NO MORE STOP- GAP JOBS Published September 16, 1996 Previous columns by Harry Goldstein	Recently, on our way to the gym, Pervis and I started talking about how this job hunt is going to be different. I've had a series of jobs that I've taken more or less out of desperation, and so has he. It all started with the move to New York. The only way to live in this city is to have a full-time job or several part time gigs; the savings you bring along from home to sustain you through an initial job search don't last very long. Before long, The Rent Factor sets in and you're snapping at the first decent job offer you get. I cashed in on the word processing skills I had developed as a temp and ended up working for a vice-president of trade sales at a children's book publisher. When I went looking for my second job, I had been sucked into the romantic notion that I could do anything to support my fiction writing -- and I did, taking an office manager job. I got canned (but loved it) a few months later and eventually wound up in my current position, paying my dues in the world of magazines.
Mindlessly shooting my ASCII resume off into oblivion won't do.	Just to ease myself mentally and emotionally into the current job hunt, I answered classified ads from the paper -- which was exactly how I'd found all my other jobs in New York and the same way Pervis found his way into the cubicle next to mine. Then I shifted my focus to the Web, firing off resume after resume and never hearing anything back. Two hundred resumes later, I had to step back and ask myself what I was doing wrong and what, exactly, it is that I really want to do. The next job can't just be something to get me by until I have some kind of work epiphany -- it has to be THE ONE. Mindlessly shooting my ASCII resume off into oblivion is obviously not going to get the job (done). Now this may seem like an inordinate amount of pressure to put on myself, but the fact is that everyone comes to a key moment in their working life where they have to decide if they are going to actually build a career -- a succession of jobs in a particular niche where your skill-set increases with each successive position, until you find yourself in a job that sustains your interest at a fairly decent wage. The other choice is to "settle" on a stop-gap, which is the way I went when I took my office manager job. Three years later, I know I have to work someplace that I care about, that challenges me, that I can learn from -- where there is enough variety to keep me from going face down at my desk.
We won't find The Dream Job by responding to classified ads.	Pervis and I gestured freakishly as we discussed our dead-end jobs and made our way down the sidewalk to the gym -- putting our hands to our throats in a strangling motion, finger guns popping off in our mouths. We ended this dance of frustration with the special sidewalk hari-kari, a full backwards abdominal thrust followed by a 720 degree corkscrew to the pavement. We agreed that the romance of subsisting by any means necessary just to be in New York was no longer a worthwhile pursuit in itself. We need the Dream Job (or something damn close), but we won't find it responding to classified ads; that tactic is only marginally better than being a totally passive job hunter, the kind of person who checks his messages frequently, hoping that someone's trying to find him.
We have to become shameless in some fundamental way.	By the time we hit the treadmill, our objectives were clear. Becoming networking fiends is the only way Pervis and I are going to climb to the next rung on the career ladder. We have to become shameless in some fundamental way, utterly unafraid of approaching complete strangers on the recommendation of a friend of a friend of a friend. One otherwise lame book on "achieving total career satisfaction" ("Love Your Work and Success Will Follow," by Arlene S. Hirsch) points out that by not networking, you eliminate 75 to 85 percent of potential employment opportunities. This only confirms what Pervis and I have learned the hard way -- and what we have to do to get where we need to be. Harry Goldstein is a writer and editor living in Manhattan. His work has appeared in Utne Reader, American Book Review, Promethean, AltX, word.com, and other periodicals. © 1996 Harry Goldstein, All Rights Reserved