In which I ponder the economy.

There is a company-wide meeting every Friday afternoon in the office where I work.

We all get off the phones and eat lunch together, and management goes over various topics and we discuss them as a group. Usually it’s changes in products or fine points of procedure. Sometimes there are assigned presentations about the products or services we offer, and there’s usually a harmless little team-building discussion topic at the end, like What was the make and model of your first car? or How long did your longest relationship last?

Last Friday at the top of the meeting, management went over our current customer count and incoming call statistics and then told us that the national unemployment rate had hit 8.1 percent… and left it at that. No verbiage tying the figures into anything like attrition procedure or new policies: just a statement, short and sweet, hanging in the air while all of us employees quietly scrunched down in our chairs and didn’t look at each other.

I glanced at the handout I’d been given and under one of the headers it said, “Our employees need to be exceptional.” Oh. Ooookay.

The clincher was the general discussion topic at the end of the meeting, which, and I’m not even kidding, was, “What would you do if you were not working here?”

I ain’t no Agatha Christie but I can solve mysteries with clues like those. They’re going to have to cut back whether they want to or not. It’s just how it’s going for everyone these days.

Maybe I’m being paranoid and my personal job is not in danger, but in my department the only person who has less seniority than me is my brother. So. If there are layoffs, it’s gonna suck for my household either way.

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I spent time between calls browsing depressing recession images on Flickr pools.

Slate magazine’s Shoot the Recession and the Economic Clusterf*ck (a.ka. Recession) of 2008-9 both feature picture after picture of the economic crisis. Closed schools, closed banks, and closed small businesses… abandoned, foreclosed houses across the nation… photo essays of Circuit City’s last day… empty, abandoned malls and empty parking lots… abandoned historical buildings in Detroit, New York, and DC.

It’s just plain spooky when there isn’t enough money.

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There was an article in the U-B last week about a white collar dude’s experience of applying for assistance. Fifty-something, upper middle class, educated, a business owner… the market he and his wife consulted in has dried up, and now they need public assistance just to pay their heating bill.

My uncle went out to the Midwest just before Christmas to bring back to the Northwest my cousin, who though educated and experienced in his field of retail, had been unable to get a job for so long that his duplex was in foreclosure.

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I’m trying to decide if I should freak out and start looking for work immediately, or if I should wait and get laid off. Walla Walla is a small town and has at best only marginal employment opportunities for someone with experience and intelligence but no credentials like me; with a recession going on I’d be lucky to find another job at all.

I doubt that any of the ISPs are hiring, especially when they’re losing their customers to phone and cable companies who can bundle, or to dial-up because it’s cheaper. (Yes, people are switching back to dial-up to make ends meet. It’s true.) And with five restaurants closing in the last month alone, I probably won’t be waitressing either. Normally in a I-need-work-NOW scenario I’d go straight to a temp agency, but I doubt they’re handling any volume these days either.

I moved here to get back on my feet after the divorce. And I nearly am, but I’m still paying off the debts of my marriage and the last dregs of the Uterine Monster surgery. I still don’t own a car or furniture or kitchenware, and now if I were to leave in search of decent employment opportunities I guess I’d feel strange about abandoning G’ma to live alone. I think she thinks I’m lazy and maybe a bit of an idiot sometimes (and frankly I’m too lazy to disabuse her of such notions, so she’s partially right), but at least she’s not alone in the house and we do on occasion have hours-long discussions about cooking that are very satisfying to both of us.

I don’t have any savings. I have no retirement fund and no insurance. I’m 40 years old and in all honesty I made only $20,000 last year.

The only relative I know of who owns her dwelling outright and who actually has empty beds in it is my grandmother. My dad lives in a motor home and my mom’s got a mortgage. I think everybody else either rents or has a mortgage, and I’m pretty sure they all have some kind of debt – I mean, doesn’t everyone? What will happen to all of them if they lose their jobs too?

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When I mentioned the unemployment rate on Facebook, someone replied, “91.9% are still employed.”

Which is comforting, until you realize that the official unemployment statistic apparently includes only those people receiving benefits. If your bennies run out or you’re not eligible for them in the first place, you’re not “unemployed,” you’re a non-entity. So in an economy that has thousands fewer jobs than it did a year ago the actual number of persons who wish to work and who are not doing so is probably higher than that.

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I buried myself this article from last weekend’s NYT Magazine and finally realized the scope of the housing crisis:

“Just when local officials thought things couldn’t get worse, Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, posted a record number of foreclosure filings. The number of empty houses is so staggeringly high that no one has an accurate count. The city estimates that 10,000 houses, or 1 in 13, are vacant. The county treasurer says it’s more likely 15,000. Most of the vacant houses are owned by lenders who foreclosed on the properties and by the wholesalers who are now sweeping in to pick up houses in bulk, as if they were trading in baseball cards.”

The wholesalers apparently buy properties for pennies on the dollar, and then resell them to naive people who end up homeless themselves when they can’t pay the years’ worth of fines and property taxes they assume when they buy. Then the house sits abandoned, gets the damage all abandoned buildings eventually do, and then the city has to find funds to raze it.

One in 13 dwellings, empty. Where did all the people go?

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Alice came to a fork in the road.
“Which road do I take?” she asked.
“Where do you want to go?” responded the Cheshire cat.
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”

-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

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So I have a roof over my head and income. My debt is still there but if I can stay employed for another year I should be out from under all of it (except my student loans, which, quite frankly, I don’t ever expect to pay off). At this rate maybe I’ll have a retirement fund and insurance in place by the time I’m 50.

Yeah, right. Who am I kidding? I’m gonna freakin’ die on welfare.

I think it’s time to do my part in stimulating the economy: I should be utterly irresponsible and get a big fat tattoo come payday. I can even justify it since I’ve been taking my lunch to work for months now, saving myself at least enough money for a tattoo.

I bet tattoo artists and dive bars don’t even notice recessions.