So Hard to Say Good-bye: The End of Unemployment

So Hard to Say Good-bye: The End of Unemployment
by Kati Cawley
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So, after months of living in my parents’ basement, I have finally secured a job in a reputable company doing reputable things. No longer will the days stretch before me, unfilled, and I will actually be sleeping at night instead of messing around my room until dawn because there was nothing else to do. That said, there are certain things I enjoyed about unemployment, and I will miss these things very much…

I will miss wasting hours in front of a computer screen, not staring at TPS reports, but The Sims. I will miss creating families that consist of my best friends and fake boyfriends who don’t know I exist. I will miss the thrill I got when I virtually made out with said fake boyfriends and when these boys ignored me in real life, I would stop feeding them in the game and they would die. What? It’s very satisfying, if not more than a little bit creepy. Whatever, if you had as much time on your hands as I did, you’d be doing the same thing.

I will miss Unsolved Mysteries on Lifetime Television. Everyday, from noon until two o’clock, I was riveted to the screen, trying to figure out what happened to murdered housewives in 1984, or just exactly what the chupacabra is. (In case you are wondering, a chupacabra is a mysterious animal in Puerto Rico that kills goats by sucking the blood out of them, and the people at Unsolved Mysteries were completely obsessed with it.) I should have known, however, when the program schedule switched and

I will miss getting food delivered at eleven-thirty in the morning from the same place every Tuesday. I would get up at eleven and wait with bated breath for the pizza shop in town to open a half-hour later. I always ordered the same thing, and I did it for so long that the woman who took my order remembered who I was and what I wanted (Greek salad with chicken and a regular Coke, sweetheart? Twenty minutes…). The delivery man became one of my closest friends during this dark time, and his leering stares and free Cokes will be genuinely missed.

I will miss staring longingly out the window at my mailman, who is very attractive, and trying to time it so that I would “accidentally” bump into him when he was dropping off my Star magazine or Netflix movies. He never asked me out, which was surprising given the fact that I always wore sweatpants and never brushed my hair.

I will miss going to bed at four in the morning because I had to watch five episodes of Who’s the Boss on DVD in my room after I was done watching Law and Order: SVU at midnight. I will also miss harassing my working friends during the day by calling them on their cell phones just to talk. But most of all, I will miss lying to boys I met in the bars about what I did for a living. At first, I was honest and told people I was unemployed, but soon realized this was not the best way to worm my way into the hearts of the masses. So I began concocting stories about what I did; everything from a ballerina to a teacher to an heiress. It never actually worked, but it was fun doing it! Now I’ll have to tell the truth about what I do: a full-time Private Investigator and a part-time lover.

I will not miss the interviews that I bombed when I fell down or threw up or bumped my head on the ladies’ room door. I will not miss wearing my ugly suit and putting on a fake smile and getting rejected, anyway. It was like going on a bunch of terrible first dates that didn’t end up going anywhere and you had to pay. It sucked. It was stressful not having any money. Of course, I never had any money when I was working, either, so that wasn’t too big of a change.

By the time you read this, I will be part of the daily grind once more, getting up at a decent hour and filling my day with something other than eating. I’ll be just like you again, and although you may think that’s rough, it’s really not. It’s good to be self-sufficient. It’s good to be able to buy coffee in the morning without stressing about it. But I look forward to new adventures, meeting new people, and finally moving out of my parents’ basement. Wish me luck!