It’s an old story. You’re fresh out of school looking for work. Employers want someone with experience. You have no experience, therefore you have no job.
But you have to. But you don’t. But you can’t. An endless loop that eventually gets you to put your B.S. in subatomic physics from Caltech on the shelf and start experience saying “welcome to megamart.”
The other side of that rock goes like this: “You’re overqualified.” So you put your 25 years of experience at Big Burger on the shelf and get a job pushing broom at the Caltech physics building.
You can’t un-do “overqualified” any more than you can break the first-job loop.
Looking for a solution here? You won’t find it. But what you will find are adventures with yet another overused and devalued piece of word currency, experience.
Your shopping experience. Your customer service experience. Your volunteer experience. Your concert experience.
What?
Yes, it’s right there on the Velveeta box. “You could win … a concert experience.”
They probably mean you could win tickets to a concert. That would be nice as your printer keeps churning out those resumes.
What is a “concert experience?” Do they strap you into a concert simulator and play videos?
Then, there’s “Experience Washington dot com.” That’s a tourist site for the state, not the nation’s capital.
Just what is a “Washington experience?” Rain? Legal pot? Or just another tightly grouped Starbucks and its competitors. Couldn’t they just say “Come to Washington and thread the Space Needle” or something?
And not to pick on Washington, how about “Experience Grand Rapids?” Put that on your bucket experience list.
To bend the word a little more toward its original meaning, the AARP invites you to the Experience Corps.
This means once you break that no-experience-therefore-no-job loop, you can help others with their own fear-of-poverty experience.
Your correspondent is a graduate of the Antioch University School of Adult and Experiential Learning which has since changed its name several times. The acronym “SAEL” does not roll off the tongue easily and it’s not nearly complicated enough for Antioch.
But that name wasn’t exactly straight forward, either. It’s a school.
Soon we’ll be training our cats for a litterbox experience.
McDonald’s or a competitor will get the bright idea and advertise their dining experience.
Once we tire of the word, we’ll need a substitute. And waiting in the wings is “adventure.”
Let’s all forget about the concert experience and wait for a concert adventure.
Shrapnel:
--Rupert Murdoch says he wanted to play nice in taking over Time Warner which rejected his $80 billion offer. So he withdrew it, which isn’t his style. Wonder what his next move will be.
--The country’s largest newspaper publisher, Gannett, is taking a tip from Murdoch and separating itself into two companies, one for print and one for everything else. Another vote for the future of dead tree news. Oh, and they’re “restructuring” their newsrooms, which means firing people.
Grapeshot:
-News in papers may be old before the ink is dry but usually it’s more reliable and deeper reaching than any other medium.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
© WJR 2014
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