Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich Page B

should we be inspired to pay recognize from the Forty-Plus meeting: turn your job search into McCarthy for the right to pursue them.
    a job, and not just a freelance-type job. You have to structure it But any sense of having arrived at some place of comfortable hierarchically, complete with someone playing the role of boss, superiority evaporates with a comment from Neal, a fortyish preferably a paid coach like Ron. Thus the one great advantage of former media manager with an Australian accent and unruly unemployment—the freedom to do as you please, to get up when blond hair. Sounding like a thousand blues songs, he says, "I wake you want, wear what you want, and let your mind drift here and up and say, 'Oh God, another morning' . . . I have no focus."
    there—is foreclosed. Just when you finally have a chance to be fully Focus, I am beginning to realize, is a code word for an emotional autonomous and possibly creative, for a few months anyway, you rather than a cognitive state; to lose it is to be not just have to invent a little drama in which you are still toiling away for confused or distracted but seriously depressed. Patrick would the man. The arrangement brings to mind Erich Fromm's best-have come to life at Neal's admission of despair—digging seller of the fifties, Escape from Freedom, which was an attempt to into him to find the buried depression, challenging him to understand the appeal of fascism. What clearer sign of an confront, of course, Neal.
    aversion to freedom than actually paying someone to play the role of Ron, however, is impervious to desperation; the secret of focus, your boss?
    he says, is "to make the search process like going into the office, Ron opens the session up for questions, and Donald asks whether whether that means going to the library, to a friend's house, or he should mention a recent illness, which cost him three months to our [McCarthy's] office." Furthermore, you have to have of work, to prospective employers. Ron's advice: "Turn [the illness]
    someone to "keep you accountable," meaning a surrogate boss-into a sound bite that could be positive for you." Emboldened by figure. "We're used to having bosses, being responsive to Donald, I ask, "What if you've lost time due to homemaking and someone, so you've got to create the same dynamic."
    raising children?" Ron replies:

    The challenge is to be a beggar with a great story. If that story doesn't land desirable "interim jobs" they have found, which is "another reason you [get you a job], you've probably got a values mismatch. Turn it into a you've got to be the banana split." All this is delivered in a low-compelling story.
    key, noninvasive tone unlike that of any of my previous coaches—
    A beggar? Well, perhaps that does sum up the status of moth-just a casual sharing of information among equals. Here's an erhood in our society. I glance at the one other woman at the idea: Write to executives who are profiled in business publications table, whose resume describes her as having spent much of the and tell them what their company needs at this stage, which is, of last decade bringing the idea of "competition" to Latin Amer-course, you. Tell them how you're going to "add value" to their ica for some New York–based bank, but her eyes dart back firm. "Stand out. You've got to get into that banana split area."
    anxiously to Ron. I must be the only one here who didn't un-Maybe we are in the banana split area already, because derstand that homemaking is such an unusual experience as to sometimes things get too slippery even for Ron. On the subject of require an entertaining explanation. How would I begin my the "Five Achilles' Heels of a Career Search," one of which is "lack
    "compelling story"? I met this guy, see, and, uh .. .
    of focus," he launches into a meandering metaphor about being Ron goes on to the meat of the evening, though given his at a train station and deciding you might not want to get on the metaphors, the main course