So what do you do?
The speed at which everything happened left me little room to improvise. "So what do you do for a living?" she asks, sipping a martini and looking at me curiously. I hesitate a little with the answer, which adds to the sense of mystery. I smile just a little. People in the bar dance or sit on white sofas and don't notice the drama taking place in their midst. A tech-bubble casualty is trying to explain to a woman what he does for a living (Nothing, thank you) and stay alive.
I sip a little from my vodka martini (shaken, not stirred), look around, and only then do I whisper in her ear "I'm paid by the Service". The DJ cranks the music and when she can¿t hear anything anymore I add, "Unemployment service".
With each passing day, I feel the title of "jobless techie" losing its glamour. Maybe it's the time that has passed since the Nasdaq crashed and the waves of massive lay-offs, or maybe it's the unstable security situation, but like many titles that have lost their glory ¿ like attorney, Internet programmer or Minister of Defense --- being an unemployed techie is no longer what it once was. In those happier times, until recently in fact, when someone asked "what do you do for a living?" all one had to do was tilt one's head, close one's eyes, and sigh: jobless techie.
The proximity to very public waves of layoffs in which thousands were thrown out on the street in a matter of weeks, made us virtual celebrities starring on the evening news. Meeting a jobless techie was a story worth telling with some sense of wonder, the feeling of having met someone famous.
Our image then, of the fat cats knocked off the summit, was still strong enough to make our employment situation into something acceptable and logical. Misery loves company and mothers still hoped their sons and daughters would marry someone from the tech sector, and if none were available, then the unemployed tech sector would do. As long as the word technology was in there somewhere.
The trouble started when jobless techies continued to multiply, raising the unemployment rate in the sector to levels that just weren't funny anymore, and it became clear the crisis wasn't going to end anytime soon. But the biggest influence was that the tech crisis was no longer in the headlines. And if you aren't there, you don't exist. Today, rightly so, it is more popular to be a reservist in Ramallah than a job seeker. Needless to say, some enjoy both titles: Jobless techie in Ramallah.
As opposed to my inventive ways to introduce myself (farmer and spiritualist are my top two so far), my mother has found a better way to deal with questions about what her son does. Modern medicine comes to her aid and she is suddenly afflicted by temporary deafness in the ear closes to the supplicant. "So what is your son doing these days?" she is asked. "Yes, it was very hot yesterday," she answers.
"There is no shame in not working right now," she tells me, "I just don't feel like dealing with the questions and explanations that will follow." Regardless of my mother, I think the whole tech unemployment thing has pretty much run its course. It is time to end this chapter of my life and start thinking of a more fitting title for myself. After all, even I have run out of stories I can sell to women in bars.
