The Perks of Unemployment

No deadlines. No tensions with colleagues. No fights over raises. No gossip in the hallways. No arguing over what constitutes a sick day versus a vacation day. No bruised egos. No bossy office managers. No office crushes. No ringing phones. It is remarkably silent in my home office. Just the sound of me typing e-mails to potential employers, most of whom have little interest in taking our relationship to the real world.

I should confess to another perk, of which I am rather embarrassed. This relates to the underappreciated fact that today the unemployed are often unrecognizable. For it is not in our skin color, our accents, our behavior, how we dress or where we hang out, that we reveal our unemployed status. In fact, many of the unemployed are just like you and me: we mix and mingle freely with the employed. We "pass" as one of them, and many of our friends don't know our little secret.