Freezing in NH

I’ve just subscribed to the “other” local paper to get the Help Wanted ads.  There are a lot of ads, but nothing that interesting.  That’s not too surprising.  It’s expensive to live here, more so recently because of the rising cost of heating oil and gas.  Things are spread out and you have to have a car because the bus runs once an hour 8am-6pm M-F.  So it’s hard to find people who can afford to make only $8 or $10 an hour.

And of course there are ads for delivery drivers for the newspaper itself.  They are paid a flat fee to deliver the papers before a certain cutoff time.  My parents live a few towns over (same paper) and their delivery driver was warning them that he was going to quit soon…he was paid a flat rate of something like $640/week to deliver in his own vehicle, and his gasoline spending on the route was up to $400/week.

Lots of ads for servers/waitresses, part time line cooks, housekeeping, 3rd shift hotel desk, etc.  Things that require a certain amount of self-discipline yet pay very poorly.  There are a few higher paying ads that require a fair amount of education or experience, e.g. machine operators, mechanics, nurses, but not much in the way of professional ads.  Nor is there much for folks that require some supervision.  No grocery baggers, assembly line workers, etc, those jobs are all full.

Most of the professional stuff is either on the website of the specific company or word-of-mouth.  I guess it makes some sort of sense.  The companies want either motivated people who search them out, or people with personal recommendations.  But they might be missing a whole segment of the population. 

A recent Pew Research survey says that Americans feel like they’re stuck and not moving forward. 

Americans feel stuck in their tracks. A majority of survey respondents say that in the past five years, they either haven’t moved forward in life (25%) or have fallen backwards (31%). This is the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in nearly half a century of polling by the Pew Research Center and the Gallup organization.

I think the housing mess is contributing to this, as is recent inflation.  I suspect if you asked this question two years ago the answer would be different.  People view losses as such a negative thing, for example if your house was valued at 100K when you bought it, rose to 180K and then fell to 120K, you feel much worse than if your house started at 100K, went to 110K and then to 120K.  You end up at the same spot but it feels bad to have something and lose it. 

Personally I feel stuck, but that is due to choices I’ve made, not outside forces.  I chose to drop the hours I work, and stay with my job when my company was sold.  I’m not sure that dropping my hours was a bad thing, but the point of dropping them was to spend the time fixing up the house I bought, and I’m still not done doing that.  Staying with the company was not necessarily a bad choice at the beginning, but it became obvious a while ago that I should be leaving.  So right now I’m stagnant in job duties and wages.  Five years ago I was working full time and making more, though I was in a more expensive area, so net-worth wise I’m ahead now.  But there are changes I need to make, and I’ve been putting them off.   So today I’m getting back in the game, sending out resumes and such.  Hopefully I can find something more interesting than what I’m doing now.

Maybe CNN is trying to tell me something: Five reasons to find a new job.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while.  I enjoy some part of my job, but the folks I enjoy working with are all burning out and either leaving or becoming hard and jaded.  And the company I work for is having some financial issues and cutting back on things like 401(k) match and raises.  The writing’s on the wall, I just need to get up off my butt and do something about it.

So now I’m trolling sites for various tips.  I’ve just run across the frugal law student’s posts:
Make Your Resume Pop With These Resume Writing Tips
Make Yourself Stick With These First Impression Tips