I’m not sure I’ve seen the equal of this ad during the 2012 election season:
Saw it appear over at Barron’s first, who has been there, and then at Instapundit. Having gone through it myself with just us, I can’t imagine how stressful it would be with kids to support.
Excellent, though the dud should have been better groomed. He could come off as a slacker. How do you get a job without doing a good job on grooming?
Sorry. I tend to focus on small details.
That’s a detail they got right. When you’re unemployed, and don’t have an interview, why bother with shaving? Who are you looking good for?
That’s exactly right. My dad normally had a beard and for the most part he always was well groomed, but that was after 16 years in the Navy and it was habit.
I know a lot of people they just don’t bother unless they have an interview.
I’ve seen it both as a kid and as an adult. Thankfully as an adult we didn’t have kids in tow at the time. For the most part it wouldn’t have been so bad, except we had a pile of student loans to kill for her degree.
Why bother shaving at all though?
I haven’t shaved or even trimmed in several years, and I’ve been gainfully employed the whole time.
Most people find that silence, or at least lack of talking, is REALLY unnerving. Cops will use it to interrogate people. They can’t help but try to fill the void with talk.
This ad really uses that silence well.
You can always shave and get psyched-up if you learn that you have an actual interview. But getting psyched is hard and stressful when you haven’t been able to get any work in over a year, or more – and not just can-collecting.
The longer your work-absence goes on, the less it’s do-able and more employers will ignore you. You become invisible and nowadays many big employers don’t/won’t even want to interview anybody who’s been damaged by long-term unemployment. And so you HAVE to lie on your resume and make up something, like say you’re a “Consultant” – which is a common disguise. I’ve been a “househusband” now for over eight years, nobody wants what I used to do… And it’s still not easy or fun.
Always the contrarion: If that ad is effective, it indicates we now live in a world where for most people unemployment is an abstract concept, with which they have no experience. I couldn’t begin to count the number of meals my family ate while my dad was unemployed, and none of them were as somber as that. It was just a situation in life to be dealt with — like by taking the next day off from school to go hunting or fishing for whatever would fill the pot.
Am I right in thinking this happened decades ago? My dad was unemployed for months at one point in the early 80s, and I remember it a lot like you say (without the hunting — if I had to guess, I’d say that my folks tried to avoid that because it would have reminded them too much of the Depression)
Most of my generation don’t work nearly as hard to keep up the wall of separation between their kids and adult issues, so the ad doesn’t strike me as exaggerated much if at all.
You’re right, it was decades ago — late ’50s and early ’60s, several times.
I’d say my parents were fairly used to unemployment, from the Depression, so the fairly mild situations that have prevailed ever since never intimidated them. Not that there wasn’t hardship, but hardship was just considered part of life. My dad had ridden the freight cars in his day, and they had lived in a squatter’s shack by the dump when they were first married.
I don’t know to what extent I was “insulated,” but I did figure out from a young age that if I was allowed to take a day off from school (other than “Opening Day”) to go hunting or fishing, it was because the larder was growing uncomfortably bare. But in those days it was nothing to get 2 – 3 pheasants a day in Bucks County, and a deer in our “free style” seasons. And in fact, that was why my folks had moved to the country, after their urban experience during the Depression.
It’s a great ad, if anyone sees it. But even if they do, whose fault is the unemployment? Unfortunately politicians who control the media have an easy time pissing on the peoples’ legs and telling them it’s raining, then selling them an umbrella at a steep markup. That’s more or less what Chavez just did in Venezuela. Americans have a better track record of seeing through that kind of thing, but most people who don’t pay attention to politics also still get their news from the MSM, which has never in history been so blatantly a tool of a sitting administration.
Speaking as someone who went thru a VERY stressful bout of funemployment earlier this year, yeah, it’s about right.
The closest I’ve come to real depression was when I was unemployed for an extended period of time and basically living on the charity of my friends and families. It’s not a lot of fun.
With kids to feed the idea of suck starting the old 870 sometimes isn’t far away. I hated thinking my kids could be going hungry soon.