My Time Unemployed, This Time: Part 2. How the Rollercoaster Starts 
       (Going up)
       Friday Apr 18 12:28:11 2014
       So, you are home. There's a hastily thrown-together box of office 
       stuff in the trunk of your car that you left there because you don't 
       feel like getting it right now. It will wait. You already dismissed as 
       a little too TV-drama-y the idea of going to the nearest bar on the 
       way home and drinking yourself into oblivion, so pretty soon you are 
       going to have to start telling people you got laid off. You will start 
       with your significant other, and then things get a bit more 
       complicated. You obviously should tell your best friends, first 
       because they're your best friends, and second, they may be the most 
       motivated and potentially best-positioned to perhaps help you out. And 
       your siblings. And... Your. Parents. Yeesh. They are worried for you, 
       and they will tell you so, and spin all kinds of not-good scenarios 
       that you weren't really to the point of thinking about yet. You knew 
       they would do this, but even if you waited a couple days to tell them, 
       you didn't wait long enough. So that's around time you start to panic 
       a bit, as you realize it's true, and it happened again. You are 
       unemployed.
       
       So you register for unemployment. Because really, that's something 
       that you should do AS SOON AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN. Seriously. Why would 
       you wait? You don't deserve it? They've been taking it out of your 
       check all this time, just for this potential occurrence! So after the 
       first time you are unemployed, you definitely prioritize this. It's a 
       lot easier now that it's all a few clicks away, anyway.
       
       Also, you update your resume on the job websites. You will not be sure 
       later if this was or was not a good idea, but that's a topic of 
       another post.
       
       You now, quickly, have gotten yourself two sources of job leads: one, 
       the lower-volume, high quality stream of jobs that apparently is 
       always flowing around your circle of friends and coworkers, that 
       everyone is normally ignoring, but now that you need a job, people are 
       looking at for you; and the other, the firehose of contract jobs you 
       probably don't want, that all these agencies seem to be falling all 
       over themselves to jam you into.
       
       This is the first "up" part of the rollercoaster, with buddies giving 
       you leads and passing your resume to their various HR departments for 
       you, with the double incentive of helping you, their friend get a job, 
       and maybe pulling themselves a nice referral bonus(!). At the same 
       time, these contract agency recruiters keep calling you, telling you 
       how good your resume looks and how they have these contracts they want 
       to put you up for. From your initial despondence, you transition to 
       really starting to think *you won't even have enough time* to enjoy 
       these unemployment days off! Time to make a list of all the home tasks 
       and hobby things that you really, really want to get done in the next 
       few days, before you end up starting a new job!
       
       At this point, one of two things will happen. In the first scenario, 
       one of your friends' leads pans out, you get an in-person interview 
       and a job offer, and you really are back to work before you know 
       it--this really does happen, not even half the time, but it happens. 
       In the more-likely scenario two, you maybe get the in-person 
       interview--or don't--but you don't end up with that first quick job. 
       And after that initial rush of sending off resumes and chatting with 
       these contract recruiters (you don't even *want* a contract job!), 
       those end up feeling like black holes, because they may hound you for 
       your resume and right to represent you on this job, but then you hear 
       crickets from them.
       
       So this is then where the next phase starts, which is actually the 
        *real* part of finding a new job. The slog. This is the part of the 
       roller coaster ride where you wish you hadn't gotten on.