Jason

When I first contacted Jason, he was hesitant to participate and didn’t think he was the “best candidate” for the project or that his experience was “indicative of the zeitgeist.” But as someone who spent six years in the Navy and then started working with a major defense contractor after his tour, I think he represents a very important part of his generation. Jason finished his bachelor’s degree while advancing quickly through the ranks of his civilian job. Currently, he is pursuing an MBA, penning his second novel, and in his ever-diminishing spare time, teaching his daughter how to read.

It's so hard when you come from a background without money to go to school. Or at least that's the perception of a lot of people. You know, I didn't know anything about financial aid. I didn't know how it worked. I didn't even think it was a possibility to go to college. College never really seemed like something I was gonna be able to do.

I joined about 9 months before 9-11, which I think, I really think that a lot of our problems stem from there and from our nation's reaction to those events. But when I joined it was all these kids, Gen Y, the tail of the Gen X, who were essentially saying, "I cannot go to college unless I do something and join the military." And a lot of people were joining at the time. And then 9-11 came. We weren't the ones that joined because of patriotic reasons or whatever, we didn't want to go to war, we wanted college. We wanted school. It was about going to school and bettering yourself. There seemed to be no other way for a lot of people living in rural communities and inner cities.

First and foremost, obviously, was always school, but travel was always a big incentive too. And the fact that I essentially burned a lot of the other bridges that I may have had. He laughs. You get out of high school with bad grades in what I considered a bad economy, without family with means, you don't have a lot of options. And the military was that option. I got to see the world, I got to work in a job that was just completely mind-blowing to someone without any higher education. I ended up taking, what, 70 credits with me from all of my military schools and not all of them got applied towards my degree, but I got a 4.0 on my degree. And then I finished out my degree at an online college, a state college that's based out of Connecticut. They work with military people coming out. And right now I'm enrolled in grad school.

I ask what made him decide to pursue further education.

I read incessantly. I read nonstop. I don't ever want to stop. I want to pursue more education even beyond my masters of business that I'm working on. I want my kids to have the life that I didn't have growing up. I don't want them to have to join the military. I don't want them to have to go through a lot of the things that I did. I didn't have a very good life before the military. I had some very strong people in my family, very good people in my family, good role models, but I was in a bad place before I joined the military. And I gained a lot from it, but I don't want my kids to have to go through any of that.

I think I had kind of a unique educational experience. I'm this 32 year old guy and there's all of these kids, like 23 year olds, with masters degrees, because their parents had a lot more means than mine did. While I was essentially sitting in a crammed little boat in the middle of Asia, getting screamed at every day by officers. I had two years of technical school in the military. Twelve hours a day in front of a desk, learning electronics. I mean, it literally was a terror but it also made me fall in love with the career roles of electronics. They're essentially puzzles, right? And a big electronic system, most people have no idea what it is. It's like the military, unless you've been there, you have no idea.

It's like—I'm not sure if you're familiar with the writing of Robert Heinlein. He wrote Starship Troopers and quite a few other novels, but he had an idea in a lot of his science fiction that they weren't really citizens—it was kinda like the Romans, you didn't really get your citizenship unless you joined the military. And it's almost like that today. You know, if your family doesn't have means, that's pretty much the only way that you can finance a future. Otherwise, you're kind of a prole, right? You're kind of delegated to the working class. I've seen too much of that. I know too many people with too much potential who essentially work factory jobs for their whole lives because they didn't have a lot of opportunity for education. I came from a very, very, small town where everything was manufacturing. That was the expectation from the time you were a little kid was that you would be working in a factory. And I could never see myself fulfilling that role.

I've come a long way. A lot further than I probably thought I would. I worked every single kind of menial labor before I joined the military.

I don't know anybody else that has a stable job. He laughs. And I have a fantastic job and a fantastic company and I'm moving up and I don't know anybody else that's in that sort of situation. I'm in a kind of unique position, my company is defense, right? He laughs. So, we're doing well because of the war. But, technology is changing, the way we wage war is changing. The stuff we're doing now saves soldiers' lives by having unmanned planes in the sky, satellite feed the soldier can look at in their hand—that kind of technology, the kind of position my company is in, is very good. So, as defense goes up and a lot of the rest of the economy goes down, my position and my company have actually been doing rather well.

I do all of the test engineering and the tests for communications systems. When I was in the military that consisted of radios, radars, computer systems, now we test the communications systems that go on the unmanned planes, ground stations, all that stuff. Before I was a technician that was actually running the tests, now I'm an engineer that designs the tests.

I [also] sit in on interviews. And we see so many resumes. I've never seen a job market like this. It's really insane. We're inundated with so many resumes. And, you know what, with all of these people who have been working 20, 30 years in the technical profession, it's really, really hard to hire someone that's fresh out of school. They've got almost no chance. Just because everybody else is downsizing so much. People are coming looking for technician jobs that, just for an example, may have been designing microprocessors through the 80s, through the big tech boom. And if you're fresh out of college, with no experience, how do you compete with that? I was lucky. Before the economy collapsed on everybody I got my job. Defense contractors still hire military, because it's a unique experience you can't really get in college. That's pretty much how it is. If I saw two people, one with military experience who'd actually been doing the job for a number of years and somebody with just a college degree, I would probably hire the military person in a heartbeat. Because the market is flooded with so much experience right now. If you just have a degree there's...you're really not competitive right now.

Joining the military, every step of the way I tried to do what was right and every step of the way things kind of worked out for me. And most of the people in the military, the friends I made there, didn't end up doing nearly as well. And most of the people I went to school with didn't end up doing nearly as well.

People starting careers now, don’t get pensions anymore. I started in 2007 at my company after I got out of the military and I was right after the pensions. And I even think they were starting to feel the downturn in the economy then. I mean we hadn't had the big housing crisis yet, but—I mean the economy was really weird at the time and a lot of people didn't know why. It seemed strange and shaky to me. Because that was right when everybody cancelled their pensions, some of the stocks were all over the map. So I've taken a lot of hits, but everyone I know has taken bigger hits than I have to their retirement. But I'm so early in my career I don't think that the impact is as big as it would've been, like some—my parents. You know, I've got a lot of relatives that they can't retire now. They would've retired a year or two ago.

My company hasn't had layoffs in probably 20 or 30 years. That's probably a pretty good indicator. We're kind of in a niche market without too many, without any real competitors. And we're in a field that's growing. That again is kind of a unique situation. I don't know anybody else. I mean even in defense, people at Boeing are you know, taking pay cuts every year nowadays. Nobody else is getting raises. Nobody else except for my company is giving raises. But we're getting to the point where we're kind of scared were not going to get one this year.

Kaila

With her easy manner, wide grin, sprinkling of freckles and closely cropped hair, Kaila looks strikingly like Huck Finn—if Huck Finn had a faint Canadian accent. Kaila graduated with a B.A. in Spring 2009 after receiving multiple awards for her scholarship and academic work in anthropology. When I met her we sat in a room full of boxes—she was in the middle of moving from San Francisco to Berkeley, seeking lower rent. Kaila has worked for a shoe shine and repair business in San Francisco for over six years.

WARNING: SOME EXPLICIT LANGUAGE

I felt like I needed a break from all intellectual pursuits after [college]. I was like, "Ok, fuck it, I'm shining shoes now.” I work for a company that my friend started in downtown San Francisco. We made it through the whole economic downturn pretty well. Shoe repair is a good—people want to get their shoes repaired more in a bad economic climate, right? Because they want to take care of the stuff they've got, rather than buy new shoes.

I'm the repair manager at the stand. I let the repair guy, who is off site, know which shoes need to come back that day, you know which are really time sensitive or whatever. And then, start busting out shining the shoes that have been repaired. Processing them. I work at the shoe shine stand that's sort of the hub, so all the repairs come back to that stand and then we have multiple stands and they go out to the stands. So that's what I do all day, is shine the shoes that need to be--the repair shines that need to be shined and then take them out to the other stands. And in between I'm shining shoes, dealing with customers, ringing up shines. Ringing up repairs, etc, etc. Up until I think it was about January 2010. And then I got bored with that. I was like, "Ok, I want some more stimulation for my brain."

So I immediately went to M--- A---, who is the archaeology professor at [my college]—he has become a good friend of mine. And I said, what do I do, how do I go about getting a job, here's my resume, look at this. So, he looked over my resume, corrected it a little bit, got me some contacts I talked to. I interviewed with this girl that he knew in CRM, Cultural Resource Management, and then sent my resume out to a bunch of CRM firms. Cultural Resource Management. It's corporate archaeology. In California, before you build you have to make sure there isn't cultural remains underneath a building site. You need to go in and have contract archaeologists check it out. And make sure there's not stuff there. And if there's stuff there—which, there's always stuff there because people have been walking around in California for a lot of years and you know, leaving their cultural deposits behind. She laughs. Then, you know, you have to deal with that stuff there.

To make more contacts I went to Riverside, which is, they had their archaeological convention there, the Society for California Archaeology. So I went there and I met some people, made some contacts, M---introduced me to a bunch of people, but nothing really came of that. I mean—well, some things. Like job leads came of that. But, nothing, really. I got some bites, but I got no fish basically. She laughs. I was bringin' it to a certain extent and I got the contacts, but oftentimes I didn't follow-up on it. I was like, if this happens, if this is meant to happen, it's gonna happen, but I wasn't really, really, really, hardcore pursuing getting archaeological work. So I got nothin'. I mean...I put some work into it. And so, I was frustrated that no prospects came of it. Archaeological fieldwork pays about the same as shining shoes—if I'd done fieldwork I would've done it just for the enjoyment of it.

The firms were not hiring as much...new people. They always, CRM firms always have a tendency to want to hire people that have already worked for them, but I think, you know, more so, with the economy being bad. A few of the places that I applied for jobs at and a few of the people that I had talked to had said that they're going to go with the people that they have. Because basically they want good solid workers that they know know the job, they don't want to lose money on training new people.

A lot my job contacts who couldn't offer me jobs, said,”Go to grad school. Get your MA.” I've had the plan to maybe go to grad school and learn—there's two ways you can learn how to be an archaeologist, you can go through grad school, get your MA, and a CRM firm will most likely hire you. I could go that route or I could go the route of getting field work. I kinda like the idea of that, because it's more blue collar, you get your experience in the field.

There's definitely hesitation about going to grad school. It's a commitment. I'm not, I don't feel fully ready. Which is why I've been hesitant about it. Which is also why I wanted to get some fieldwork experience.

And actually I love my job. I love shining shoes. I'm working with all my friends. I'm a recovered alcoholic as you know and everybody that I work with is a recovered alcoholic and it’s a totally fun job. It's a really fun gig. That's part of it. Leaving that, leaving what I know and love for something that's unknown, that potentially might not make as much money or is a little bit iffy, I don't necessarily want to do that.

Fieldwork is, it's temporary, it's sporadic. She laughs. The great thing about the shoe shine job is that it's somewhat flexible. So I could leave, go do some fieldwork for a month or a couple of months and come back potentially. But, maybe not. Maybe they hire more people...I mean, I'm pretty solid there, I know the job really well and most likely I'd be able to come back. But I might not get as many hours when I come back, something like that. So, that—that's iffy.

I didn't expect to be shining shoes for this long after I graduated, but I didn't really have—I didn't have a really clear idea of what it was going to be like after I graduated. I think if the economy was better, it would've been easier to find field work and with the amount of effort I did put into it, I would've been able to find a job no problem. I actually did find—M--- offered me a job, he said he could get me this particular job, but it was in L.A. and it was labwork. She laughs. Which, if it had been fieldwork, I probably would've gone for it, but labwork is boring. And then, the economy plays into that too, because I didn't necessarily have the money to move down to L.A. to get the job. It costs money to move, in order to do the field work you have to be mobile, it costs money to get a plane ticket and stuff like that. And I don't have a car here, if I lived in L.A. and worked in L.A. I'd definitely have to have a car and have all of the expenses associated with that car. So I didn't want to do that. So, yeah, the economy's definitely affected me.

My sister actually just—she's in Canada so it's a little different climate. But she just graduated, she just got her Phd in English and she had trouble getting a job right off the bat. She's brilliant, she got really good grades, did TA the whole time, so she's got all the job experience teaching and everything like that. She didn't have a job for months and months. She finally ended up getting some teaching work, but it's not what she wants. She got some community college work. Even a Phd isn't what it once was, you know?

I think if I was to stay at the shoe shine forever, I would be sad and restless about that. I want to get out and do something. I do want to use my degree at some point. The question is whether I can use it as a undergrad degree or whether I have to go to grad school to use it…I might have a bit of a positive outlook on the economy, I don't think it's going to stay this way forever.