It's Super Fucking Hard To Find Work Right Now

So, in the past week I have applied for about 10 jobs. One was from a seemingly real person, but the job sounded so nice, I decided to call her and talk with her about it. I could only leave a voice message, and I have not heard back. The second job, which I think wanted a Design Engineering Manager (they posted Design Manager, and I met all the qualifications), sent me an automated rejection notice within 10 minutes. Stop. It's not funny. Lastly, someone on Intch wanted to hook me up on one of those weird task scams. If you don't know what that is, a task scam is a scheme where victims are recruited for fake remote jobs involving simple repetitive tasks, paid small real amounts to build trust, and then pressured into depositing their own money to complete increasingly expensive "special tasks". These are deposits victims never get back.

I was immediately put off by the kerning and when I shared the documentation with Anthropic's Claude, I was given the details about what the scam really was. But they also mentioned crypto, which isn't real, so just stop.

I have been in contact with Intch support several times over the 9 months while using the platform, and maybe it's just the way I use it, but I have had little success. I've tried it at different levels as an employee: entry, mid-level, management, and have never successfully received an offer from anyone I've connected to. But most of the Top 10 postings they give you each day don't seem to really be geared to me, and I have no idea whether to take that personally.

For instance, I purposefully don't put sales and marketing as something I'm interested in because the marketing I'm used to is what I did after college for (at the time) a Big 6 accounting firm. No cold calls. What most companies now mean by marketing is SEO, cold calls, warm calls, you're-on-your-own calls.

There's also a lot of pyramid scheme activity where Tadley wants to help improve my life by teaching me to be a life coach/travel engineer/executive concierge for a certain amount of money. I've never paid, but I have heard from Intch that these people aren't teaching anything but how to post a service on Intch that will get you money from other people. I've learned to report and block.

Then there are the jobs that are Lithuanian? I am not sure why I am shown such exotic jobs when my filter is "Fluent English" and "Basic Spanish".

I cancelled my membership with them this week, which is itself a scam, though not an expensive one if broken down month to month, but they don't allow that so it's $80 I will never see again, but good news, everyone! I can still use the site until June which will be a full year after joining their service.

I do think that if we were living back in the United States, I could find a job more easily, but then I would also have to give up the nearly free public insurance I receive here (slow as it might be). But I also suspect that I would end up working retail or doing CAD work for a very boring company. And honestly, I'm not supposed to be working. My psychologist and psychiatrist told me to file for disability way back in 2018, and I did. Someday I will write about that experience, but hopefully it will be after I've received benefits and have a more generous attitude toward the Social Security Administration.

The best job I've had in the last 14 years was working at Allen Edmonds as a shoe salesperson, and I'd gladly do that again, but I did that as a side gig working for, I mean really, the most boring company on the planet. I've smudged the dates of my resume to obliterate the job from my life, even though at the time, it was a lifeline.

But that was a long time ago. And now I'm stuck in this weird limbo where I am seeking remote work because I am only allowed to work in the United States, but remote doesn't actually mean remote, does it?

Remote means within 30 miles of an office. Remote means using your own computer the hiring company wants to bloat with their own spyware. Remote obviously means things I cannot do.

It's all very discouraging and makes my rejection sensitive dysphoria go haywire, but it's okay, people I know think it's funny.