Ok, this is a pile of single socks. Our pile of single socks. It sits in an antique chair in the corner of our bedroom. And it has, for about 6 months now, grown. You see – I’m on a Job Break.
Over that time, it has grown in number and height and width. I re-upholstered that chair, idk, during lunch, a couple years ago.
My wife and I ask each other frequently – why do we have so many single socks?
But it serves only as a rhetorical question, I think – small talk. We have both accepted that.
Rhetorical questions are designed to set one off into pondering and self-reflection.
I’ve done a lot of pondering and self-reflection since being laid off the Monday after Thanksgiving, 2023.
It’s now 2024, May – and I am quickly approaching 6 months of unemployment. As that mark approaches, “this state” – the one I have found myself in, has also … grown. It has grown increasingly more painful.
Why? Well, I’ll tell you.
As the historic “head of household.” I’m sorry – it’s painful … because everything else in life just stops. It has for me on my job break.
… And the pile of single socks grows.
An Environment for Creating Single Socks
Before I get into exploring how we have so many single socks (and if there, in fact, is a metaphor here), I think you first have to understand the dynamic in my home.
I live with my wife and two now college-age daughters. My oldest daughter occupies the full 3rd floor in our house – where there is a bathroom and 2 rooms; she works occasionally as a pet/house sitter and walks to college where she is a Junior, Mass Comm major. She likes nice things and keeps her shit tidy – for the most part she buys her own food, does her own laundry, and by all accounts – is sorta like having a renter that just doesn’t pay rent.
My younger daughter, she works in retail – at a home goods store. She took classes at the local Community College for the 2nd semester of what would have been her Freshman year. She’s, and I’m sorry – there really is no other way of saying this, a slob. My wife and I don’t really like even entering her room. Except when we must – to collect empty seltzer bottles, empty chip bags, and to scoop up the dirty clothes off her floor.
She loves wearing fuzzy socks when she sits in her bed watching Harry Potter on her iPad.
It was the Lab in the Study with a Candle Stick
We have 2 dogs, and during my job break, my daughters have decided to add 2 sibling kitty cats. I bring the pets up, though, only to tell you this one single thing – our oldest dog is a lab. Read – she has the tendency to pick up whatever is nearest to her at the exact moment when we arrive home. About 13.6% of the time, when she comes, bearing a gift – it happens to be, you guessed it – a single sock.
Or the Mrs. in the Hall with a Dagger
My wife is a real estate agent. If it wasn’t for her, and really the steady stream of business she’s had so far in 2024 and “this state” would frankly be unbearable. She, like my daughters, enjoys a variety of fancy socks. The kind, you know – one goes missing and there is not any other set to draw from to make a new pair.
Crushing it for the last few years, she is, it seems, on the move and out of the house 24/7. And with that, I have taken on many of the responsibilities around the house that might have otherwise historically been hers.
One Strategy for Avoiding Single Socks
Me. I buy or am gifted socks in packs. Black calf-length athletic socks – usually 6 or 8 or 10 in a pack. One grows a hole and I throw it out. The surviving single one finds its new mate when the very next one grows a hole. It’s a good system.
That’s the environment I live in. Maybe or maybe not more prone to divorcing socks than others. The rate of singles, I will say, picked up when we moved our laundry to the basement with our covid-modeled kitchen. Idk. But I am pretty sure that none of those single socks are mine. (Despite what is clearly evidenced in the picture above. Ha!)
What I do know – it’s my responsibly to put those single socks back together. It has been part of my dad description for many years now.
Job Roles & Dad Roles
Since I was laid off, I have applied to, at this very moment – 400 different jobs. Most in my field – Software Quality, but some not. And that number doesn’t include the 25 or so other random conversations I have had exploring this or that.
I wrote a little about “this state” in a blog post for the new QA Jobs site – QAJobs.co – Why Does Job Hunting in QA Feel So Difficult Right Now?
You don’t have to read it (unless you want to), because I’ll sum it up for you here. I make a couple of points, but the main ones being: 1) It’s very competitive in the QA field right now (presumably, between the lines – because lots of us have been laid off in the last year) & 2) It seems that to get an offer, from anyone – You need to be the exact perfect fit. (Really more so than ever before.)
The Exact Perfect Fit?
I’ll stop to say – I have been very close to the end with a handful of companies. In fact, I expect to hear more from two potential employers this week. I’ve been to the end with others, too, expecting to hear, some over a period of a month or even two. And unfortunately, before I can even finish this paragraph, I got an email from one of those two – “We are moving forward with candidates whose skills and experience align more closely with the needs of this role.” And like that, those two are now down to one. I hope to follow up with that other one later today.
What do I mean by you need to be the exact perfect fit? Well, in a nutshell – it seems, you need to have honest experience with all of the specific tools, and only the specific tools, that are posted in the job description. And that, in my mind – from the talent acquisition people up to a good many of the hiring managers is being exercised at an ill-reasoned extreme. (More on that in a future post, I hope.)
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All I really want to say, though – with loosing my job, and maybe this is only me, but I have lost my honest will to do many of my dad duties. Like marrying single socks. I have, and my wife comments frequently, shut off everything in my life that is not related to finding work. From studying my craft and skilling up, to networking, or working on my LinkedIn profile, my resume, and my interview skills. Oh, and applying for jobs. It has become the only thing I can focus on.
At Will Works?
As is customary, my last company gave me two-weeks notice before laying me off.
Oh. Wait!
For those that are unfamiliar with “At Will Employment”, it sums up like this – You, as an employee, can end your employment at any time. AND, likewise – an employer can terminate you, as an employee, at any time. It’s a two-way street.
And being blinded-sided is really the bitch of it.
At first, after it happened – I thought it was *in my Larry David voice* me. It took me a long while to realize it was actually, instead – maybe more them. And not so much – the “company”, but the people, the “personalities” – not only those that ultimately made the decision, but it probably also had a lot to do with a handful of little, specific, identifiable interactions along the way.
So, I thought long and hard before I put down, and later revised, the words I have HERE.
I guess I wasn’t the perfect fit.
When You Commit to an Employer, You are Often Committing to a Cause & To a Very Specific Way of Doing Very Specific Things
I’m not going to say I haven’t done anything since I’ve been out of work. My commitment to quickly learning new skills is real. I’ve had to.
Over the previous 8 years, I worked for two different SaaS companies. I was committed to their respective missions, and to performing specific sets of QA tasks using specific tools and techniques. Some dictated by the industries I was in. Some I’m also quickly finding are/were unfortunately – way too proprietary, becoming out-of-date OR otherwise, are just not now valuable.
One commenter on that QA Jobs Post from above asked simply – “How are you keeping it together?”
It’s not like I haven’t done anything – I was paid to DJ a wedding, we went to Mexico, and we helped my brother-in-law finish a flip. I did a couple plaster/drywall repair jobs, visited Virginia Beach for the first time as an adult, helped my mom put down her dog, was rude to her more than once, fought with my wife loudly, reupped my Scrum Master certification, played with, read about, came to embrace – AI, AI, AI, and I have taken a lot of online courses.
Just this minute – these following videos are open between the 100 or so tabs of reading I have up: Advanced Cypress Testing, UX Foundations: Content Strategy, Business Writing Principles, PHP Essential Training, JavaScript Essential Training, Taking Exceptional Meeting Notes, Learning Data Governance, Advanced Cypress Testing (Filip Hric), Introduction to Playwright, NUnit, Exploring Service APIs through Test Automation, Java Programming (Best Java course I have ever taken) & UX Writing. Some are refreshers and some I am learning brand new.
Marrying the Single Socks – NOT
I mean – I’m soon to be in my 6th month of unemployment. I won’t lie – it’s brutal. And the load of topics I could have covered in this post were mountainous. Kinda like our pile of single socks. :~)
“Unexpected” Job Loss – is really what we are talking about here. And when you are 100% remote – you don’t see the shuffling about the office. It’s hard to read between the lines, let alone to see the writing on the literal and/or figurative wall.
With unexpected job loss comes, at least for me – loss of will, desire, and ability to do anything else other than sit at a computer often 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week – doing something related to job hunting.
When Do You Add It as a Job Break?
If you see this post on LinkedIn maybe give me your thoughts about whether I should add “this state”, my current state, as a “Job Break.” You know – to my LinkedIn Work Experience.
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That’s it – I really want to try to get back with writing on the regular. I know I have to move this site to a Block Theme, but I’ll try to make a point of posting once a month even after I start a new Job. Assuming I get one.
Thanks for your support. You can find my resume here on this site and my portfolio here. Thanks for reading.
~jb bartkowiak, Quality Engineer | Content Engineer