Gigonomics: (Job) Fair Thee Well

One day I hope we’re all employed, noses happily pressed to various grindstones. Among the good things employment will bring, besides a steady paycheck and the restoration of self-esteem, is not having to attend any more job fairs. If there is a single force in the universe with the power to galvanize job-searching efforts, it is a job fair. And I don’t mean in the inspiring, Rosie the Riveter way. I mean in the screaming Edvard Munch get-me-out-of-here way.

It might have been just one of those days. But as I walked along Grand Avenue toward the Polk County Convention Complex in Des Moines, the world had a gauzy, surreal tint to the air, as if the buildings and the parked cars and the big steel sidewalk planters were cast onto a scrim from a rear-projection camera. I knew why, too. It was because, with all my heart and mind, I didn’t want to be here, making yet one more public confession about the sorry state of my predicament…