My Facebook friends might know that I have decided to elevate my search for employment to an art form. Yes, why not? I might as well enjoy my, as yet, fruitless search.
So we’ll start with this story. I went to an interview for an interaction design position at a major publishing firm in Amsterdam. This was my first interview since returning to Amsterdam from Iran, and I was a bit nervous, especially since I had not yet gotten accustomed to being on-time for appointments. The Dutch are on-time when they arrive 5 minutes early. Iranians are on-time when they arrive 2 hours late. After four years of living on Iran time, Dutch time was proving a bit of a struggle for me. But I managed to arrive just a couple of minutes late despite a delay on the metro.
I was led upstairs where two baby-faced young men waited to interview. Here I am interviewing for a tech-design job, and my interviewers have barely read my resume, let alone googled me. Not only that, they felt that our time was best spent discussing my college education. Uh. College? I graduated 17 years ago. Seventeen. (valedictorian, btw.) S e v e n t e e n.
In the end they told me that I was too “American” for the job. What does that mean?
I rent, I used to own, but now I rent. My house is old, the plumbing is suspect, there is a pile of leaves, dirt, and insects on the roof that worry me to no end. Some of the windows don’t close all of the way and some of the electricity can’t be fixed without a major overhaul. Our shower door is held closed using a huge binder clip and the kitchen is the original and dates back about 60 years. We cannot broil anything in the oven and it runs about 50 degrees too high, but it is home and we want to stay. We moved in at a time when rents were at their cheapest in years and have lived here almost 4 years – our landlords have never raised the rent and they could. In the recent economic hardships we find our selves living pay check to pay check and the option of moving is out of the question.
So, when my family joined the many of people who have found at least one household member out of work and another barely making enough money, we needed to help. We got help from places we expected to find it – family. Never did I expect that our landlords would be people that would also provide help. If it wern’t for their generosity, patience and willingness to work with us and come up with an agreement on paying our rent, we would surely find ourselves without a home of our own. Not every landlord is slum and I hope that we’re not alone.