She needs a job. She’s one of the 4.3 percent of people unemployed.
The economy’s in great shape. It should be easy, right?
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Jessica Contrera.
On the morning she would try to change her circumstances, Donna Maria Osborne did everything she thought she was supposed to.
She woke up early, lifting herself off her sister’s couch.
She said her prayers, making sure to say “thank you” before asking, again, for what she wanted most.
She dressed in a black suit, paid $2 to ride the bus and arrived at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center at 8:30 a.m in Washington, D.C.
The job fair started at 10.
The 4.3 percent
By the numbers, it’s a good time to be a job seeker in America. And now, a few hundred of them — black, white and Hispanic; young, old and middle-aged — were lining up behind Osborne, each person hoping that this would be the day when they would no longer be among the 4.3 percent of people in the country who counted as unemployed. She waved to one of them, motioning for him to come cut in line beside her.
“Same old, same old,” her friend Durward Jones said.
“You never know,” Osborne said.
“You never know,” Jones agreed. “Something good might happen.”
At the job fair
But if she were honest with herself, she would settle for just something. For two years she had been patching together work from temporary job placement agencies, never earning the $13,000 a year she had when she worked for her church — her last steady job — and not coming close to the $42,000 a year she once made as an administrative assistant. She had no debt, and only herself to support. Still, she couldn’t afford her $600-a-month room in a group house anymore.
But at the moment, her finances amounted to a bus card loaded for the week and $2.50 in change. And that’s why she showed up too early, and accepted a secondhand suit from the associate pastor at Trinity AME Zion Church, and prepared a stack of 20 résumés touting her trustworthiness, initiative and all the volunteer work she’d been doing to remind herself that she still had something to offer.
She and Jones rode an escalator down into the large hall where 113 booths were set up, 113 potential somethings good.
At the booth for the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority, she introduced herself.
“Do you know if they have any open customer service positions?” she asked.
“They do,” the representative answered. “It’s a call center type of environment.”
“Right,” Osborne said, nodding to show her enthusiasm and picking up a flier.
“They are looking for a background in call centers,” the representative said. “Billing, and so forth. So if you worked in a doctor’s office or something like that, that’s customer service, but it wouldn’t be on the scale of this call center environment.”
“Oh,” Osborne said. “Okay, thank you.”
She stopped at a hotel management company, whose representatives told her she’d need to apply online. She thanked them and took a free pen with their logo branded on it. Next, the Library of Congress. Apply online, she was told. The same at Two Roads Hospitality.
How many hours had she already spent hunched over her laptop submitting applications? She had purchased it four years ago, when she was working full-time. She envisioned herself back at it the next morning, entering her information over and over again. Or maybe she would start tonight after she stopped at the assisted-living community on 14th Street to check on her 85-year-old mother.
The waiting game
Booth by booth, she looked for her shot at something good. What she got was a water bottle, five hand sanitizers, a towel, two lip balms and six pens, all branded with the names of employers she did not work for — yet. She had 16 fliers listing websites where she could apply.
After nearly two hours, she headed up the escalator with Jones. Her mouth was dry from smiling and asking questions and saying “Okay, thank you.” She dug in her bag for the water bottle, searching beneath the stack of résumés that was nearly as thick as when she arrived.
“This year was more positive,” Jones said.
“This year was good,” she said. She headed out to the bus, paid the fare, and made her way back to her sister’s couch.
