Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

I decided to spend my online time this morning looking for a new job. I want to get away from dealing with the public on a daily basis, especially now that Revolutionary City has made customer hostility something I have to confront regularly; and I'd like to find something that pays significantly more than my present job. Unfortunately, I'm having trouble locating anything that satisfies both requirements.

Of course, there's one other significant limitation: since I have to stay here to take care of my mother, I can't look too far afield. I've restricted my job search to the immediate area: primarily Williamsburg, but also Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach. (I'd prefer not to commute, but I will if I have to.) I've gone through the listings for Colonial Williamsburg and the College of William and Mary, as well as the classifieds from the Daily Press and the Monster.com listings. The more I look, the more depressed I get.

Most of the jobs fall into one of two categories. There are the low-paying, hourly-wage service jobs, mostly in retail sales or food service; and I don't even want to consider those, because that's exactly what I'm trying to escape. Then there are the higher-paying, salaried positions that are ridiculously specialized and require anywhere from 2 to 10 years' experience in that specific field. Many of these still involve customer service, so I wouldn't want them even if I had the required level of experience; others require extensive technical certifications, so I'd have to go back to school and basically start all over again to acquire the necessary knowledge, by which time the jobs would no longer exist, replaced by something new requiring yet a different set of certifications,

I guess majoring in English wasn't the best decision as far as a career goes, since I didn't want to go into teaching (and would probably have to go back for a PhD or other specialized schooling if I changed my mind) and there doesn't seem to be a hell of a lot else you can do with an English degree. At the time, I hadn't thought that far into the future-- I majored in English because I loved literature, I was good at writing, and so it seemed to be the logical choice. But now I'm starting to have my doubts.