Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Over Qualified

I interviewed for a job with a lawyer who is in WALKING distance of my apartment (and distance was important to him).  I was willing to work for minimum wage and I don't need health care. He angrily looked at me and said "It gets pretty hectic can you handle that?"  I explained that in my 40 years of experience I have worked in manufacturing, wholesale, retail, service, engineering, medical and not-for-profit and I have experienced everything there is to experience and survived. He didn't hire me. No one hired me for 2 years and so I took age 62 early social security retirement before they decide to change that.  One personnel director (in an all black office in Harlem) said I would not be happy working there because as an older person I would have a GOOD work ethic whereas all the young employees are very chatty and have a poor work ethic.  The Craigslist add mentioned that a Masters in Social Work is a plus. She told me I am over-qualified. I said "How can I be over-qualified when I lack the masters degree?" She quickly said it was a typographical error. People tell me I am over-qualified and I say "who ISN'T over qualified after working 40 years?"  That organization in Harlem is HCZ, the Harlem Childrens Zone, founded by Geoffrey Canada.  She hesitated and said that they MIGHT hire me to go in the basement, take all the student records, design a spreadsheet and key them into the spreadsheet.  An hour after I got home I Googled and found a bunch of state and federal laws which say you cannot hire some guy off the street to throw together a spreadsheet. I said that Geoffrey Canada with all his media fame should approach Apple or Microsoft to fund a national standardized cloud application with encryption and backup to conform to state and federal laws for storage of the information of minor children. I never heard back. Oh well.

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