40 Septembers

A strange thought occurred to me today as I headed home from an errand trip.

I know I have lamented on numerous occasions about my current jobless state, but this thought is a peculiar one, if not monumentally ...uh... trivial.

In the past 40 years, since I was 5 years old, I have never been "off" in September.

Kindergarten through senior year in high school things always started in the last days of August. In the fall after high school graduation, and after determining that I couldn't afford to go to school, I dug into my savings and started at a junior college in my home town. A year later I enrolled in my last fall semester before entering the Air Force.

Four years later I was home from military service, arriving in early November. After a few weeks I was working as a driver at a school bus company, as well as delivering for an Italian restaurant. The following September I was already in residence at Southern Illinois University, where I remained for another two and a half years, graduating mid-stream in December of 1990.

Despite the fact that it took me two years to find video production work, I did find a job not too long after graduation, again as a driver, but that time for a livery/limo service, carrying customers to and from O'Hare airport from the south suburbs. Then, in May of that year, I started as a security officer at a nuclear power plant.

Laid off a year and a half later, in January, I immediately found work at a TV station back in southern Illinois (I had applied down there amid rumors of the layoff, and interviewed immediately after I was cut loose).

In southern Illinois for two years from February that year until January of 1995, I moved down to south Georgia where I worked for four years at two different places. I did take a one week vacation in September of 1998, just a couple of months before I moved back home, but that doesn't count.

A week before Christmas, 1998, I made the move back to Chicago, where I was jobless for eight months until I got another video job at the same company — more or less — for whom I had worked in Georgia, but at a considerable cut in pay commensurate with the lower position I had accepted. That job started in August.

Little more than a year later I switched jobs again, in January of 2001, where I remained for the next eight years.

And now I'm experiencing my first September for as long as I can remember without something to do!

That may change soon, as another odd occurrence hits me as I write. My fall-back over my working years has seemed to be driving jobs. And once again, as the career prospects appear dim, I resort to the wheel. Barring any difficulties with licensing or my chosen company, I will most likely, within a week or so of this posting, begin driving a taxi cab for a living.

I sure hope there's no Louis DePalma to deal with....



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