I've just concluded my obligatory tech-industry multi-month period of unemployment. I was laid off January 25, 2002, and spent six months in a fruitless search for a new gig; in July, I started doing contract work for the company I'd left to take the job I was laid off from. Two weeks ago Friday, they asked me to come back aboard full-time.
We made it through far better than I could have imagined before it happened. None of us had any health problems, so the major medical policy we bought to replace the insupportably expensive COBRA coverage worked out OK, and cost us $4000 less than the COBRA policy would've. We still have no credit card debt, nor any other debt except for a car loan from my father-in-law; his willingness to allow us a payment holiday for the duration helped enormously. Our savings have been somewhat depleted, but not as much as I'd have expected, thanks to my wife's money management ability.
On the positive side of the ledger, as the father of two preschoolers, I had a unique and unexpected opportunity to spend a whole lot of time around my children before they were spending most of every day in school. I wouldn't necessarily have chosen the way things happened, but I'm grateful for all those hours with them that most fathers don't get to have.
The hardest part was putting everything I had into finding a new job, to very little effect, and knowing that many of the people around me, even those closest to me, believed that I could have and should have been doing more. With no tangible results to point to from all my efforts, it was hard to convince my wife, her relatives, my relative, our acquaintances, etc. that there wasn't something obvious I was doing wrong. Our parents' generation has no experience of the type of economic situation and job market we've been in over the last couple of years, and in the dozen years or so I've been in the technology industry, there'd never been a time before the middle of last year when I didn't believe, probably rightly, that I could always get another job in almost no time; I'd been continuously employed for thirteen years before January of this year. My wife has been home with our kids since the eldest was born, and while she had no desire at all to go back to work, she felt guilty about not doing so, and that sometimes turned into resentment toward me for not doing more. In our better moments, she accepted that I was doing everything I could, but there were plenty of moments that weren't among our better ones. Nevertheless, as hard as it was for her at times, she continued to support me and believe in me, and there's no way we could have weathered the storm as well as we did without her faith and her bulldog tenacity in economizing without having to give up the things that are important to us both.
There isn't really a moral to the story; for anyone else dealing with this situation, all I can say is that you have to do everything you can, and then accept that you're doing all you can and remain positive; self-doubt is your worst enemy. Take complete responsibility for what you do to find a new job, and give it your all, but don't try to take responsibility for the actions of employers who never respond to your resume even though you're well qualified for the position they advertised, or for the way others react to your situation; you've got enough on your plate as it is. At the worst times, I never really believed that I'd be unemployed or underemployed forever. I went into this experience mentally and emotionally prepared for the possibility that I might be unemployed for a year; I'm glad it didn't take that long, but if it had we'd have survived it.
OK, that's enough of that. I've got to go to work in the morning.
12:40:33 AM 
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