Be Prepared For The Worse  But Hope For The Best
Written By: Gilbert Goh
When I returned to Singapore from abroad in 2001, I was looking for anything that pays between $3000 to $4000 a month. It was reasonable, at least for me, when I was earning around $60,000 a year as an insurance advisor before my venture abroad. I also tried to return to my former vocation as an insurance advisor but perhaps due to a lack of passion and that I have quitted once before, most of my former clients have lost the trust in me. I gave up after about 3 months selling successfully only one insurance policy to my wife. My confidence was dashed another awful blow. On a scale of ten, I came in three on that rating during that period.

I must also say that my expectation of a reasonable salary also hindered my choices of work. By setting a benchmark, I have actually placed unseen hurdles at regaining employment promptly. My advice to the unemployed is to take up any job that comes your way and hang in there. It is frankly worse not to have any job at all especially in a very down period. The longer one is unemployed the worse the situation will become.

Should one who was retrenched go back to their former trade? I don’t know really. For some, it worked for others it doesn’t. A friend of mine who has migrated to Sydney managed to get back an engineering job just three weeks after been retrenched. He was also fortunate to have a substantial pay rise. In Australia, companies are more compassionate and retrenched staff has access to company’s internet office access for one month and a recruitment consultant will provide tips for re-hiring purposes. The same can’t be said for our local companies. Some don’t even pay severance pay when they retrench staff.

During that dark period, there was the usual countless emails a day to prospective employers and at least an interview a week target that I set for myself during the first six months of unemployment. Many interviews that I attended were multi level marketing (MLM) jobs that do not pay you a salary but only a commission on the number of products that you sold. I later did not email as much as I figured that it won’t matter much anyway. There was little success and much effort was needed to sort out the newspaper advertisement and job website. There was the feeling of hopelessness and once it overwhelmed you it is very difficult to get out of.

I have also given up on looking for jobs on the newspaper as firstly there were not many of them anyway and secondly they were very few that responded. Like many, I always thought that such jobs were placed by the government to make the job market looked good. There were never meant to be real proper jobs for the taking. Such was the cynicism that I have developed within myself after emailing more than a thousand times and attended countless rounds of interview without much success. I have lost hope in a very hopeless situation.

However, through a stroke of good fortune, I managed to land a telemarketing job after staying unemployed for six months peddling bank products to depositors. It was an advertised job in one of the major newspaper. After the first interview, I was confident but the second interview proved elusive. The interviewer had her doubts that I will work for a basic salary of $1500 knowing that I have drawn treple that salary before. However I was hungry and urgent and my bank account was fast dwindling. I finally got the job after much earnest pleading.

It was a job that I could manage well and the income was a basic salary of $1500 on top of commissions. My first pay cheque was $2300 and I was satisfied. More than that, I thought that the worse was over and the light was shining brightly on me again. However, it was never meant to be. On the second month, I was called up by the bank management and explained on my resume’s past employers. Some of the employers were not responding to their request for a reference check and they suspected that it was fictitious! As it was an American bank and 911 just happened, on the pretext of security reasons, they have no choice but to axe me. To this day, I could not figure out the real reasons for the sack.

It was the darkest moment of my life – worse than the first six months of been unemployed. There was a lot of self doubt and whether the tunnel is all darkness and gloom. Was the break going to come for me? I wondered. I remembered the week after was horrendous. I could not wake up from my bed and depression set in. I could not eat and sleep well as you were brought down to earth after thinking that you have escaped from jail. There were moments of trying to end it all which was the darkest that one could fall to. The only comfort I can get here is that things will have to move up for me as that’s the lowest ebb that one can go to.

So be prepared for the worse case scenario – it may just come and you want to be prepared for it. You need  almost a warrior-like approach when we face up to life’s most ugly adversity – joblessness.

The ordinary person takes everything as a blessing or a curse. A warrior takes everything as a challenge. Carlos Casteneda

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