Hey unemployed: Just take any job!

Good morning, fellow lazy unemployed people! (Bear with me; you aren't lazy.)

Time to waltz down to the local McDonald's and start working... Yep, that's right! Just walk right in and tell them you are starting work this morning.  Even if your last job was as a financial analyst.  McD's will hire you on the spot!  (Sure they will!)

Or that bakery with the Help Wanted sign in the window? Just go right in there and tell the owner that you are ready to bake cakes.. even if you have never baked a cake in your life.

Or go hang out on the corner with the immigrants waiting for day jobs. Of course, somebody is going to hire you, an obviously non-Hispanic woman in her late 50's, for a day job! How could you doubt that they would?

There are jobs out there for you! All you have to do is to be willing to work, right?

Are you as tired of these kinds of silly comments as I am?

Should any of us even answer these silly comments anymore?

Well, let's get the facts out there:

Yes, the unemployment rate has gone down a bit, though much of that is from people dropping out of the labor market. But there are still at least four jobseekers for every job, and employers are still very picky, even for cake bakers.

(Update July 2013:  As of June 2013, the unemployment rate has gone down about 2 points since this article was written in early 2011.  And we now have "only" about 3 jobseekers for every job, not four.)

Simple grade school math seems to elude the naysayers who believe that "anybody can get a job": 

If there are four times as many jobseekers as there are jobs, a good 80% of people out there will not be able to get a job. Why is that so hard to understand?

How many of you remember playing musical chairs when you were a kid? You would march around a row of chairs with the other kids, and when the music stopped, everybody would sit down. Except that one kid would not get a chair because there were fewer chairs than kids. Well, today's job market is like that, except that there are four or five "kids" for every chair.

So... everytime you are bombarded with a fool who claims, "There are jobs out there! I just saw a help wanted sign today!", try not to let it get to you. It's not worth the aggravation. Anybody who thinks that there are jobs "out there" has not been looking for a job in the past three years. Or he/she has some kind of special skill set or a contact that has enabled him/her to quickly get a job.

I know a number of people who have gotten jobs over the past two years: One of my friends is a statistician in the health sciences. The son of a friend, a recent college graduate, has a sister who has a father-in-law who is a fabulously successful entrepreneur. The sister's father-in-law got him a job in one of his Internet companies. The son of another friend has a brand new degree in Computer Science. He got a job.

I won't go on, but I think you get the picture. Just because some people get jobs, it doesn't mean that there are jobs for everyone.

Try not to let the naysayers get you down.