Thread: a bad dream - "Over Forty and Looking For a Job"

Over Forty and Looking For a Job

In the post-industrial America of the not-too-distant future, a displaced American engineer drives into southwest South Carolina, to an enclave - an industrial park, if you will - of American industrial businesses in a remote location far from any town.

The all-wood construction of the industrial strip mall is haphazard, two stories, shallow, and for this business, only one or two rooms deep. The exterior facia is a lazy arc of 5° facing south-southwest, shielding offices from the afternoon sun. It goes on for hundreds and hundreds of yards, with dozens and dozens of industrial businesses. There is no pavement, only a little-used dirt road, and no vehicles are visible (where are they?). Behind the arc facia, on dirt floors, mechanics work on trucks and work vehicles in garages emplaced among the two-story offices. Everything is out of date; obviously nothing is manufactured here according to ISO 9000 specifications.

Toys and Small Electronics Company

There are no young people here; everyone is Anglo-Saxon and over forty, except a few electronics technicians in their thirties.

The hiring manager is bald, portly, wearing a medium-grey suit, a white shirt, and a solid grey tie. He sits at an old desk in an open room with several other desks, all of which appear to be from Salvage City. After the interview, he passes along the applying engineer to an engineering group in a nearby office.

While they are discussing small motors and repair strategies, the electrical power goes awry. The lights go bright and then go out. The office equipment malfunctions and quits. A multi-line phone glows brightly as the plastic begins to bubble. The applicant engineer offers that a 215v source has intruded into the 117v power circuit.

The hiring engineer and the applicant rush through the offices looking for the culprit. In an empty office, a 220v screw tap hangs below the heating and ventilating wall unit. Apparently, someone connected a 110v upright floor vacuum to the 220v screw tap with straight wires. The 220v power then fed back through the floor vacuum power cable into the 117v wall outlet.

The power is off, so the interview is over, and how does the interviewee find his way home? (And where do all these workers live anyway? And where are their cars?)

The hiring engineer volunteers an employee heading north to guide him to the parking lot at the interstate. She explains that she lives and works on weekends at a farm for the handicapped outside of Spartanburg. Following her along the meandering corridor and narrow wooden stairs, she disappears and reappears and finally disappears altogether. But a younger single mom, carrying a baby, is going the same direction. Eventually, they arrive at a portal in the arc, a dirt floor below bare wood construction. It looks like a barn, with people in place of horses and cattle.

Waiting at an exit, one of the guys jesting with the receptionist grabs her wig and yanks it off, exposing her thick, long hair, which is black on top, but shock white around the ears. This is a place for the no longer young who have no other place to go.

Finding his car, the applicant drives southeast along the arc to see what businesses are here. There is a big "NA-OK Tire Co." with a brick red facia, and a Coca-Cola distributor. This is a big industrial park, and the strip mall goes on and on.

At the end, the dirt road heads into brushland with groves of trees. A parrot screams in the brush - a parrot! - so this is a hot summer, even for southwest South Carolina. The road comes up to an embankment, which his car struggles to climb. Nearby, a four-wheeler is bounding up the embankment, as its driver shouts, "Climbing 3200 feet per minute!" That would be 73 miles per hour on a 30° grade. Hot stuff.

At the crest of the embankment, a stocky young woman stands guard at a locked gate across a dirt road heading down the hill into some trees. Several wide galvanized silos are visible above the trees. When asked what is in the silos, she says she doesn't know. Obviously they are storage tanks for hazardous industrial chemicals, or pesticides, perhaps.

[End of dream]

Not that I condone this type of behavior, due to lack of finding a job, yet it is becoming more prevelant among white males..could it be this man's job was stolen by an illegal. Pure speculation though throughly plausible and at his age it would prove difficult to find a job.

Highway Bandit leaves Trail of Bank Robberies:


http://www.keyt.com/news/local/9885412.html

Try finding work when your pushing 60!