This has been an article I've long had floating around in my head, in response to one JU regular's quite ignorant accusation that I have the run of "bad luck" with jobs that they have with theirs. I haven't updated people on my personal life lately, because, frankly, I have been more than a little tired of some of the games for some time, but here goes:

When I started on JoeUser, I had just left the mine. The mine had never been my idea of a permanent job. I was working at the time in plumbing, a job from which, yes, I was fired. However, given that I have only been fired from two jobs in my entire life, and given that my unemployment was approved without appeal, I think it's fair to say that this was not a "just cause" firing. Part of the problem had been excessive absenteeism, again, a first for me, and only brought about because my wife was 60 miles away at the time due to premature labor with our son, and my transportation was extremely limited.

When that job let me go, though, I took the unemployment check as a good opportunity to move out of an area where we never intended to remain. My income was portable,  so I didn't need to worry about finding a job immediately. The Mojave Desert is not only hot, it is insanely, ungodly, and in all other ways hot, and not a place I wanted to spend a significant portion of my life, so we lit out of there and found few things more exhilerating than that last lingering look at the city in our rear view mirror.

You know part of the rest of the story. You know we got a good opportunity on a house out here and moved here. You know that I worked for two years as a paperboy. What you may not know is that my job with the paper paid double what the near-minimum wage jobs that prevailed in the area paid, and required about half the time commitment. Yeah, it meant keeping up a good car, but it was a good income, and I had a fair amount of time free.

I've never been one to stay down. Ever. We made good money off of that route, good enough to work our way back into a reliable car and for me to pay off my substantial remaining college debt so I could free up my transcripts and go back to school. And back to school I went. During the duration, of course, I had been running a campaign for State Representative on the Libertarian Party ticket. I finished with a respectable 15% of the vote, historic numbers for a third party candidate in this area.

I started with an ISP and have been there since. Not only have I been there, but I was recently promoted to supervise the PC Repair department. I will finish with my Associate Degree in December, at which time I will move straightaway to working on my Bachelor's Degree. At no point have I ever been not working.

While it may be tempting to confuse a short downturn in someone's life as a failure, it's more realistic to look at the big picture. In 20 years in the workforce, I have never been without work for more than six weeks, and only twice in that time had a hiatus of two weeks or more between jobs.

The thing is, I'm not one to stay down, and never will be. And while I have no idea what tomorrow will bring, experience tells me that I should manage to stay employed.