After making Fred’s deposit, I had to choose between spending $30 on a new [bicycle] gear changer or paying my phone bill. The phone has to wait. The mechanic said he had never seen a chain and gear changer worn out from use as much as mine over so short a time. That’s a veiled compliment and more so because he has probably heard some wild claims about mileage before. This assembly wore out after 3,763 miles.I did a good turn today, a customer came in and had accidentally deleted his resume information off his email. I recovered all but the final copy and showed him the process of keeping such important files on his own computer. Turns out he was a professional chef for 27 years at the same place and they fired him as soon as business turned down. This is a recession, month after month of net job losses, and we don’t mean unskilled labor. It has been bad in this area for years and now the facts are biting deep.
The majority of job hunters we get are clerical, since a nation of unemployed people just does not require a huge secretarial pool. Another thing that makes the current economy worse than a mere recession is the loss of infrastructure. There is a name for this I once learned in economics. The situation where a skill suspended for too long is lost. So even when growth returns, it is sluggish because nobody can do the old job. For example, the US laid off all the people who could build large rockets after the Apollo program. Now it will cost infinite billions to retrain the people needed to build a Mars rocket. Or we just buy it from the Chinese. Using the Renminbis we borrowed from them.
