Every day, Helen Williams counsels and consoles the hopeful and the helpless. She tells them not to give up; she never has. A job will come.
By KELLEY BENHAM
Published October 12, 2003
[Times photos: Kinfay Moroti]
Christina Varela, left, Ron Stout, center, and Charles Cunningham use the computers earlier this month to look for jobs at WorkNet Pinellas. “I didn’t want to retire, but they basically told me to either retire or get fired,” says Cunningham, 65, who was a purchasing agent for the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.
At the WorkNet Pinellas office in Clearwater, clerk Annie Liverzani, left, and customer service representative Helen Williams sort through job listings.
CLEARWATER - Sometimes they come as soon as they have cleaned out their desks. Sometimes they have to cry under the covers first. They come carrying last year's resume and last Sunday's classifieds.
Ron Stout got up at 5:30 and, for the first time in five years, had no job to go to. He put on a suit, because he feels good in a suit, and laced up his crocodile shoes.
Now he has found a seat next to Charles Cunningham, who rubs his hands and frets over his resume. He's 65 and has had five heart surgeries. He thinks he still has something to give. Just not anything physical, his doctor said.
Two chairs over, Christina Varela scrolls the job listings for housekeeper, cleaner, dispatcher. She has plenty of experience, but no diploma. Her back hurts so bad she can't pick up a basket of wet laundry, and she can't afford pain pills.
Bill Coffey is working the fax machine in the corner. He has been here every day, open to close, for two weeks. He keeps his contacts on an Excel spreadsheet and his whole life in file folders at his feet. He's got an MBA, two mortgages, a kid in private school. Made 308 contacts. Got eight callbacks. Hasn't eaten lunch in two years.
Kids climb on the waiting room chairs. A Seeing Eye dog cools his belly on the tile floor.
Helen Williams, who has worked here long enough not to be surprised, spies one of the regulars searching the computer for Latin girls in bikinis.
"These computers are for jobs," she tells him. He starts to yell.
"I already got a job!"
That's what he said the last five times she caught him.
"That's fine and good, sir," she says.
He goes out hollering and she goes on to the next client. There will be more than 200 of them today - frustrated, hopeful, raging, naive, sliding toward surrender.
She tells the next in line to type the kind of work he wants in the box on the screen.
"m-a-s-h-i-n-e o-p-e-r- . . ."
"Okay," she says quietly, "we got that spelled wrong."
And louder, to everyone else, she shouts: "Today is a good day!"
Hard to swallow
Ms. Williams hardly ever learns their names, but she remembers the faces and she knows the stories. Laid off. Downsized. Let go. Escorted out.
They come through her office at WorkNet Pinellas to file for unemployment, tweak their resumes, check job listings and get referrals. The five offices of WorkNet, Pinellas County's welfare and job-placement agency, are 52 percent busier than they were a year ago.
Sometimes hers is the first face they see. Sometimes she is the first person they can yell at, cry to, plead with.
If they're hungry, she digs some crackers out of her desk. If they scream, she takes as much as she can stand.
"I understand pride," she says.
A long time ago, she drifted through the same door, her world eroding and her ego damaged. Her daughter was 4. Her job was gone. She felt diminished and scared. She stayed three days before someone told her about an interview in the office.
In 28 years, she has worked her way up to supervisor and been knocked down again. She has learned that sometimes a job is a job, and sometimes it's something more. When you don't have one, it can seem like everything.
Sometimes she has to lower people's expectations, and sometimes she has to build them up.
"I tell them put pride on a slice of bread," she says, "and try to eat it."
My resume, with extra cheese
Inside the crowded training room, they learn that the odds are bleaker than they imagined.
They wear suits, overalls, dirty tennis shoes. They have tattoos and split ends. They take dutiful notes on the endless things that can keep them unemployed: twitching legs, tapping pens, slouching, babbling, rambling.
"How do you feel in an interview?" asks J.P. Quinton-Scott, the peppy motivational trainer. "Like lambs to the slaughter?"
Forget the classifieds, he tells them, as they hold the classifieds in their laps. In a lousy market like this, 95 percent of jobs are not advertised.
"Are these desperate times for jobs? Are you ready to do some desperate things?"
They scribble these down: Send a pizza with your resume. Send tea bags, send cookies. Offer to work for free at first. Hand out resumes on street corners. Wear sandwich boards.
"What do you have to lose?"
They nod. Stare at their laps. Stare at the ceiling.
"Anybody not get their last paycheck? Anybody think employers treat people like cattle? Any such thing as loyalty anymore? Anybody get laid off by voice mail? Get escorted off the property? Anybody think they're indispensable?"
They shake their heads. Not anymore.
Next
Here's a girl she hasn't seen before. Cute. College degree.
Meg Rogan says she gave up a $40,000 job as a graphic designer. Now she's a server at Crabby Bill's. Ms. Williams looks at her. Her eyebrows rise.
"Your parents happy with you?"
She went back to school to be a dog groomer, she says. "I wasn't into the corporate thing."
She found an opening in the computer for a pet stylist, pays $6.25-$7 an hour.
"Well," Ms. Williams says, handing her the contact information, "if you like fleas, I'm happy for you."
Next.
* * *
Kimberly Huett has a fistful of possibilities: construction laborer, forklift operator, landscape laborer, sign installer, asphalt raker.
"Asphalt raker?" Ms. Williams asks.
"I don't care what I do."
"You want to go where it's hot and sticky?"
"I'll go where the money is."
One job requires a Class D license. I'll get it, she says.
Another requires lifting 75 pounds unassisted. Okay, she says.
She has been out of work two weeks. She has cleaned the house. Rearranged the furniture.
"You can come to my house," Ms. Williams offers.
She shakes her head.
"Okay, well if you get burnt up out there, don't think about me, hear?"
Next.
* * * o
"I need help getting a job."
His face is so earnest. He's wearing a suit and holding a resume.
Karl Evans graduated from Eckerd College in May, he says, near the top of his class in computer science. He's working at Blockbuster.
"What's the minimum you're willing to work for?" she asks.
At the beginning of the summer he would have said $15 an hour. "But the summer has taught me I can't even get $10."
He tugs at his pants to hide his white socks. He couldn't find the black ones this morning.
He has found two job openings related to computers. One is to operate something called a "computerized cutter." It requires standing all day and lifting 60 pounds.
This is not what he had in mind when he picked his major.
"Is that a computer job?" he asks her.
Ms. Williams isn't sure. But the second job requires a year of experience, and he doesn't have that.
"Never mind," he says, and he shakes her hand.
Dressing for work
From the training room come the lessons of the peppy job trainer's second performance.
Again, the room is filled. Again, the message is a curious combination of enthusiasm and gloom.
What's the only constant thing in life? Change!
It wafts out over the room, where Christina Varela is still searching for a job that doesn't require a diploma. She hasn't worked since March.
Maybe she could take another telemarketing job, but she hates telemarketers. She hangs up on them when they call the house.
The bills are piling up. Her mom is sick. The roommates are moving out. She has a stepson to look after.
But she believes she will find something, because she's too stubborn not to.
"I'm so up to proving everyone wrong," she says. "Everyone believes I can't make it here on my own. I feel that I can."
Ms. Williams tells her, baby, everybody's going to want a high school diploma.
She tells them, if they will listen, how to look an interviewer in the eye. To tone down the makeup. To go easy on the cologne. More than anything, she tells them to keep their chin up.
She had to tell Ron Stout that more than once, when he spent five months here trying to find a finance job a few years ago. Thursday morning, he walked back in the door and asked for her by name.
The previous morning his secretary had told him people were losing their jobs. You're kidding, he said. Then the phone rang.
Pretty soon he was filling a box. He remembers tossing in his three-year plaque. It had a pretty nice frame, he thought. Maybe he could use it for something else.
He was escorted out. Put the box in the car. Drove away listening to young people music, the kind of music you can't mope to.
He was proud of the job he did. When payday came, he reminded himself, he didn't have to walk backward to pick up the check.
He's 56. Too old to start over, too young to retire. He pays child support for three daughters. He needs to work.
He didn't take a day off; he didn't sleep in. He put his best clothes on, and went looking for a face he knew.
Hanging on
Ms. Williams is one year and four months from retirement, and hanging on.
She has had this job for almost three decades, but it's hard to feel secure. She's at the whim of the economy like everybody else.
She started at $2.19 an hour and felt rescued. It was more than minimum wage then. She was so proud.
She worked all the way up from interviewing clerk through three other jobs to Office Supervisor II.
Then a few years ago came a reorganization. Then a downsizing. Then a choice: take a demotion or leave.
It crushed her. She knew she'd worked hard and done a good job. She knew she didn't deserve this.
But her mother had taught her to work, don't depend on the system, and she had taught her daughter the same thing. She thought about walking away, filing the unemployment papers, joining the job search.
She took the demotion.
"I'm thankful I have a job," she says.
All she has to do is look around. She has seen hard times before, but now it seems like the regulars linger longer. Faces she knew years ago have reappeared. The system is harder to navigate, with the computers and the keywords and the anonymity.
"I see the ravages every day," she says. "I look at people having lost their jobs and say man, but for the grace of God."
Some days, like anyone else, she'll get caught complaining about her job. But that almost never happens anymore. Because always, in a room so full of people, one of them will say to her: "Then give it to me."
