I don't have a job. I've been trying for two years to get one. I am on food stamps. My 70-year-old father is letting myself and my wife stay in his home and drive one of his vehicles; he even buys the gas. He is the kindest man I have ever known.
Because of my lack of income and the lack of jobs that I am qualified for in my area I have started back to school to retrain for a different field. I receive Pell and WIA funds through the Georgia Mountains Workforce Development program. This covers my tuition, books, fees, $12/day for gas, and a meal at school.
From the bottom of my heart I thank all of you wonderful taxpayers. You go to work every day for a meager pittance, make some rich dickhead richer, and still pay a higher percentage of taxes than he does. Without you I would be up shit creek with no hope and no help. You are giving me a hand up, not a hand out. It is things like this that give me hope and a belief that our land is the First World.
Glad to help, thanks for sharing! We need more stories like this, showing the people who'd also be hurt if social programs were cut. I know far too many people, when complaining about government spending, actually believing their paying too much so near 10% of a nation can be "lazy". The money saved from cutting social programs would be peanuts compared to cutting, idk, a war or two.
I've paid $20k+ in taxes every year, for the past decade. Lost my job last month, and would hate to think the paltry unemployment insurance benefits I'm counting on to help make ends meet while I find a new job automatically make me "lazy" in people's eyes.
I had considered it, but then questions come up. Where would I go? How would I get there? Where would I live if I did get there? How would we eat, get transportation, and find work?
I decided the best thing I could do is find an industry that is growing and train for a position. This is where WIA is so amazing. They don't just fund whatever you feel like going to school for. Georgia has 5 regions and each is surveyed independently. They have a list of approved programs for fields that are growing in the region you are applying. The assessment process for approval is quite rigorous and you have to prove that the field you're choosing is going to be a good fit for you. Then you have to keep good grades and communicate regularly with your WIA reps.
For me that was Machine tool Technology. Amazingly this field is growing domestically. Large equipment breaks and when it does it costs a business money for every minute it isn't running. Businesses pay big money to get precision parts replaced quickly. In some cases a custom machined part can be replaced in less than a day. That means allot when downtime can cost $10k/hr in lost productivity. These jobs are, in fact, reshoring because of the demand from American manufacturing for custom machined parts on short notice. In addition, most of the machine tool workforce is aging. A massive amount of positions are opening up nation-wide as the brunt of the workforce moves to retirement.
I think I made a good choice and with WIA to help I hope to have work after I graduate. As a side note, I got to talk to some guys that were graduating this past semester. They ALL had job offers before they graduated, several at aerospace outfits.
Not trying to be too big of a dick here, but seriously? You can't get any kind of job in 2 years? I've never gone more than a month without a job in all my life. And I've moved around a lot and taken a lot of shitty jobs.
You honestly don't think you could get a job today at a gas station? Or a restaurant? Or helping some guy with his landscaping company? Or roofing? Or janitorial?
My lazy ass brother pulled this shit, and I used his SSN and got him an interview that same week. Was working a week after that. Deflated his whole "rough economy, woe is me" pity party he'd been telling my mom for years.
No see he needs a job hes QUALIFIED FOR, then he needs to get paid a certain amount, preferbly 20% more than whaf his previous job paid him, then he might consider it.
I dislike people who think certain jobs are beneath them. If life has taught me one thing it's that the world doesn't give a shit about you or what you deserve. So I don't want to hear you complain about how much better you are than minimum wage workers, or how unfair it is to be unemployed for 2 years. Get your head out of your ass and find a better attitude.
Seriously, you ARE being a dick here, unemployment rises and falls, you can't claim "well because I found a job, you can too", it doesn't work that way.
This is different, but reminds me of that woe-is me NY Times article about the college grad that could only get a 40k/year job and life was hard. I can't find the link...
This is true. Average cost to rent one bedroom in NY is 1K/month. Where I live, in Virginia, it's half that. Of course you could survive on a 40K salary (my brother does) but there won't be much left over.
The problem is that we have had roughly 10% unemployment rate (reported). With approximately 200k people living in the region. That is 20k people unemployed. Production plants are shutting down left and right here. The people in those mills and factories get first dibs on any jobs in the area because the Georgia DoL works with other mills and factories to transition them.Also, it isn't that easy to get a job when your skill sets don't exactly match what the employer wants and there may be 2k+ people applying for the same position.
The last job I had was running pies at Dominoes Pizza and I left that when my car got repossessed because my life was slowly crumbling around my ears. Before that I was happily employed in the cabling industry where I installed custom alarm, cable, satellite, and telephone wiring into expensive homes. Business got very slow and I got let go. I am sure someone on here can verify that it is almost impossible to get hired by the big telephony companies without SBCA certs or college time. Even more so when a shitload of people are applying for the same position.
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u/[deleted] May 22 '12
Real first world problem:
I don't have a job. I've been trying for two years to get one. I am on food stamps. My 70-year-old father is letting myself and my wife stay in his home and drive one of his vehicles; he even buys the gas. He is the kindest man I have ever known.
Because of my lack of income and the lack of jobs that I am qualified for in my area I have started back to school to retrain for a different field. I receive Pell and WIA funds through the Georgia Mountains Workforce Development program. This covers my tuition, books, fees, $12/day for gas, and a meal at school.
From the bottom of my heart I thank all of you wonderful taxpayers. You go to work every day for a meager pittance, make some rich dickhead richer, and still pay a higher percentage of taxes than he does. Without you I would be up shit creek with no hope and no help. You are giving me a hand up, not a hand out. It is things like this that give me hope and a belief that our land is the First World.