My Artistic Journey
(Part 3)

(continued from part 2)

If you read the last episode, you will remember the 2007/2008 recession had just hit… and lucky for me at that time, I had a good job, wait, what am I saying? I had a great job!

I'm sure I've never worked for a better boss or been paid as well as in my old job. But as I found out… nothing on earth lasts forever. My job was working for an architect. As you may know, architects depend on people who want to build, building contractors and developers are a large portion of their clientele. Those clients in turn depend on banks and lending institutions for their project money. It seems that money is at the bottom of it all. Yeah, I know this comes as a big surprise to nobody.

Well, the great recession of 2008-2009 put a big squeeze on the money supply everywhere. Contractor and developer companies, who had been playing musical chairs with the lenders money, began falling like flies. When the music stopped, they found their was no where to sit and… bam, they were out of the game! One by one, so many of these companies seemed to disappear. This bad turn of the economy creates a ripple effect on everything. One big stone falling into the troubled waters of the economy creating waves than many businesses weren't able to get over or ride out.

The shock wave, created by the recession, took a few years to reach me in my job at my work. During 2009, I saw the number coworkers diminish. Then one day in 2010 I went to work and the same day my boss gave me the news that I was being laid off. "Go gather your things and go home", he said.

That was certainly one of the worst days in my life. My wife and I had bills, car payments, credit cards, a mortgage and all that goes with it. What are we going to do now? Thankfully my wife had a stable job working for the County…a job that thrived on bad times for people but still our income fell by more than half.

Again, what now? With the worlds economy on life support and my own prospects for work in my industry at zero… I spent the next two years searching for work. Thank God for Unemployment benefits, even if they were half of what my former employment had been.

When you are on unemployment, they require you to do several things as part of your search for work and their continuing to provide benefits (money). One of those required things was to attend occasional seminars. Early on in one of these, I had been instructed that construction dependent industries, like mine, were not likely to rebound until around 2018.