Employment Blues
Many people in Ottawa are in economic crisis but because they live in a government town, our City Council, led by Mayor Larry O'Brien, can afford to ignore them. Government employees are only vaguely aware of the lives of non-government employees, not because they don't care about other people, but because they are so insulated from economic insecurity themselves that they don't really give it much thought.
What's unconscionable is that politicians seem to be just as vaguely aware of what's going on here with a public transit strike heading into its third month on top of a global recession. People who, three months ago couldn't afford to take a sick day, have now lost their jobs.
The big employer here, the federal government, can't help them. It's a human resources mess with gaps everywhere but the hiring process is so byzantine that getting a job in the civil service is like winning the lottery. It happens. It's just not going to happen to you.
If you didn't know the civil service couldn't possibly have been designed to deliberately keep Canadians not already employed in it from gaining entry, you'd think it most certainly had been. Unless you're a recent graduate from a university co-op program. Then you can move right into a management position and pretend to deal with the personnel issues of staff the age of your parents while you search in vain for an administrative assistant to handle everything else.
The devotion to second language testing continues unabated, of course, with competitions held and re-held seeking bilingual candidates for designated bilingual positions that sit unfilled because there are no successful bilingual candidates to fill them. Meanwhile, unilingual English positions, the holy grail of positions for Anglophones, are filled so quickly they don't even need to be posted.
(Here's a tip when you see an English Essential position advertised as vacant - it isn't. But sure, write the exams, do the interviews, get in the pool. Just don't expect to get a job for your efforts.)
Ah, whatever. I've got the January blues bad enough to realize that the trade-off for a lifetime of employment security is most likely your soul, from what I've seen, so perhaps poverty is a better investment. At any rate, I'm as employed as I want to be I decided last night, sometime around 3:00 a.m., as I lay fretting in bed. Still, I imagine it'll go against my Scottish Presbyterian grain not to be trying, at least, to get one of those elusive positions one imagines exists in those huge government complexes that populate the otherwise unemployed downtown.
Ironically, just when I came to the conclusion that it was time to stop trying so hard, I realized what I'd like to do as I turn 50 is learn French. So if anybody has any immersion ideas that won't have me living in a cardboard box in the road in my old age, I'm all ears. But as I posted earlier in the New Year, I pulled the Burning House card in a Tarot Reading on New Year's Eve, and as Yesmenia said, "You can't stay in a burning house. You have to jump."
I'm starting to think Ottawa might be the burning house.
