From the Washington Post
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Former Lawyer's Job Hopes Ride Ether of E-Mail
By David Finkel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 29, 2003; Page A01
First in a series of occasional articles
NEWARK, Ohio
Monday begins with good news, exactly the opposite of what Stuart Adkins has come to expect.
"Congratulations," the e-mail Adkins is reading starts off, and that first word alone is enough to flood him with an emotion he hasn't felt in nearly two years. Later, he will describe it. "Jubilation," he will say. But for now, he reads what comes next -- "on successfully advancing to Level 2 of the Trade Chief Assessment" -- and sits, just sits, overcome.
A 38-year-old single man, Adkins represents what in Washington is the political issue of what to do about the more than 9 million Americans who are either jobless or underemployed and an economy that has been described as "slow" and "adrift." In Newark, Ohio, though, Adkins is simply one of the sadder stories around.
Once a lawyer, he lost his job in June 2001 when his company downsized because of the worsening economy, and has seen his life collapse. He has exhausted his savings and retirement. He had to sell his house and the 40 acres he lived on and everything else he owned except a car, a bed, two chairs, a laptop computer and a TV. It took 18 months to find the part-time job he has now, which, to add to the sting, is at the local unemployment office helping people find jobs. He works in a cubicle that belongs to a woman on extended sick leave. The family pictures are hers. The decorations are hers. The bottle of water is his, and the day planner, and that's it. That's what two years have brought.
But now comes word that, for the first time in hundreds of attempts, Adkins has made it to the second round for a job, a permanent, full-time position with the state, and after reading the e-mail, he goes to tell his supervisor, Patty Ernest, who is so happy for him that she comes around from her desk and gives him a hug.
"Poor Stuart," she says after he has returned to his cubicle. "He's been through it, I'll tell you that much."
He rereads the e-mail. He takes in the word congratulations, and then reads the part telling him what he needs to do next.
"Part 2 is a written assignment," it says. "Please respond by 12:00 noon on Thursday."
'This Is Bad as It's Been'
The middle of America: That's where Stuart Adkins can be found, and why what has happened to him has a larger meaning as the economy continues to stagnate and the unemployment rate continues to rise. His is not the story of someone at the extremes of the American economy, such as Yuma, Ariz., where the unemployment rate is 21.8 percent. Adkins lives in a place where the local unemployment rate is 6 percent, in a state with a 6.1 percent unemployment rate, in a nation with a 6.1 percent unemployment rate. The middle, in other words, which is best seen not through statistics, but by coming here and looking around.
With a countywide population of 150,000, it is a place somewhere between big and small, defined neither by the poverty of southern Ohio Appalachia nor of northern Ohio's industrial rust. The county's Web page boasts that it is "the seventeenth largest and the seventeenth fastest growing county in Ohio." The workforce is blue-collar and white-collar. The downtown is dominated by a courthouse shaded by maple trees, and the main street through town has that most American of addresses, Main Street.
This is where Adkins works, at 144 W. Main Street, in a plain brick building that has been busier these past months than in years. The same has been true in other parts of Newark's social services net. The Salvation Army's emergency shelter has been running at 95 percent occupancy this year; three years ago, before the recession, it was at 73 percent. Meanwhile, at the Licking County administration building, more than 500 people hoping for housing assistance stood in line in early June for as long as five hours to get on a two-year waiting list. Meanwhile, the food pantry handed out 1,497 boxes of emergency rations in May, more than double the number handed out in pre-recession May 2000.
"This is bad as it's been," Ernest, who has been with the Ohio Department of Job & Family Services for 20 years, says as Thursday begins. She looks around at the people waiting for help, either with unemployment benefits or with job possibilities on which they need more information. "These are people affected by the politics. These are the statistics," she says of them. "This is the ground level. This is where you're actually seeing what it means when people say this is a slow economy."
As usual, the first car was in the parking lot before the doors were unlocked at 8 a.m. This day, it was a Ford Taurus wagon with no hubcaps and three kids in the back. At 7:55 the phones started in, and by the time Adkins reached his cubicle, the third one on the right, the one with the box of tissues for those who will need tissues, one line was holding and people were coming in the doors.
"Stuart speaking. May I help you?" Adkins says now to the caller who's been holding, a woman named Barbara who is looking for a job. Then it's another caller, and another, and then he hangs up and rubs his eyes.
"I'm a little tired this morning," he says.
He was up late. It was the writing assignment. Which is due in 3 hours and 20 minutes.
He takes another call.
"I know you're an excellent salesperson. . . . The only thing I have is someone to sell mobile storage units. . . . You'd be interested?"
He started the first question after dinner, he says. "You have been chosen as the chief of the trade section. . . . What specific action items would you wish to accomplish during your first week on the job?" That's the job title: chief. It would be with the Ohio Department of Job & Family Services, which is opening a new division to help the unemployed whose jobs go overseas. The first round was an interview, and he knew he did well, because why wouldn't he? He is a lawyer. He has been a human resources manager. He has been unemployed, and he has worked in an unemployment office.
"Good morning. Thank you for calling. Stuart speaking."
For some reason, though, the answers weren't coming, he continues, so he turned on the TV, and by the time he turned it off it was 11, and by the time he finished the sixth and final answer it was 3 a.m.
"Stuart, you have an intake," says the receptionist.
But it all worked out, he says, because as he was answering the last question, about the problem of a low-performing staffer ("Address it as we need to attack the production issue, not the producer"), he knew, absolutely knew, he had nailed all six questions.
"I was on a roll," he says. "It just poured out of me."
And so at 8:44 a.m., with only the slightest of hesitation, he sends in his answers.
And then welcomes into his cubicle an unemployed man named Richard, who wants details about a job listing.
"Nine to 10 dollars an hour," Adkins says, reading from his computer. "It's fast-paced, hard-working, must be able to speak, read and write English, heavy lifting."
And toward noon checks to see if his e-mail has been received. It has.
And then welcomes into his cubicle an unemployed woman named Cathleen, whose nine-month job search has come down to a listing she holds folded in her hand.
"You would be vacuuming up Owens Corning industrial waste," he says, reading from the computer.
"So it's like vacuuming up that waste junk?" she says, so crestfallen that he wonders whether to tell her about his own search, and his period of depression, and his weight gain, and the exercise weights he is wearing on each ankle at this very moment as he waits to find out about a job he is surer by the minute will be his.
And then, at 5, checks his e-mail one last time.
"Nothing yet," he says.
'Something Will Come Along'
There is nothing Friday, either.
And now, on Monday, there is hardly time to check because Monday at the unemployment office is always the busiest day. "In one day I had 82 unemployment claims I had to process," Adkins says of a previous Monday, "Normally this time of year, that's what we would have for a whole week."
"Position will require long standing periods in all types of weather; $7.70 an hour," he tells one person asking about a job.
"Power washing homes, fences; $10.20 an hour," he tells another.
"Cannot be afraid of heights; $8 an hour," he tells another.
These are the jobs available in the world of 6 percent unemployment. They are not about careers. They are not about fulfillment. They are just jobs.
"How can I help you?" Adkins says now to a man named Shawn Allen, who has been out of work since May 2002 and is wondering if there's a way to extend his unemployment benefits, which have been his only income and ran out months ago. A week before, they had spoken by phone. "I know what you're experiencing," Adkins had said to him then. "Hang in there. Something will come along."
But nothing is coming along, Allen says now, face to face with Adkins. "A solid year and a month," he says, and Adkins nods, knowing exactly how a year and a month can feel.
" 'Get your toolbox,' " Allen says of the way he learned of his layoff from an industrial plant after eight years. "No 'sorry,' no explanation, no questions, just goodbye."
"What's going on?" was what Adkins, who was general counsel to a firm that installed displays in stores such as Wal-Mart, had asked when he was summoned by the owner as the recession began to take hold in the retail sector. "You know what's going on," the chief financial officer had answered, and just like that Adkins did know.
"Forty thousand, with overtime," Allen says of what he was making.
Eighty thousand, Adkins doesn't say.
"Sixty résumés," Allen says of how many he has sent out.
Three hundred-fifty, all over the country, is Adkins's total so far.
"Fast food, unstable small companies unable to provide benefits, no long-term employment opportunities," Allen says of the only jobs available.
Which reminds Adkins of his own recurring nightmare of what he'd be saying for the rest of his life: "Would you like fries with that?"
"You can only go so far on nothing," Allen says, getting up to leave. "I'm on the edge of struggling" -- and there's something about that phrase that reminds Adkins of a day last August when he was well past that edge and down to begging someone for a job.
He had been out of work 14 months. His unemployment benefits had long run out. His savings were gone. His retirement account was gone. Three-hundred-fifty résumés. Three responses. Zero jobs. Depression. Overeating. Thirty pounds. In 14 months, he says, he had gone from someone who would accept only a legal position, to someone who swallowed his pride and said he was willing to work for the lowly sum of $25 an hour, to someone willing to take any full-time job, to someone trying to make a skeptical woman at a temporary agency understand that a one-time lawyer would gladly take anything she had.
"I have no money, and I need food," he said that day. "So you give me anything you can."
"So you just need some cash," the woman said.
"Exactly," he said. "Cash."
"Well," the woman said, "we can do that," and soon after he had his first paying job since his layoff.
It was five days, at $8 an hour, in a distribution center. He opened boxes. He took out underwear. He sorted the underwear into piles. "I wasn't going to screw it up," he says of how diligently he did this, hoping that he would be asked back for a second week.
He wasn't.
A week later, though, he got another assignment, also for five days at $8 an hour, this time assembling cardboard boxes.
"Every day I went in, I'd hope they would say, 'You've done well. Now we're going to put you on the line full time.' "
They didn't.
Then came a third assignment: several weeks in a musty storage shed, cataloging the old records of a physician.
And then came nothing until November, when he was informed that a job he had applied for several months earlier -- part time, 1,040 hours maximum per year, no benefits, no guarantees, official title: Intermittent -- was his.
"My whole family was ecstatic," Adkins says, especially his mother, who'd had to give him money so he could buy glasses, which made him feel that much worse. "You get in there and show them what you can do!" she told him.
Which since Dec. 16, his starting date, he has been trying to do, taking on each day as if being an intermittent in the third cubicle on the right on Main Street in Newark, Ohio, is the best job a person could get.
Into the cubicle comes Travis Cooper, who says of the employment situation, "It's scary. Especially when you have marketable skills and can't find anything." Adkins helps him with his questions, and quickly checks his e-mail when Cooper leaves.
In comes Dick Dudgeon, who says he got his 30-year award from Owens Corning before he was laid off, only to be brought back now and then for half the pay, "no benefits" and "no vacation."
Adkins checks his e-mail again.
In comes Dale Modesitt, 27 years at a company called Tectum Inc. until being laid off in March, inquiring about a bakery job that pays $8.36 an hour.
"You don't want to be here around Christmas," Adkins says after Modesitt leaves, checking again, "because it just rips your heart out."
Nothing.
In comes Rick Cantrell, 39, to see about a program that would pay for him to go to trade school. He sits in another cubicle, but Adkins recognizes him because they know each other slightly, not from the unemployment office, but because the seven acres Cantrell lives on is just down the road from the 40 acres Adkins lived on until November.
"A beautiful place," Cantrell says of Adkins's property. He remembers the barn Adkins put up after buying it in 1999, and the pond Adkins put in, and the fencing Adkins built himself, and the quarter horses he would see sometimes running around Adkins's fields, nine in all. "There was nothing ever wrong with the place," Cantrell says. "It was immaculate."
He remembers, too, the day last November when Adkins, selling the place, had an auction. He didn't go, but he imagines if he had he would have seen a man at a low point of his life.
'Selling It for Next to Nothing'
"I was extremely arrogant," Adkins says. "If I went by somebody without a job, it was, 'Hey, loser.' "
It is Monday night now -- still no word -- and Adkins is describing who he was on the day before he lost his job.
"In business, I was a bastard. My way or the highway. It was all hardball. Everything was money-driven.
"Work hard, set your goal, attain your goal, move on to the next goal, that was life. From goal to goal to goal. I was invincible. I'd never failed."
By the day of the auction, though, he was convinced he would never succeed again.
Item after item, there went his life. His farm equipment. His truck. His furniture.
"Not just having to sell it," he says, "but selling it for next to nothing."
On top of that, the weather couldn't have been worse.
"Rain. Snow. Sleet. Wind. You thought the whole universe was against you."
Even worse, the weather kept his mother and sister from coming, which meant they couldn't help him fill a contractual obligation of the auction to sell food to those in attendance, which meant that was how Adkins spent his last hours on his property.
"On the porch, selling hot dogs," he says. "It was pathetic."
And then came the very worst part: taking the bed, two chairs, TV, clothes and a few boxes of personal possessions and moving into a friend's vacant bedroom, where he has been since.
It is where he wrote the answers to the questions, on a laptop with a keyboard still sticky from those weeks doing inventory in the musty shed.
It is where he will go this night, and where he felt so lonely on Dec. 15 before his first day at the unemployment office, and where he was a few weeks later when he first had the thought his life had taken a turn for the better.
"You helped me the other day, and I've got another problem," someone had said at the unemployment office that day. That was it. That was the transaction. But thinking about it later in the solitude of his little room, Adkins says, he thought: "This is it. This is what I want to do."
Meaning:
"I am fulfilled in this job more than I ever have been in my life," he says. "I am helping people get through a situation I myself have been through. That's the key. I used to put people in the situation I was in and didn't care how they dealt with it. Now how ironic is it that the thing happened to me? So who better to fix the situation than someone who can pay it forward? I can't fix what I did to people. But I can pay it forward."
That's why he is so confident about getting the job, he says, even though it's been four days and 10 hours and he hasn't heard a word.
"It's as if this was all meant to be."
Or as he will say the next day to a woman named Christy who has been unemployed since the fall, "Everything works out for the best."
Or as he will say the day after that to a woman named Jennie who was just laid off from her job at a hospice, "Hang in there."
It will go on like this for 11 days in all, until he gets his answer about the job. It will come not by e-mail, but in a thin letter of rejection.
He will read it.
He will rip it in half.
He will feed it through a shredder.
That's what's to come, along with a new report that the unemployment rate has edged up again.
But on this Monday night, Adkins is still filled with the jubilation of seeing the word "Congratulations." "I'll be devastated," he says, if he doesn't get the job, but he is sure that's not going to happen.
"I'm good," he says.
"I'm good," he repeats.
"You know my honest opinion? I've got the job. This is my job. Everything is falling into place."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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