34 Comments on “It’s Come to This”

1. Hmm. Did he get one job? Or did he get 78% of a job — since it said there’d be 22% fewer jobs for grads.

   Dr. Phil

2. More likely he got 78% of last years pay…………

3. To be honest, I thought it was from The Onion at first.

4. Maybe this will start a trend of other people getting jobs as well.

   One can only hope…

5. Hi, I have a bachelor’s degree. Do you need your grass cut? I also do windows!

6. eviljwinter @3: I think I heard that The Onion bought out CNN some time back. They were also going to buy out FOX News, but they were outbid by the RNC.

7. Woo! At least he’s from my school! Go Terps!

   (Like (probably) everyone else, I had to triple-check to make sure I was not on the Onion website…)

8. If not pottery, maybe poetry.

   According to the Telegraph, the internet is causing a poetry boom!

   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/4863351/Internet-is-causing-poetry-boom.html

   (Oh, people are publishing more, but still not making any money from it. Sigh. I’m better at constructing poems than I am pottery. Though I have heard there is money in pottery, and it is legal in some states for medicinal purposes.)

9. I’ll be finding something else to do after next week. Anybody need some silicon microfabrication done? High-precision harsh enviroment data collection systems built? No?

10. This really looks like a headline straight from The Onion.

11. In my job for a hedge fund manager I basically sit and follow the financial news all day long. I’m depressed. Not jump of a building depressed. But, I could use a pick me up. A few books back I read “Agent to the Stars.” I really enjoyed it. It had characters you could root for, a few good laughs, and an interesting plot. Anyone got any suggestions for similar escapist reading.

12. I saw that headline yesterday but couldn’t bring myself to click on it. I thought it sounded just too damn dumb. I was right. Right now I’m sitting on unpaid invoices–when my clients can’t get money from their clients upstream, guess who has to wait longer and longer for payday?
    Jess @#5: You take the lawn and windows, I’ll vacuum and do the laundry. Who wants to take over the dishes and dusting?

13. Read the last paragraph in that article:

    Have you found a job recently? We want to hear from you. Send us an email and attach a photo. Tell us where you got hired and how you landed the job and you could be profiled in an upcoming story on CNNMoney.com.

    Yep 300 Million Americans and now it is news if a single person gets a job.

    I hear the Military is hiring!

14. Hey, I’m already doing the dishes and dusting both at home and the part-time gig I’m hoping will go full-time-perm. I’ll never notice few more.

    PS to Hugh57@6 – I work near CNN in Atlanta, I think the building would have imploded if the Onion had bought them out. To say nothing of putting the CNN Center Starbucks out of business! I swear, the on-air talent call their order in before they leave the set and it’s waiting when they walk up alreay miked, make-upped and all.

15. I remember when the dot-com crash happened. All my friends that left I/T support in healthcare to go get rich with the dot-coms, were working at Starbucks within a year.

    I’m still working in healthcare, and happy for it, largely because healthcare can somewhat ignore the ups and downs of the more cut-throat commercial scene.

    If all else fails, I have the Reserve. They’ve always got stuff open for people who want to volunteer, either here in the States or elsewhere.

    What I wonder is, will this current economic collapse force the U.S. to move away from its service economy and back towards a more sensible production and manufacturing economy? Our agricultural base has always been strong, and if we could get back to actually making shit people elsewhere will buy, methinks we’d be doing ourselves a favor.

16. There was a campus-wide email this morning from the chancellor about how worrisome student depression is becoming, and we’re having a “Mind and Body Awareness Week” to address it. Maybe we should be having a “How to survive on the street” week instead…

17. @15- We do make stuff people elsewhere buy…we’re the world’s third largest exporter in fact…but since the demand for cheap Chinese crap is so high in comparison to more expensive domestic products, we also wind up being the world’s largest importer. Oops.

18. Same impression as ‘most everyone else: The Onion.

    PS to Sub-Odean Healthcare isn’t totally safe; if everyone loses their jobs with insurance benefits, we’ll be in trouble too; unless National Health Insurance magically appears.

19. Another one who thought this was an Onion headline at first. Jeepers.

    I work for a university and there’s definitely job-search anxiety going on among our seniors. Though I hear the educational sector is strong, despite the ongoing hiring freeze at my workplace…

20. M.A: How about a, “Moving back in with your parents” week?

    =^)

21. M.A. @16 : I suspect both are really needed.

22. M.A. (16) Take heart… let us not forget

    “Amid this bad news, however, never forget that our country has faced far worse travails in the past. In
    the 20th Century alone, we dealt with two great wars (one of which we initially appeared to be losing); a dozen or so panics and recessions; virulent inflation that led to a 21% prime rate in 1980; and the Great Depression of the 1930s, when unemployment ranged between 15% and 25% for many years. America has had no shortage of challenges.

    Without fail, however, we’ve overcome them. In the face of those obstacles – and many others – the
    real standard of living for Americans improved nearly seven-fold during the 1900s, while the Dow Jones
    Industrials rose from 66 to 11,497. Compare the record of this period with the dozens of centuries during which humans secured only tiny gains, if any, in how they lived. Though the path has not been smooth, our economic system has worked extraordinarily well over time. It has unleashed human potential as no other system has, and it will continue to do so. America’s best days lie ahead.”

    Warrant Buffet – 2/27/09

23. Nooo!! not pottery, I don’t need the competition. I left a soul sucking corporate software engineering job to take up pottery. There’s no money in pottery – go try something else like scrapbooking or fused-glass jewelry or raccoon taxidermy.

24. Hey! I hear there are job openings at the Treasury Department

    I think they’re pretty good paying positions too. Hours may suck, though.

    And we need a Surgeon General. That could be a pretty easy ride.

25. Well, that only cost 3 trillion dollars or so. Who’s next?

26. Man, I shouldn’t have to look twice to be sure it isn’t The Onion.

27. Tom and others, Re: Military

    It’s working out for me. Job security = 100%, and as an Officer I’m making more than the national average (ave. US household income = 42K) right out of school.

    Of course right now I’m working 56 hours a week (minimum), which is a step down from the 60+ I was working for the past six months. And six months from now I’ll be done with training, and probably in a submarine heading towards a war zone.

    But I’m also no good at pottery.

28. Ridiculous. I didn’t get a CNN article when I landed a job in the field my masters’ is in. And I’m STILL getting the degree, too…grad August 2009. What does that say?

    Yeah, I know. It says I picked the right field, lol.

29. @ 27 Jim

    I really wished my head was screwed on tighter when I left High School. I really should of gone NROTC, gone Nuke and would probably in a better place in my life.

    But at the same point, if I had my head screwed on right then, I doubt I would of ever met my Wife. So glad my head was screwed on wrong.

    But no knocking the Military. A very viable way to get a great education and more experience than any university could provide. Although that getting up before 6AM part is for the birds.

30. I would enjoy learning pottery. I have long fingers.

31. The line at RPI back in the day was that the only aeronautical engineer to get a job in ’91 was Joé Juneau, who had an NHL contract.

32. But are *essential* jobs being lost?
    There’s this little game you can play: “Which Jobs Do We Really Need For Society To Work?”

    For example:

    -Dishwasher: YES. Somebody has to wash the dishes.

    -Construction Worker: YES. We need to build and maintain houses.

    – Short-Order Cook: YES. (Yes, that includes McDonalds.)

    -Nurse: YES.

    -Schoolteacher: YES.

    -Plumber: YES. (Duh.)

    – Garbage Collector: YES.

    -Computer Game Programmer: NO. We can survive without computer games.

    -News Anchor: NO. You can read the news yourself.

    -Supermodel: NO.

    -Blogger: NO. (Sorry.)

    It’s when a lot of those “Yes”-jobs are going, that things are really getting serious…

33. A.R.Yngve: My wife’s school district (all of 5 elementary schools) is laying off 20 teachers. Fortunately, she has enough seniority to retain her job.

    But you don’t really need dishwashers and cooks…eating out is a luxury, not a necessity.

    In the great depression, movies did relatively well…I suspect books did so as well. Will computer games do as well? Who knows…your average computer game is a damn good deal in hours of entertainment per dollar.

34. Steve raises an interesting issue: Does a society in crisis (of some sort) really, REALLY need entertainment/diversion to “survive” said crisis?

    Seriously: If we didn’t have new movies/games/whatever produced during a recession, would people start to go postal/kill themselves in great numbers?

    (Somehow I find that hard to believe. There is always *old* entertainment to come by.)