By Mary Seymour ’80

A little over a year ago, I took a leap of faith and left my comfortable position as an alumni magazine editor. I had no job lined up, but I had a few thousand dollars in savings and, thanks to profits from selling my home in Massachusetts, a mortgage-free house in Greensboro, North Carolina.

I’d dreamed of moving to a warmer climate for years; with my son in college and my fiftieth birthday looming, the time had finally come to leave behind New England’s bone-knocking winters. It was also time to leave the Pioneer Valley, where I’d lived since arriving at Smith in 1976. In thirty years, I’d moved only seven miles.

I felt bold, terrified, fully alive. Comfort and stagnation are only a few degrees apart, I’d discovered, and my life had become brackish.

“What will you do for work?” friends asked.

“I’ll work at Wal-Mart if I have to,” I told them, fervently hoping that day would never come. “Or Starbucks—they give health insurance to part-time employees.”

“But you don’t drink coffee,” one friend pointed out, “and the smell gives you a headache.”

Details. What mattered was my willingness to take a risk. Unfortunately, the rest of the country, after a decade of profligate risk-taking, was on an opposite track. Seemingly in the two days it took me to drive from Massachusetts to North Carolina, the US economy sprouted huge cracks in its foundation. Suddenly the news was all about bankruptcy, stock-market losses, bank closings, mortgage defaults, and plummeting real-estate values.

The adrenaline rush of moving and settling into a new city kept me buoyant despite the dire economic news. There were rooms to paint, stores to visit, unfamiliar streets to navigate. What a lark! I had several freelance writing assignments and an interview at a custom-publishing company.

“You’re just what we’re looking for,” the HR director told me. “We’ve signed with a new client, and we’re expected to roll out the first publication in February. We need to start hiring yesterday.”

Flush with the prospect of a salaried job, I bought curtains for every room in the house. Days and weeks rolled by without a word from HR, despite my follow-up queries. Finally I learned from an inside source that the company was laying off employees after losing two longstanding magazine contracts. The company’s downturn had a further twist: its CEO had invested millions with Bernie Madoff, Wall Street swindler extraordinaire.

And so began the slightly surreal experience of living the news rather than reading it. I began to understand—truly understand—that an oceanic recession was under way, and I, like millions of Americans, was flotsam in the receding tide.

By November, my savings account was thinning and my credit card was my crutch. The rate at which money went out—house repairs, car registration and insurance, utility bills—was alarming, especially given the lack of influx. I dropped my health insurance and started grinding my teeth at night.

Since my professional career seemed to be on hold—or worse, given the number of newspapers and magazines shutting down everywhere—I decided to take a less conventional path. I began applying for every oddball job that struck my fancy. Remember, it’s an adventure, I reminded myself. That’s what I wanted, right?

My initial pluck faded with the news that my fail-safes, Target and Starbucks, were laying off employees all around the country. Meanwhile, the Greensboro airport had no interest in me as a baggage handler, and my application to the temp pool at the local university gathered dust. I wished, a little too late, that I’d learned how to use Excel and PowerPoint.

After I filled out an application on the UPS Web site, the company democratically invited me to a group interview for seasonal package handlers. We assembled in a plastic-paneled HR room, where a tough young woman in acid-washed jeans lectured us. I was about 30 years older than most of my fellow would-be handlers; most were male and looked like weightlifters.

“If you get the job, you’ll probably quit within ten days. Your bodies will ache so bad you won’t be able to sleep. But, if you stick it out, you’ll get used to it, and you’ll be in the best shape of your life.”

She led us at a brisk pace to the loading plant, turning to shout, “Those of you who can’t keep up with me should go home now. Slow doesn’t cut it around here.”

Our tour took us through cavernous gray warehouses filled with grinding, shrieking machinery; past peephole views of hairy knees and tattooed shins; next to workers in solitary confinement tossing barbell-size packages onto an unrelenting conveyor belt. “You’d be crazy to work here,” a guy in a Metallica T-shirt shouted at us just before a manager headed in his direction.

The final stop in the tour was a security checkpoint. I walked through the metal detector, imagining I was entering a portal into an alternate world, a soft and welcoming place where jobs grew like toadstools and affordable health care was available to all.

After we gathered again in the HR room to complete our paperwork, I stared blindly at my application. Given my propensity to depression, I felt shaky about working in such bleak conditions, especially since the only slot available was the graveyard shift.

“I’m afraid I can’t work those hours—I’ve got a conflict,” I told the HR woman.

“No problem. Just give me your application; we’ll shred it.”

And with that, I was free to return to joblessness.

With Christmas approaching, seasonal retail jobs began to open up. I applied for sales associate at Macy’s and got a job in women’s ready-to-wear after a five-minute interview. Perhaps my years of retail experience in high school and college had landed me the gig. No, the HR guy told me. “If you have a pulse, we’ll hire you.”

I started the day after Thanksgiving, known in retail as Black Friday; I arrived exhausted from my own anxiety. I spent the day gathering staggering piles of clothes from fitting rooms, then wandering in fruitless circles, trying to put them in their rightful place. After eight hours, I went home more tired than I’d ever felt.

Despite the downsides— $7.50-an-hour pay, perpetually aching feet—I enjoyed helping customers. With frantic open-mindedness, I decided my future might lie in retail. I applied for a part-time position at Anthropologie, a boutique chain that specializes in boho-chic fashion and artsy home goods. I became one of twenty-five new associates, winnowed from an astounding 170 applicants, with a starting pay of $8.50 per hour. To prove my can-do attitude, I cheerfully steamed clothes, strapped a vacuum cleaner on my back, Swiffered the fitting rooms, and cleaned bathrooms. The funky atmosphere of the store, I soon discovered, masked a Third Reichian corporate policy, which included inspecting employees’ purses whenever we left the store. A surfeit of tiny blond managers ruled with despotic efficiency, chiding me for leaning against the cash register counter and hanging a dress improperly.

Within a few weeks, in the absence of professional status and positive feedback, my self-esteem was in shreds. I noted my own descent with clinical clarity, registering how quickly fifty years of accumulated skill and experience could turn into rubble. Still, I stayed on in the belief that an unpleasant job was better than no job.

Craigslist ads that had seemed beneath me began to look better. I applied for jobs as a housecleaner, receptionist, personal assistant. Most turned out to be scams. For comic relief, I turned to the personal ads, fascinated by people’s bizarre predilections. Then I came across a listing that made me think about a new career direction.

$eeking a cauca$ian female who would like to benefit from my company. Any relationship we have will be under your direction and at your convenience. Me: 46, professional, educated, hygienic, fit, non-smoking, financially secure. Yes, I’m married but enjoy the company of other women.

A job that didn’t require being on my feet sounded good compared to long days in retail. It went against every value I’d been raised with, but these were dire economic times. I wrote a brief reply expressing my curiosity and interest.

DJ and I exchanged a couple of e-mails, in which I learned that he was an engineer with a small consulting firm and had a daughter in middle school.

“Been happily married for 18+ years,” he wrote. “Seems contradictory to have a happy marriage and place a personals ad at the same time. I’m just asking you not to judge.”

My inner judge was willing to leave the courtroom—at least until DJ sent me a photograph of himself. There he was, a dark-eyed, salt-and-pepper-haired man with a drooping chin. A Christmas tree stood in the background, while a woman’s cropped head occupied the left corner.

“Seeing a bit of what I presume is your wife’s head in the photo makes me wonder if I’m ethically capable of this,” I wrote. He was most understanding in his reply, and the possibility of a liaison ended as quickly as it had begun. I was back to being broke, but with a clear conscience.

Being a prison guard had never been a career aspiration, but desperation made me an out-of-the-box thinker. I filled out an online application for detention-services officer for Guilford County, trying not to blink when I answered “yes” to questions such as:
1) Are you willing to use deadly force, if necessary, to protect a life (yours or others)?
2) Are you able and willing to identify a dead person’s body or watch an autopsy being done?
3) Are you willing to inspect unclothed prisoners including looking into openings, using proper protection with exposure to body fluids, wastes, and possible contact with sick, infected, or dead people?

I mailed my notarized application and received a phone call a week later. The sheriff’s office needed a certified copy of my criminal record (or lack thereof), available for $15 at the county courthouse. I drove downtown and circled a cluster of grim gray government buildings, looking for a parking place. As I circled, I tried to imagine myself closing prisoners into jail cells. I thought about how trapped I felt, my life limited by external circumstances and a burgeoning sense of powerlessness. I could never lock anyone in—not now or ever. I drove home and threw out my application.

Recently I had coffee with an editor who’d quit her job at a publishing company several months ago. She’d started her own marketing consulting firm, but so far the work was nonexistent. Everyone was cutting budgets and making do with what they had. She’d begun looking for jobs online.

“I got turned down for a lousy $10-an-hour job,” she told me. “I can’t believe I’m being rejected for jobs I don’t even want.”

During the course of lunch, she was alternately angry, anxious, and gloomy. Listening to her, I realized how far I’d traveled emotionally since I arrived in North Carolina. It occurred to me that, like terminal patients observed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, I’d passed through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, ultimately coming to acceptance.

I felt strangely peaceful as I listened to her roil in her anger phase. I knew that for both of us, certainty, security, and a large measure of self-confidence had gone out the window. What took their place, if we looked at it through an extremely rosy lens, were freedom, possibility, and an AP course in resiliency.

“I had no idea it would be this hard,” the former editor said.        

“Do you wish you hadn’t quit your job?”

She paused a long moment, swirling her coffee with a spoon. “No,” she said. “I felt like I was dying. I had to leave.”

I gave her a big fellow survivors’ hug when we said goodbye. “The right thing is just around the corner,” I said. “Believe in that and keep moving forward.”

I hurried out the door and headed to Macy’s for an eight-hour shift in the petites department, eager and anxious to find out what surprises the day—and all the days after—would bring.

Mary Seymour ’80 is a freelance writer in Greensboro, North Carolina. She works part-time at Anthropologie and Macy’s, shows her artwork at a local gallery, volunteers at a therapeutic riding center, and is taking coursework toward a master’s in counseling.