The Unemployment Diaries

Coaches Corner 03.02.10

I find the only seat left in the place. People are buzzing like birds that spin around cartoon characters’ heads after they fall. I feel dizzy. It’s as if Harper just announced that once Parliment resumes, he’s proroguing caffeine from Ottawa. It’s noon at a downtown coffee shop and people, employed people, need their fix.

It’s strange to be outside my bubble, a circumference that includes my house, the closest coffee shop, and the closest bar. I forgot that driving ten minutes gets me to a city, as did one Toronto friend, who after I told this anecdote asked, wait, Ottawa has a downtown?!. Yes it does. And it’s full of busy people leading busy lives and stopping in busy coffee shops to oil their joints.

Laura Stone is one of those busy people. The  fellow King’s grad breezes in the joint after stepping off a treadmill and has half an hour to kill before heading to work across the street.

I had come from my parents’ attic, and had as much time to kill as I possibly could before I had to go to my mom’s friends basement and shred medical records.*

Luckily, the coffee shop is the great equalizer, and no one can tell you’re unemployed as long as you have a four-dollar something in front of you.

Lovely Laura at a park in Harlem

Laura sipped her latte, and me my tea, and we discussed none other than GETTING A JOB. Laura’s in the middle of a one-year internship at Canwest, a newswire service for Canadian papers. She chases stories from her desk: researching online, making phone calls, and hoping they get picked up. She likes the work, but says it can be disheartening when she writes a good story and the only other paper that runs it is some rag in Peterborough (who should know I would work for them, by the way).

She  graduated with an English degree before doing a two-year journalism Masters at Carelton University in Ottawa. Last summer, she interned at a Vancouver paper called The Province, and is a big proponent of going where the jobs are.

She was even considering taking a job at a small town paper in Bathurst New Brunswick before finding out she landed the Canwest gig.

Coincidentally, I recently received an e-mail from an editor at the Miramichi Leader, a small-town N.B. paper, asking if I’d like to talk about a news editor position. I had applied for a reporting job there weeks ago, and figured I’d lost out to some other job-hungry Ontarian or overqualified NB journalist laid off from a bigger paper.

News editing? Miramichi? Things were so much less complicated when I had no prospects…

But enough about me (Wait, this blog is about me. More on me later…). Laura has a job in her field and therefore qualifies to be featured on the Unemployment Diaries as an offical coach.

Here are her words of wisdom.

Thanks Laura!

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*That’s right, I’ve been keeping busy for the past two weeks  by shredding 10-year-old medical records for my mom’s doctor friend. I think I’ve cured a lot of diseases. Out of sight, out of mind? I’m not sure it qualifies as a job, considering I’m trying to work for a paper rather than destroy it but it pays the bills (which I don’t have because I live with my parents).