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What do you do?
Laid off, terminated, let go — whatever you call it, being unemployed can bite. It can also be the best time of your life. What has it been for you?
BY KEVIN BANKS

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. -Bob Dylan

For the unemployed, "What do you do?" is the almighty cocktail-party-conversation killer. Even if you spend eight hours a day job hunting (um, right), you can’t avoid the inevitable: as your girlfriend introduces you to her pals, you hear, "Nice to meet you, I’m with the XYZ company. What do you do?" Fortunately, you’ve got an emergency cache of productive-sounding stock answers to reply with. After six months of job hunting, though, your inner voice is wailing, "Screw you for asking, you *%$!%#$@!" But all that comes out of your jobless hole is, "H-h-have you tried the calamari? It’s so spicy."

Last year, you spent every working day jockeying for position in the rat race. You worked insane hours, bucking for the much-deserved chubby paycheck. You knew it would take some time, but you had plenty of that. Ten-hour days, five days a week, even a few weekends. By all estimates, next year you’d be making double and commuting to work in a vehicle you didn’t need to pedal. But one gray Friday morning you hear the rumors, and pretty soon your boss is handing you two weeks’ severance printed on a roll of toilet paper for you to blow your nose on.

Whatever you are — recent graduate, laid-off, terminated — you’re jobless and ass-deep in a big, mysterious pile of time. And much like a pile of cash (say goodbye to yours), this heap of time must be spent somewhere, doing something, before your lonely week looks like this: Monday=isolation, Tuesday=paranoia, Wednesday=desperation, Thursday=three DVD rentals and a bottle of Absolut.

In an effort to save their sanity, or just to generate smart answers to cocktail-party questions, the savvy unemployed make the most of their time. Perhaps it’s the bliss of newfound freedom that empowers them to set out and achieve on their own. But they know you’re wondering what the hell they do all day. So as the state’s unemployment rate reached 6.2 percent in July, we surveyed residents from the Boston area who’ve been unemployed for six months or more and asked them, What have you been doing?

Click here to see.

Kevin Banks is a formerly unemployed illustrator living in Brookline. To view additional responses to the survey, or to contact Kevin, visit kevinbanks.com.


Issue Date: September 5 - 11, 2003
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