Free Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich

engage someone in conversation long enough eye I can catch, but everyone is hastening to reclaim their coats.
    for it to seem natural to say, "Here, why don't you take one of What do I do? Start thrusting my Kinko's cards into their my cards?" Something is holding me back—maybe "lack of confidence," as Kimberly and I agree to call it, though I sus-meet his or her individual needs.
    pect also a prideful resistance to "selling myself."
    These objections, though, are in the present circumstances Other job seekers seem to suffer from the same reticence.
    only excuses. Whatever is holding me back—shyness or Hillary Meister, for example, whom I met by e-mail through pride—it must be vanquished, and in this enterprise I can see I need the Atlanta Job Search Network, says she has trouble with "the further help.
    whole networking thing":
    The Forty-Plus Club's boot camp is not an option. On my next trip to D.C. for its Monday-morning get-together, Ted It's personality. I'm very quiet, not very extroverted. It [networking] feels confronts me with the question "What's holding you back?" I so fake to me, but I know that's the game.
    freeze, sure that this is a Joe-type query to which the possible It feels "fake" because we know it involves the deflection of our responses include "procrastination" and "nonlinear career natural human sociability to an ulterior end. Normally we path." "Money?" he continues, and I realize he's asking what meet strangers in the expectation that they may truly be holds me back from enlisting in the boot camp. I say no, I can't strange, and are drawn to the multilayered mystery that each commute two and a half hours each way every weekday for human presents. But in networking, as in prostitution, there is three weeks of 9-5 sessions.
    no time for fascination. The networker is always, so to speak,
    "There's a guy who commuted all the way from Pennsylvania,"
    looking over the shoulder of the person she engages in conver-Ted reproaches me. "Or you could stay in a hotel."
    sation, toward whatever concrete advantage can be gleaned If I went through boot camp, I would be entitled to become an from the interaction—a tip or a precious contact. This instru-actual member of the club, which might put me in a position to mentalism undermines the possibility of a group identity, say, hang out with Merle, exchange views on the correct hanging of as white-collar victims of corporate upheaval. No matter how scarves over suit jackets, and absorb some of her executive aura for crowded the room, the networker prowls alone, scavenging to myself. But I have found an appealingly condensed alternative; or rather it has found me. One day when I was weeding through the Atlanta job possibilities, I came across an announcement for an "executive boot camp" to be hosted by something called the ExecuTable and scheduled to take exactly three
    one day. It isn't cheap, especially when you factor in airfare and a night in a hotel, but the difference between 7 hours and the 120-hour commitment required by Forty-Plus is compelling.
    So I go to Travelocity.com and, after about thirty minutes of Surviving Boot Camp
    comparative shopping, come up with a travel plan.

    I've been to Atlanta twice in the last two years, just long enough to gain the impression that it's a city without a heart.

    From one of the downtown hotels I stayed in on a previous trip, I could walk two blocks in any direction without encountering another pedestrian. I even asked the doorman where the Atlantans could be found, and he directed me to take the subway out to a mall in the suburbs, where indeed there were hundreds of people, none of them showing signs of having recently fled a neutron bomb attack. This could be the latest urban trend—the depopulated includes all the requisite skills, I expand beyond the pharmas effect—since I've encountered it also in Dallas and Oklahoma and leap to offer myself to any company seeking:
    City. What it means, for the