Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich Page A

forty—designed to help retool executives "in transition." When I other people present, and there's no way for anyone to escape my call to inquire, I am asked about my salary expectations, and overtures. Paul, a deadly pale, thirtyish fellow, tells me that he is this time, in a surge of positive thinking, I say $100,000.
    still reeling from a conversation he had with his boss last week, who But that turns out to be half as much as what you need to get warned him of a coming wave of layoffs and that he, Paul, was into the Richmond confab; for pikers like me, there's another likely to be let go, if only because he is paid more than anyone else in meeting in Washington. The cost is a mere $35, plus the $150 I've the department. His title is impressive—director of business already spent to become an ExecuNet member and receive its development—and he must earn over $100,000 to be here. But monthly newsletter—a small price to pay, I guess, to network with success, in his case, has had a perverse effect.
    a superior class of people. I am advised to bring forty copies of I also approach Donald, who unnerves me by starting with, "I my resume and to dress in business clothes. But when I get to know I've seen you somewhere before!" Before he can recall that Washington, the latter instruction is overruled by the weather: given the previous sighting must have been on TV, someone speaks, his eyes slither warily from one of us to another, reminding intervenes to tease Donald about his "dumb pickup line." A laid-me of the Time Warner executives I once lunched with years off sales and marketing VP with a wife and three children to ago, who seemed poised at all times between arrogance and support, Donald confides that he's been through "some deference, nervously calculating which to project. A line from a very wild emotional mood swings. I've gotten defocused, kind Robert Lowell poem comes to mind: "a savage servility/slides by on of hiding from my reality." But he seems to have absorbed the grease."
    EST-like ideology of the job seekers' world, reporting, "Now
    "There are four ways to find a job," Ron is explaining: "net-I'm totally past any sort of victim mentality, which is so working, networking, networking, and networking." As for dysfunctional."
    posting your resume on job boards like Monster.com—don't When we are seated comfortably around the table, Ron, our bother, if only because you'll want to send a customized resume leader for the evening, introduces himself. He identifies him-for each job you apply for. I can only wonder what "customizing"
    self as a "serial entrepreneur" who has launched all sorts of involves and how much it borders on fraud. Tim, the sandy-small companies providing business services. The high point of haired man on my right, who has carried Ron's tight-collar theme to his career seems to have been the years he spent at the RNC
    what looks like a painful extreme, chimes in to testify that in thirty (Republican National Committee), though he assures us, "I years as a VP of HR, he never posted a job advertisement on a don't go around with a big R on my chest," perhaps on the off board. Donald observes that the boards are for "your fifty-K people chance that there might be a Democrat present. I don't hold that and below." Apparently, in the exalted circle I have entered here, against him, but if I had to "design," as Kimberly might put all jobs are attained through personal contacts.
    it, an RNC operative, Ron would be it. He has the bur-Continuing his introduction, Ron reveals that he does not actually nished skin of a man who can afford regular facials, and a collar work for ExecuNet, but for some other firm called McCarthy and so tight that his face puffs out alarmingly from the neck. As he Company, which is in possession of 300 high-level networking contacts. The purpose of this evening's program is to teach us Neal appears unmollified by this advice, which of course I how to make use of such contacts,