Facing 60

I agree that the fact that some things are illegal doesn't mean that people don't do them. It's illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities (ADA) but I always have to be VERY careful about not letting on that I'm deaf in my applications... there's a definite pattern of not being called back at all if I do. I usually wait until we're scheduling an interview to let it slip. Even then people often try to weasel out of it in a variety of ways. (Note, I only apply for positions that I CAN do -- obviously if I'd apply for a telemarketing position they wouldn't have to seriously consider me.)

I'd recommend against leaving some dates on and some off. If you're leaving off dates, manipulate the format so that there's no room for dates at all. Having just one date, and no date for the others, is a red flag.

Cj -- Your first sentence is a restatement of my intention in beginning this thread.

I have been coping with what life has handed me by continually seeking work and working two or three jobs as I stated.

However, the fact that I am working and continuing to apply for work does not prevent bill collectors from seeking me out. This morning, I received two calls from bill collectors and the only bills that I have that are outstanding -- aside from my recent dental bill -- are the bills my former husband created on what I believe is called a tort, a verbal contract.

As for positive attitude, when I was writing my thesis, I envisioned myself walking the half mile to the commuter rail every morning, wearing a great outfit that I saw in the J. Jill catalog, carrying the smart brief case that I bought at Marshall's for $16 on my way to work as an editorial assistant.

A college friend once gave me a self-help book that she used to great success. The premise of the book was when people don't get what they want, it is because they really do not know what they want.

The author suggested that you take time, make lists of the traits of your desired object (whether a job, husband, home or vacation) and study these lists, arrange them and re-arrange them. Once you are happy with the list of traits, sit for 15 minutes each day, meditating on them and this will draw that thing to you.

I guess the current version of this advise is called The Secret.

Well, I think the problem with this sort of thing is that you engage in a bit of self-hypnosis and convince yourself that what appears before you is what you want.

Besides, I had a lot of positive thinking going for years, but, how can you remain positive one month from your 60th birthday, six weeks from the time you must sell your lousy home and two months from the end of the yoour job when there is no job in sight?

Are you thinking positive or are you delusional when you just know, like Little Orphan Annie that the sun will come up tomorrow and everything will be okay? Some folks say the present and the past are good indicators of the future.

Now, in Michigan, in my 20s, I never went more than two weeks without a job.

How desperate am I? I applied for a 1/3rd teaching post in the Berkshires! That's $10,000/annum without health insurance.

BBB -- I have been changing. When I completed my degree at 50, I aimed for publishing (supposedly, Harvard grads are in demand in the publishing business and I had been a working journalist) or university administration. I had a plan B which was working as a security guard at the Museum of Fine arts as several friends of mine did the same work at Detroit's Institute of Arts. Today, they want people with a security background. Grrr.

Teaching was something of a switch, although I did teach in the 70s. Hated it then as I found staying in one room all day was too much for me.

Frankly, just working as a receptionist would be a switch. Now, a friend with three years of college, who lived all over the US and then two years in Paris and learned to speak fluent French on the ground and who has 20 years+ secretarial experience was told that "older women can not work as receptionists as they lack the patience to deal with ringing phones."

Mama and CJane -- Glad you feel as I do about phone calls. I'd be annoyed. If I really want a job, I will email or send a nice handwritten letter on beautiful blue paper. Gee! Maybe the people receiving my letters hate the color blue!

I think phone calls are too intrusive. They would be fine after an interview.

POM, I can see that you've been dealt with a lot of lemons in life,
we all can, and having negative thoughts are understandable, but one can get consumed with the pitfalls in life and the unfairness of it. Really
it doesn't help a thing, and I am a firm believer that such prolonged feelings are counterproductive for your health, your psyche and your overall outlook into the future.

Life takes its course regardless if you're smiling or frowning, however,
a smile will get you farther than a frown.

It's a darn shame that someone with your educational background is
tied down to jobs that pay peanuts. Have you checked into tutoring?
A math or english tutor easily can generate $20/hour. If you advertise
at craigslist or your local schools, I am sure you could get some work,
and build slowly a clientele. How about getting away from teaching
all together and looking into something like publishing houses where experience is definitely preferred over age?

POM, when I read your posts I get somehow the feeling that you block
yourself just by feeding your negative outlook in life. Forget these
self-help books, read some good old Dale Carnegie, and try to manage
one positive thought per day, and gradually work your way up. It
will do you so much better, and not only that, people will start responding
differently towards you.

I once had a neighbor whose husband died in his 50s. She also was in her 50s, never worked a day in her life, had no college education, and
was always taken care of, first by her parents, then by her husband. When
he died, she was left out in the cold. First she felt sorry for herself, then
got angry and ultimately learned that only her personality will get her
ahead, and that's what happened. She was such a fun person to be
around, she always smiled, was upbeat and talkative. She joked, laughed and talked to the grocer, the dentist, the mailman, you name it, she
had a friendly exchange with everyone, and her personality got her a
job. Her dentist was so smitten by her friendly attitude that he offered
her a job as a receptionist. He didn't care that she can't type or do any
other office work, being friendly and caring to his patients was good
enough for him, and it did pay off. His patients loved her!
I doubt she every would have gotten ahead, if she remained in the
"poor-me-why-me" stage, feeling sorry for herself.

Sometimes a great personality is all you need.

I am well over 60, but my problem is not the expected senior moments, those are always merely humorous. It's my age-inappropriate junior moments that get me in trouble.

There is always the problem of zipping up but the real problem is un-zipping in the first place.

Ah the voice of experience.
My experience has taught me to zip up AFTER it's in.

You two are bad boys!! This thread is not about Viagra

plainoldme :
i don't know if this is of any help to you - since it comes from the "other"side of the border - but here goes anyway .

i retired at the ripe old age of 55 - was offered a good deal that i could not possibly pass up .
after some leisure time , a friend of mine , who had a small insurance agency , offered me a part-time job doing some simple book-keeping for him .
while i didn't need the money desparately , i was looking for something to simply help me adjust to a slower pace of life .
of course it was a step down from being a professsional accountant(similar to the american CPA) and being the company audit manager .
but i actually enjoyed life "in the slow lane" .
after a few months i was approached by the local community college who asked me to teach some evening courses for senior accounting students .
"no way , i have no idea how to teach !" , was my answer .
a department head assured me that it was not really "teaching" but more like working with the students to help them understand their course material , help in solving questions ...
as it turned out , i really enjoyed working with those students who were all holding down a job and attented college in the evening to prepare for the examinations of the professional accountants' association .
many years later , i am happy to see that most have been able to make a good career after finishing their studies .
after two years i was looking for something new .
i had read about canada's "business development bank" who made small loans to struggling small businesses and offered counselling help ; such as : setting up books , developing business plans etc .
so i applied and started working with struggling entrepeneurs , both young and old .
again , i found it a very satisfying experience ... so completely different from "corporate" life .

i should stress that all these jobs were part-time and each job alone would not have been able to support us .
i felt , however , that if necessary i would have been able to take on a variety of jobs for which i would have never thought i was qualified .

after having worked for the same company for almost 30 years , i was quite surprised at myself to realize that i was able to do other things and do them quite well .

i really don't know if this is of any help to you , plainoldme .
perhaps you might tell yourself that you are NOT plainoldme , but someone ready to take on new challenges !
perhaps you need to take a few small steps first , dip your toes in the water and see how it feels !

i certainly wish you all the best !
hbg

CalamiltyJane and Plainoldme, the only time I talk theologically is when I note that the best way to make God laugh is to tell him our plans.

Isn't that the truth! That's why I rarely make plans, life just happens.

There are some good stories here.

Hamburger -- Your story has a geographic element to it, I feel. Living in suburban Boston (where people want to stay after attending any of the colleges here), there is a glut of people with advanced and/or professional degrees, so the idea that a junior college would approach someone to teach is a little outre.

I have a story to tell everyone. I went back to school at 41 but it took nine years to finish my master's. I got divorced -- actually, I went back to school because my former husband was literally making me sick (rashes and severe digestion problems, both of which I treated, as people of a scientific bend do, as physical illnesses and not psychosomatic ones. When my mind finally admitted that it was having the problem and stopped trying to slough it off on my body -- I developed agoraphobia -- I knew I had to do something, so I enrolled in a class to give me a reason to leave the house that wasn't connected to taking the kids to school or buying food).

There is something healing -- I want to say about HArvard, and I have listened to many women 'witness' about how it changed their lives (one even wrote a novel, "The Women's Room") -- but, I think returning to school as an adult is healing, no matter where you go or what you study.

Anyway, I remember the first time another student (a woman close to my age) asked me if I wanted to have coffee after class. My former husband had told me that I was physically and mentally ugly and that no one wanted to be my friend. I was in awe. You want to have coffee with me, I almost asked her. It was the beginning. I started going to potlucks and lectures and volunteering at American Repertory Theatre with my new friends.

My former husband became more and more angry. The only friends you have are those people at Harvard, he screamed at me one day. No longer ridden with rashes and able to digest my food, I turned to him and said, "That's because its the only place I go without you."

Anyway, I had a terrific love affair with a post-doctoral fellow who was nine years my junior (6' 3"; with movie star looks and a brilliant intellect)as soon as my ex-husband and I separated.

When he returned to Canada, I cried my eyes out. Then, when I went to the reception for returning grad students the following September and spoke with two Deans, they were amazed at how resilient I was.

IT is hard to be resilient on $7,000/annum.

I wish I didn't have to take my former husband to court, which is causing the biggest part of worries right now. I am profoundly frightened of him.

However, when

plainoldme, you're right that there's a geographic element to hamburger's story - it matches up quite strongly with your location and story.

hamburger lives in a city which is quite similar to Boston in a number of ways - one of them being that it is a university town (one of Canada's oldest universities is there), with a number of academic institutions - and the grads never want to leave town.

Other portions of his story are very similar to yours. He completed his CPA equivalent as an adult - while I was in high school. We did our homework at the same time. He graduated the year I started university myself.

hamburger was quite active in his professional association and as a volunteer, so it wasn't really that surprising that he was approached by the college to teach, or by his former colleague to advise/work, or the Federal Business Development Bank to teach/mentor. He'd gone out, and perhaps deliberately, perhaps inadvertently, made a name for himself as a good go-to guy.

It doesn't work in the same way for everyone - but it is possible to make a go as a professional in a new field once you're freshly qualified as an adult.

I applied for several jobs today. That's not strange in and of itself because I continually apply for jobs. Some of these are wonderful, like working as a production assistant for Antiques Roadshow. It's a 10-week post and, basically, you get to travel to the six cities the Roadshow will go to this summer (no, I do not know which cities they are) for long weekends.

They talk about the job involving long hours on your feet and lifting (I'm not a very big woman, so this is a little daunting, but, for the time being, I ignored that part). Besides, as a mom I've done a great deal of lifting and I've worked in retail for years and years, so standing on my feet is nothing.

I wrote a note to accompany the resume about loving antiques and having worked at the Henry Ford Museum, which has a small but gorgeous collection of decorative arts.

This is nothing new: I do this sort of thing all the time. And I am genuinely interested in antiques. If I had some commercial property, I'd run an antique shop in part of it just for the fun of it.

The other job is exactly what I have wanted for years and years and exactly what the counselor told me almost 20 years ago when I took the Myer-Briggs and the JAckson Interest Inventory: that I should be working in an academic setting.

It's running the English department at Tufts University. Now, Tufts has its website set up so that your resume and cover letter form one document. A generic cover letter is just that: generic. So, I went to the website, found the name of the chairman of the English Department (most universities seem to hide the names of their chairs) and emailed him about how much I have been looking forward to doing this sort of work and how I wanted to be in an English department as I have a master's in English.

Now, you folks have assumed that I have a depressed demeanor. I've been sharing some of this stuff with a younger member of the English department here and when I told him about the posts today, he said that its a shame that the people filling the slots can't see my "infectious enthusiasm."

I've been thinking of the notion of a health insurance costing more for older workers than for younger workers. Considering that so many younger workers are heads of households, it doesn't seem likely that they would less expensive to insure.

Beth -- For many years, I carried on as though I could do anything, if I worked hard enough. My principal thinks I have a fantastic work ethic. But, working your fingers to the bone just doesn't always mean success, as you concluded in your paean to hamburger.

plainlodme wrote :



i certainly agree with you on that !
and i think ehbeth would agree that even though i worked hard to get my professional qualifications , we had plenty of family time . i never gave up my holydays , most summer weekends we spent at the beach or by the lake .
what served me well , i think , was to give up one night a month to attend
a meeting of the professional association . that's where i met people in an informal setting and was able to learn what was going on outside my daily job routine . eventually i volunteered to help organize meetings and became involved in running the organization at the local level . i made sure , however , that it never became "a second job" - it's easy to get sucked into a routine where you have little or no time left for family , friends and yourself .
i was fortunate that often i was able to take mrs h along if i had to go out of town on business or for the association .
that avoided what only too often seems to happen : the husband becomes so busy that he forgets that he is married - and that can be deadly .

i hope i don't sound like a "know-all" - because i certainly don't know much (probably nothing) about your personal situation .

personally , i have always been quite satisfied with the jobs i've had - but done my share of grousing !
there is a rule i've tried to live by - as much as possible - and ehbeth knows it very well .
it's what the sailors lived by in the days of the sailships :
"one hand for the ship , one hand for yourself ! "
the reasoning is that if you give "both hands" to the ship (your job or anything else) and loose your footing , you are likely going to fall overboard - and neither the ship nor yourself are going to gain by that .

i sure hope thinks will work out well for you !
and remember : ONE HAND BELONGS TO YOU ! .. or to put it diferently : while you want to do your job well and help others , you'll also have to take care of your own needs ; you don't want to loose your footing !
take care !
hbg

You don't insure the entire family, just the younger employee, and that
is definitely less expensive.

---

Somehow your last few posts are much more upbeat and optimistic
than the others were, POM. Keep it up, you sound very enthused.

But you do insure the entire family. The parents and the kids. That is expensive.

Now, I wrote yesterday about applying for a post at Tufts. Tufts wants folks to combine their cover letter and their resume into one document but I didn't do that. I wrote an email note to the chair of the English dept.
He forwarded it to the person who is doing the hiring through HR. She emailed me and told me this, then said that she read my resume and won't interview me.

I think without HR departments, people have a better chance of finding work.

Oh, other reasons for bitterness? Bush is in the WH and people are environmental spendthrifts. Its a shallow, reality tv world. All the critters are dying. That bothers me than my financial situation.

Besides, does anyone understand that I really have earned $7,000 a year?