applicants. With more applicants, and 8% fewer positions, the rate will likely fall this year. Teach for America, where annual salaries range from $27,000 to $45,000, expects to accept about 15% of applicants this year, down from 20% a year ago.

Nonprofits say they are putting a premium on applicants with business backgrounds. The Peace Corps is trumpeting a fellowship program that helps volunteers pay for an M.B.A. after their service. The agency hired Shari Hubert, a former recruiter for General Electric Co. and Citigroup Inc., to overhaul its recruiting processes. One of her tasks is to meet a growing world-wide demand for people with expertise in microfinance and small-business development.

To that end, the agency is accepting more people like Steve Smith, a 65-year-old former restaurateur who until recently ran a small business maintaining vineyards in California. Mr. Smith wanted to join the agency in the 1960s, but got sidetracked by the Vietnam War and raising a family. Divorced and with his two kids in their 30s, Mr. Smith’s 60th birthday rekindled the dream. “I just filled out the paper-work, sold my company, gave all my possessions away and here I am,” Mr. Smith said Thursday as he waited to board a plane to Cameroon, where he will help farmers develop small businesses.

Business-savvy volunteers are particularly good at helping nonprofits do more with less, says Sandy Scott, director of public affairs at AmeriCorps, a partially government-funded organization that places volunteers at numerous nonprofits, including Habitat for Humanity and the Red Cross. “These people are setting up credit unions, writing grants, managing resources — it’s called indirect service,” Mr. Scott says.

AmeriCorps plans to place 88,000 workers this year for 10-to-12-month terms, 17% more than in 2008. Participants receive small living allowances and help paying for higher education. The competition is fierce: In the first five months of this year, the organization received more than triple the number of applications as in the same period in 2008.

To stand out in a stack of résumés, applicants should be well-rounded and flexible about what they are willing to do and where and when they are willing to do it. Ms. Lartigue, with the Peace Corps, said candidates should highlight language skills — particularly French and Spanish — as well as prior volunteer experience, including community service, pro-bono work and involvement on nonprofit boards. She says applicants should consider additional training in specific areas, such as teaching or microfinance. Mr. Smith, whose experience with both farming and business helped him get a slot, says he has no idea what he’ll do when he returns from Cameroon.

This is the last installment from our guest blogger, KSS, who wrote several posts as she went through her process of applying to graduate school — something she was not sure she would even attempt when we first met last July.

When I was an adolescent, my grandfather dispensed sound advice upon my upset regarding yet another out-of-state move. Just as I would begin to feel settled in a new place, news would come from my parents that we were set to move again. Concerning this particular incident, he said, “Think of moving as being an opportunity for you. Each time you move, your slate is wiped clean, and you are given the chance to start over again.”

I often think of his words now as an adult, especially during times of change, whether voluntary or involuntary. Perhaps it is a bit of nature (I’ve always tended toward movement) and perhaps it is a bit of nurture (my errant childhood) that makes the winds of change consistently blow transformation into my life. And perhaps, it is also the desire to start anew again. Sometimes, the winds in my life scatter things so minutely that I can hardly locate the pieces that used to form a whole. Other times, I am blown off one course and onto another. Ultimately, this has a dualistic effect where I am stimulated by the prospect of change, but equally overwhelmed at the notion of managing it alone.

Whatever the cause or reason, I see myself as a seeker in life. I seek many things similar to what most of us desire: joy, contentment, a sense of rightness in my life, love. It is this search that directs me in life, guiding me forward and fine-tuning my intuition as I go along. With each experience, I gain further insights into the essence of myself, what makes me happy, and what still needs tweaking. It was out of this desire to delve deeper that I began working with Daisy.

Collaborating with Daisy helped to eliminate many of the turbulent side of effects of my wandering ways as I stepped onto the path leading to graduate school. Clear and concise as she is, she deftly circumvented any indecision or backpedaling on my part. In turn, this enabled me to see my own habits as they cropped up, breaking my pattern of capriciousness so I could know when a change was necessary and when one wasn’t. This continues to be a great ratification for me as Daisy has acutely pointed out gifts that have always been with me, but were maybe a bit overshadowed by my want for a clean slate. As I head off to graduate school this fall, I leave with a stronger sense of self, and a more refined sense of seeking that instead emanates from within. With Daisy’s wisdom, I no longer feel a victim of the winds of change, but rather the driver of this centrifugal force.

This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
By Anna Prior
May 24, 2009

The dismal job market has twentysomethings realizing that they can — and maybe must — go home again.

For the young and jobless, moving back with Mom and Dad can provide free or low-cost housing. But conflicts can arise when independent offspring are subject again to the rules under their parents’ roof.

Here are some tips to make the most of your time at home, while keeping your (and your parents’) sanity.

Set a move-out date and have a plan. If you go home without a plan, six months might turn into a year, and a year into two. Instead, establish a timeline and a plan of action for finding a job or temporary work, says Gary Gilgen, a financial planner.

“Try to get as much of this in writing as possible, get it agreed upon and get it signed,” says Mr. Gilgen.

This will help keep you motivated, while giving your parents a light at the end of the tunnel.

Chip in however you can. Talk to your parents about paying a small amount of rent or contributing in other ways around the house.

Paying rent can boost your self esteem and “in return, your parents are much more likely to be more lenient, to not nag and criticize as much,” says Elina Furman, author of “Boomerang Nation: How to Survive Living with Your Parents the Second Time Around.”

When Mr. Gilgen’s daughters moved back home, he stashed the rent money he collected from them in a savings account, which he gave back to them to use as down payments on homes once they were ready to move out.

Paying rent is “another way of showing discipline,” he says.

Save, Save, Save. The main reason for many people to live with their parents is to save money, and you should do just that.

If you have a source of income, financial planner Kelly Campbell suggests setting up three different savings accounts: an emergency fund, savings for a down payment on a home, and a retirement-savings vehicle.

“You should focus on putting away at least half — or more — of your net income after taxes,” says Mr. Campbell.

Don’t view your wages — even from temporary jobs — as “extra” money for nights out or discretionary purchases just because you aren’t paying rent, says Ms. Furman.

Redecorate your childhood room. You’ll probably be happier if you take down the *NSYNC poster, put away the Little League trophies, and invest in a few items that reflect who you are as an adult. But don’t go overboard.

“Do a really minimalist, cheap renovation,” says Ms. Furman.

“Small changes are the best way to go because then you aren’t committing to staying at home longer than you have to, but you are creating an environment that you can live in,” she says.

Say thank you. We shouldn’t have to say this, but…be nice to your parents and realize that they are doing you a favor by letting you move back home and adding you back into their budget.

“They don’t have to take you in,” says Rick Staszak, a financial consultant. “So, once you move out of the house and you are on your own, treat your mom and dad to a nice dinner.”

This is a very satisfying article from the New York Times Magazine on 5/24/09. Rich with ideas for adults facing new realities and parents wondering about what’s to come for their kids. Hope you’ll take the time to read this.
By: Matthew B. Crawford

The television show “Deadliest Catch” depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another, “Dirty Jobs,” shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. “Dilbert,” “The Office” and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs.

Is there a more “real” alternative (short of inseminating turkeys)?

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. A car mechanics’ trade association reports that repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current recession: people aren’t buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India.

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. I work on Japanese and European motorcycles, mostly older bikes with some “vintage” cachet that makes people willing to spend money on them. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. And yet my decision to go into this line of work is a choice that seems to perplex many people.

After finishing a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Chicago in 2000, I managed to stay on with a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the university’s Committee on Social Thought. The academic job market was utterly bleak. In a state of professional panic, I retreated to a makeshift workshop I set up in the basement of a Hyde Park apartment building, where I spent the winter tearing down an old Honda motorcycle and rebuilding it. The physicality of it, and the clear specificity of what the project required of me, was a balm. Stumped by a starter motor that seemed to check out in every way but wouldn’t work, I started asking around at Honda dealerships. Nobody had an answer; finally one service manager told me to call Fred Cousins of Triple O Service. “If anyone can help you, Fred can.”

I called Fred, and he invited me to come to his independent motorcycle-repair shop, tucked discreetly into an unmarked warehouse on Goose Island. He told me to put the motor on a certain bench that was free of clutter. He checked the electrical resistance through the windings, as I had done, to confirm there was no short circuit or broken wire. He spun the shaft that ran through the center of the motor, as I had. No problem: it spun freely. Then he hooked it up to a battery. It moved ever so slightly but wouldn’t spin. He grasped the shaft, delicately, with three fingers, and tried to wiggle it side to side. “Too much free play,” he said. He suggested that the problem was with the bushing (a thick-walled sleeve of metal) that captured the end of the shaft in the end of the cylindrical motor housing. It was worn, so it wasn’t locating the shaft precisely enough. The shaft was free to move too much side to side (perhaps a couple of hundredths of an inch), causing the outer circumference of the rotor to bind on the inner circumference of the motor housing when a current was applied. Fred scrounged around for a Honda motor. He found one with the same bushing, then used a “blind hole bearing puller” to extract it, as well as the one in my motor. Then he gently tapped the new, or rather newer, one into place. The motor worked! Then Fred gave me an impromptu dissertation on the peculiar metallurgy of these Honda starter-motor bushings of the mid-’70s. Here was a scholar.

Over the next six months I spent a lot of time at Fred’s shop, learning, and put in only occasional appearances at the university. This was something of a regression: I worked on cars throughout high school and college, and one of my early jobs was at a Porsche repair shop. Now I was rediscovering the intensely absorbing nature of the work, and it got me thinking about possible livelihoods.

As it happened, in the spring I landed a job as executive director of a policy organization in Washington. This felt like a coup. But certain perversities became apparent as I settled into the job. It sometimes required me to reason backward, from desired conclusion to suitable premise. The organization had taken certain positions, and there were some facts it was more fond of than others. As its figurehead, I was making arguments I didn’t fully buy myself. Further, my boss seemed intent on retraining me according to a certain cognitive style — that of the corporate world, from which he had recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning. As I sat in my K Street office, Fred’s life as an independent tradesman gave me an image that I kept coming back to: someone who really knows what he is doing, losing himself in work that is genuinely useful and has a certain integrity to it. He also seemed to be having a lot of fun.

Seeing a motorcycle about to leave my shop under its own power, several days after arriving in the back of a pickup truck, I don’t feel tired even though I’ve been standing on a concrete floor all day. Peering into the portal of his helmet, I think I can make out the edges of a grin on the face of a guy who hasn’t ridden his bike in a while. I give him a wave. With one of his hands on the throttle and the other on the clutch, I know he can’t wave back. But I can hear his salute in the exuberant “bwaaAAAAP!” of a crisp throttle, gratuitously revved. That sound pleases me, as I know it does him. It’s a ventriloquist conversation in one mechanical voice, and the gist of it is “Yeah!

After five months at the think tank, I’d saved enough money to buy some tools I needed, and I quit and went into business fixing bikes. My shop rate is $40 per hour. Other shops have rates as high as $70 per hour, but I tend to work pretty slowly. Further, only about half the time I spend in the shop ends up being billable (I have no employees; every little chore falls to me), so it usually works out closer to $20 per hour — a modest but decent wage. The business goes up and down; when it is down I have supplemented it with writing. The work is sometimes frustrating, but it is never irrational.

And it frequently requires complex thinking. In fixing motorcycles you come up with several imagined trains of cause and effect for manifest symptoms, and you judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a mental library that you develop. An internal combustion engine can work in any number of ways, and different manufacturers have tried different approaches. Each has its own proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire.

As in any learned profession, you just have to know a lot. If the motorcycle is 30 years old, from an obscure maker that went out of business 20 years ago, its tendencies are known mostly through lore. It would probably be impossible to do such work in isolation, without access to a collective historical memory; you have to be embedded in a community of mechanic-antiquarians. These relationships are maintained by telephone, in a network of reciprocal favors that spans the country. My most reliable source, Fred, has such an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure European motorcycles that all I have been able to offer him in exchange is deliveries of obscure European beer.

There is always a risk of introducing new complications when working on old motorcycles, and this enters the diagnostic logic. Measured in likelihood of screw-ups, the cost is not identical for all avenues of inquiry when deciding which hypothesis to pursue. Imagine you’re trying to figure out why a bike won’t start. The fasteners holding the engine covers on 1970s-era Hondas are Phillips head, and they are almost always rounded out and corroded. Do you really want to check the condition of the starter clutch if each of eight screws will need to be drilled out and extracted, risking damage to the engine case? Such impediments have to be taken into account. The attractiveness of any hypothesis is determined in part by physical circumstances that have no logical connection to the diagnostic problem at hand. The mechanic’s proper response to the situation cannot be anticipated by a set of rules or algorithms.

There probably aren’t many jobs that can be reduced to rule-following and still be done well. But in many jobs there is an attempt to do just this, and the perversity of it may go unnoticed by those who design the work process. Mechanics face something like this problem in the factory service manuals that we use. These manuals tell you to be systematic in eliminating variables, presenting an idealized image of diagnostic work. But they never take into account the risks of working on old machines. So you put the manual away and consider the facts before you. You do this because ultimately you are responsible to the motorcycle and its owner, not to some procedure.

Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given symptom may have several possible causes, and further, these causes may interact with one another and therefore be difficult to isolate. In deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you, and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.

Put differently, mechanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street. Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. The slap of worn-out pistons hitting their cylinders can sound a lot like loose valve tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly open to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is a virtue that is at once cognitive and moral. It seems to develop because the mechanic, if he is the sort who goes on to become good at it, internalizes the healthy functioning of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. How else can you explain the elation he gets when he identifies the root cause of some problem?

This active concern for the motorcycle is reinforced by the social aspects of the job. As is the case with many independent mechanics, my business is based entirely on word of mouth. I sometimes barter services with machinists and metal fabricators. This has a very different feel than transactions with money; it situates me in a community. The result is that I really don’t want to mess up anybody’s motorcycle or charge more than a fair price. You often hear people complain about mechanics and other tradespeople whom they take to be dishonest or incompetent. I am sure this is sometimes justified. But it is also true that the mechanic deals with a large element of chance.

I once accidentally dropped a feeler gauge down into the crankcase of a Kawasaki Ninja that was practically brand new, while performing its first scheduled valve adjustment. I escaped a complete tear-down of the motor only through an operation that involved the use of a stethoscope, another pair of trusted hands and the sort of concentration we associate with a bomb squad. When finally I laid my fingers on that feeler gauge, I felt as if I had cheated death. I don’t remember ever feeling so alive as in the hours that followed.

Often as not, however, such crises do not end in redemption. Moments of elation are counterbalanced with failures, and these, too, are vivid, taking place right before your eyes. With stakes that are often high and immediate, the manual trades elicit heedful absorption in work. They are punctuated by moments of pleasure that take place against a darker backdrop: a keen awareness of catastrophe as an always-present possibility. The core experience is one of individual responsibility, supported by face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

Contrast the experience of being a middle manager. This is a stock figure of ridicule, but the sociologist Robert Jackall spent years inhabiting the world of corporate managers, conducting interviews, and he poignantly describes the “moral maze” they feel trapped in. Like the mechanic, the manager faces the possibility of disaster at any time. But in his case these disasters feel arbitrary; they are typically a result of corporate restructurings, not of physics. A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.

Those who work on the lower rungs of the information-age office hierarchy face their own kinds of unreality, as I learned some time ago. After earning a master’s degree in the early 1990s, I had a hard time finding work but eventually landed a job in the Bay Area writing brief summaries of academic journal articles, which were then sold on CD-ROMs to subscribing libraries. When I got the phone call offering me the job, I was excited. I felt I had grabbed hold of the passing world — miraculously, through the mere filament of a classified ad — and reeled myself into its current. My new bosses immediately took up residence in my imagination, where I often surprised them with my hidden depths. As I was shown to my cubicle, I felt a real sense of being honored. It seemed more than spacious enough. It was my desk, where I would think my thoughts — my unique contribution to a common enterprise, in a real company with hundreds of employees. The regularity of the cubicles made me feel I had found a place in the order of things. I was to be a knowledge worker.

But the feel of the job changed on my first day. The company had gotten its start by providing libraries with a subject index of popular magazines like Sports Illustrated. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, it now found itself offering not just indexes but also abstracts (that is, summaries), and of a very different kind of material: scholarly works in the physical and biological sciences, humanities, social sciences and law. Some of this stuff was simply incomprehensible to anyone but an expert in the particular field covered by the journal. I was reading articles in Classical Philology where practically every other word was in Greek. Some of the scientific journals were no less mysterious. Yet the categorical difference between, say, Sports Illustrated and Nature Genetics seemed not to have impressed itself on the company’s decision makers. In some of the titles I was assigned, articles began with an abstract written by the author. But even in such cases I was to write my own. The reason offered was that unless I did so, there would be no “value added” by our product. It was hard to believe I was going to add anything other than error and confusion to such material. But then, I hadn’t yet been trained.

My job was structured on the supposition that in writing an abstract of an article there is a method that merely needs to be applied, and that this can be done without understanding the text. I was actually told this by the trainer, Monica, as she stood before a whiteboard, diagramming an abstract. Monica seemed a perfectly sensible person and gave no outward signs of suffering delusions. She didn’t insist too much on what she was telling us, and it became clear she was in a position similar to that of a veteran Soviet bureaucrat who must work on two levels at once: reality and official ideology. The official ideology was a bit like the factory service manuals I mentioned before, the ones that offer procedures that mechanics often have to ignore in order to do their jobs.

My starting quota, after finishing a week of training, was 15 articles per day. By my 11th month at the company, my quota was up to 28 articles per day (this was the normal, scheduled increase). I was always sleepy while at work, and I think this exhaustion was because I felt trapped in a contradiction: the fast pace demanded complete focus on the task, yet that pace also made any real concentration impossible. I had to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down. To not do justice to an author who had poured himself into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.

The quota demanded, then, not just dumbing down but also a bit of moral re-education, the opposite of the kind that occurs in the heedful absorption of mechanical work. I had to suppress my sense of responsibility to the article itself, and to others — to the author, to begin with, as well as to the hapless users of the database, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflected the author’s work. Such detachment was made easy by the fact there was no immediate consequence for me; I could write any nonsense whatever.

Now, it is probably true that every job entails some kind of mutilation. I used to work as an electrician and had my own business doing it for a while. As an electrician you breathe a lot of unknown dust in crawl spaces, your knees get bruised, your neck gets strained from looking up at the ceiling while installing lights or ceiling fans and you get shocked regularly, sometimes while on a ladder. Your hands are sliced up from twisting wires together, handling junction boxes made out of stamped sheet metal and cutting metal conduit with a hacksaw. But none of this damage touches the best part of yourself.

You might wonder: Wasn’t there any quality control? My supervisor would periodically read a few of my abstracts, and I was sometimes corrected and told not to begin an abstract with a dependent clause. But I was never confronted with an abstract I had written and told that it did not adequately reflect the article. The quality standards were the generic ones of grammar, which could be applied without my supervisor having to read the article at hand. Rather, my supervisor and I both were held to a metric that was conjured by someone remote from the work process — an absentee decision maker armed with a (putatively) profit-maximizing calculus, one that took no account of the intrinsic nature of the job. I wonder whether the resulting perversity really made for maximum profits in the long term. Corporate managers are not, after all, the owners of the businesses they run.

At lunch I had a standing arrangement with two other abstracters. One was from my group, a laconic, disheveled man named Mike whom I liked instantly. He did about as well on his quota as I did on mine, but it didn’t seem to bother him too much. The other guy was from beyond the partition, a meticulously groomed Liberian named Henry who said he had worked for the C.I.A. He had to flee Liberia very suddenly one day and soon found himself resettled near the office parks of Foster City, Calif. Henry wasn’t going to sweat the quota. Come 12:30, the three of us would hike to the food court in the mall. This movement was always thrilling. It involved traversing several “campuses,” with ponds frequented by oddly real seagulls, then the lunch itself, which I always savored. (Marx writes that under conditions of estranged labor, man “no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions.”) Over his burrito, Mike would recount the outrageous things he had written in his abstracts. I could see my own future in such moments of sabotage — the compensating pleasures of a cubicle drone. Always funny and gentle, Mike confided one day that he was doing quite a bit of heroin. On the job. This actually made some sense.

How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up among these walking wounded, a “knowledge worker” at a salary of $23,000? I had a master’s degree, and it needed to be used. The escalating demand for academic credentials in the job market gives the impression of an ever-more-knowledgeable society, whose members perform cognitive feats their unschooled parents could scarcely conceive of. On paper, my abstracting job, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futurologist in a rapture: we are getting to be so smart! Yet my M.A. obscures a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. When I first got the degree, I felt as if I had been inducted to a certain order of society. But despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as an electrician. In that job I had made quite a bit more money. I also felt free and active, rather than confined and stultified.

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.

Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

An economy that is more entrepreneurial, less managerial, would be less subject to the kind of distortions that occur when corporate managers’ compensation is tied to the short-term profit of distant shareholders. For most entrepreneurs, profit is at once a more capacious and a more concrete thing than this. It is a calculation in which the intrinsic satisfactions of work count — not least, the exercise of your own powers of reason.

Ultimately it is enlightened self-interest, then, not a harangue about humility or public-spiritedness, that will compel us to take a fresh look at the trades. The good life comes in a variety of forms. This variety has become difficult to see; our field of aspiration has narrowed into certain channels. But the current perplexity in the economy seems to be softening our gaze. Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times
May 16, 2009
by CATHERINE BERGART

I WAS around No. 1,892,450 of the 2,111,000 people who lost their jobs in the United States last October. It happened near the end of the month. I wasn’t new to layoffs — my first one was in 2001 — but this was different. This time, I not only lost my income, but also I lost the day-to-day camaraderie of a particularly close group of colleagues.

“The Great Good Place,” a book by the urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg, talks about the social and psychological importance of what he calls “third places.” He designates home as “first place” and work as “second place.” He describes “third place” as somewhere neutral, convenient, comfortable and welcoming. It’s where regulars gather and where conversation is lively, engaging and often accompanied by laughter. Soda fountains, beer gardens, cafes and Main Streets have traditionally functioned as third places.

But with a dearth of cozy public gathering spots in America today, I was lucky to have found my third place right inside my second place.

Five days a week, I spent time with my colleagues. Most days, we chatted over morning coffee, hung out at lunch and indulged in more late-afternoon guffaws than management might have liked.

In one of our more serious conversations, we compared notes on how we had each fallen into advertising, never having set out to work in that field. One woman who has a graduate degree in psychology went on to say: “I used to fantasize about escaping this business and finding something I truly love to do. In this economy, however, my only hope is to keep the job I have.”

My co-workers and I were a disparate group. While we were all advertising copywriters, we covered a range of ages and lifestyles, and it’s unlikely we would have met socially. That’s one of the charms of third places: they expand your possibilities. Forging connections with people outside your usual circle gives you a broader sense of community. And of belonging.

I stay in contact with my former colleagues through e-mail, instant messaging, and the occasional phone call. I also joined Facebook, but none of it is the same. Without the shared time, week in and week out, it’s hard to find the loose threads of conversation that dangled in the air among us.

Our communications have become more like a series of polite inquiries: “How was your weekend?”, “Is your husband over the flu yet?”, “Did you hear that Deb found a new job?”

These days, I spend most of my time at home. When I was first laid off, I sent out résumés and made networking calls, but when many of the other ad agencies turned to layoffs, too, I realized that my job prospects were limited. I became, by default, a freelance writer.

Now, my first place is also my second place. I negotiate freelance gigs by e-mail, and if I need background materials for a project, my clients send them to me digitally. I use e-mail and the phone to communicate. Working from home, I lack not only the third-place socializing I used to enjoy with my congenial coworkers, but I also miss out on the basic human contact that usually comes standard in a second place.

As Mr. Oldenburg wrote in The Planning Commissioners Journal, “Social well-being and psychological health depend upon community.” Having a third place, along with a first and second, he says, “suggests the stability of the tripod in contrast to the relative instability of the bipod.” What would he make, I wonder, of my monopod existence?

Of course, there are benefits to working from home. I save on gasoline and can stay in my pajamas all day — and my dog adores having me there.

But I, too, am a social animal, and the lack of human interaction — aside from the one-on-one kind I share with my husband in the evenings — is starting to take its toll. In addition to the loneliness, I’m finding it harder to maintain a sense of perspective, and humor, about my life, and when I am finally in a group situation, I feel out of practice and like the shy kid I used to be.

In an effort to create a better balance for myself, I’ve tried taking my laptop to Starbucks. I know from its marketing materials that it seeks to be a third place, but I’ve found that no matter how many people are sitting there drinking coffee and tapping away at their computers, the experience is essentially solitary. With little wit, laughter or lively, engaging conversation among regulars — and no free coffee — it bears little resemblance to my ex-office.

RECENTLY, I heard about a new way for people like me to deal with their second- and third-place needs. It’s called “co-working.” The idea is that someone sets up an office space and then rents out desks. For a modest fee, you get a quiet place to work, big-office amenities — copier, printer, microwave and free coffee or tea — and an instant community. Everyone works independently, but you have the opportunity to share ideas and socialize. Co-working seems to be catching on around the country, and I’m hoping that a space will open soon near me.

More than five million people have been laid off in the United States since December 2007, so I know I’m not alone. While that makes me no less lonely, it does suggest that there are hordes of people out there who, like me, have suffered from a double loss: their income, as well a place that provided a special form of social nourishment.

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Sometimes it doesn’t feel like this is so easy, does it? Wayne Dwyer’s quote is a good one to repeat over and over — a mantra of sorts — especially these days. Again and again I hear people talking about the paradigm shift we’re all dealing with. The proverbial ‘salad’ being tossed into the air but there’s no bowl to catch it…What new ways of working are we all creating? Reading about Hulu yesterday made me pause and think…The genie is out of the bottle and nobody knows how to get it, or the monetization that makes our world go around, back in the bottle. Or do they? Seems we’re all trying to figure this new world marketplace out. Even the best and brightest.

So then I put the paper down (yes, I read the paper and I’m mad as hell that newspapers are going away! I love reading the paper and I know so many people who do. Every day I silently plead don’t let our papers go away.) and I remember to release my shoulders that have crept up my back closer to my ears, and I take a deep breath – realizing how shallow my breathing has been all day. And then I move on to the next article about people becoming entrepreneurs because they’ve been laid off and have decided to make the move to self-employment (thank you Wall St. Journal). And while I read I notice my breathing, and my back against the couch. I hear the Dallas/Denver game in the background. And I think to myself…we’ll figure all of this out. Collectively we’ll figure it out. And then I tell my son to go to bed and I stretch my arms to be sure my back is broad enough to hold all of the weight of the world and then I release them and drop all of it. Ta da!