Oh no you DIDN’T.

(For the purposes of this conversation, please use the universally-accepted “Jerry Springer pronunciation” of the above phrase.)

A little bit of a job hunt rant coming up, and I’ll warn you up front this one’s gonna end in a bit of a blue streak. Bit better than a brown streak though, innit?

I’ve been sending out job applications like they’re going to stop making jobs tomorrow. (Some day, looking at the listings, you’d swear that’s already happened.) I’ve been concentrating on IT-related stuff, but once every couple of weeks a multimedia-related gig pops up that looks really interesting. The good news is that I’m waiting to hear back on one of those early next week.

Saturday morning, while feeding a certain fussy boy whose name, beginning with E, will not be printed here to preserve his anonymity, I got a phone call. As usual with calls from a number I don’t recognize, I let it bounce off my voice mail and then checked the message that was left. Oddly enough for a Saturday morning, this was a call from someone wanting to verify my information with regards to a job listing I had answered. I called them back, answered a few very oddly cursory questions – yes, my name is Earl Green, I am presently alive, eligible for employment, and over the age of 18 by an embarrassingly wide margin – and was then asked if I had any plans to go back to school.

It started getting a little weird here. My answer, anytime anyone asks me that, is that it’d have to be precisely the right set of circumstances – I’d have to be able to afford it (preferably in scholarship form, if that’s even possible for someone with my more-spotted-than-the-average-leopard academic record, because I’m sure as hell not going to open a new loan in the current climate), it’d have to be done in such a way that it doesn’t interfere with work or with my family time.

Then the young lady started pitching online courses to me. I got more than a little bit incensed. I stepped out of the kitchen so that the aforementioned unidentified toddler wouldn’t learn any colorful new words from daddy today, and very politely but firmly asked the person on the other end of this conversation which employer she was representing.

Oddly enough, she had no answer. What, you mean to tell me that no one else, having realized that they’ve been had, has ever nailed the caller’s ass to the wall and demanded some honesty? Rather than answering my question, she went on a spiel about how getting a degree, even from an online university, would make me more marketable. That’s just dandy, honey, and it may well be true, but I’d like to have a job sometime before the next presidential election.

Again, I asked who she was representing; she countered that by telling me that becoming “difficult” during the interview (which was never stated to be an “interview” until that moment) wasn’t going to make me a good prospect.

At this point, I stopped believing, even for a moment, that there was a genuine job opportunity even remotely connected to this phone call. And at this point, I said so. “There’s not even really a job, is there?” I asked. “You’re just trying to sell something.”

Click. Whoa, wait, what? She just hung up on me. It’s not like I was cursing up a storm (though it was tempting…) or ranting and raving; I kept an even tone throughout the conversation, even when I was serving notice that I Just Don’t Believe One Goddamned Word That’s coming Out Of Your Mouth Anymore.

The hang-up really just reveals one thing: that I was probably right. And whoever was behind this thing, placing listings that lead to this kind of dead-end sales-pitch BS, can feel absolutely free to go to hell, preferably on the next dingy charter bus. It’s hard enough trying to find a decent job where I’m not going to hate myself for getting up in the morning and going to work, and the fact that something like half of the listings on any given online source are false leads doesn’t help.

I’m not one for “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” black-and-white thinking, but whoever was behind this? Here’s a hint: they sure as hell aren’t part of the solution.

I’ll let you work out the math for yourself from there.