Have a coke and a smile.

Being unemployed again, is not without it's moments. A little deja vu for me as I write this, (wasn't I just here like yesterday?) but with something old, there is always something new. Last time around, I sat at a tiny little desk with an IDES worker (Illinois Decides Everyone's Stupid Illinois Department of Employment Security) and tried to explain how I got fired from my last job. You see, I wasn't very good at the whole money making thing in the frenetic world of futures trading, and when I rashly pissed away the chunk of money my new employers had bestowed upon me, they decided what I already knew: that I sucked as a trader. But this time around is a whole new ball of wax: how to convince them that I deserve money after I quit.

Well I am not going to re-bore you with all of that. It is winding its way through the process, but I wanted to point out a more serious observation I noticed yesterday while in the land of the unemployed. Apparently, "unemployment office" and "smiling" are not in the same sentence. Not in the same dictionary. Hell, not even in the same galaxy. I was there for little over an hour, (yes Fridays are the best days to go, if there is a best day to actually be unemployed) and the entire time I was looking at everyones faces. From the downtrodden citizens in line with me, to the frenetic security guard that jetted around the place like his pants were on fire, to the robotic man behind the counter sending us all in this direction or that to wait out our fate, nobody ever so much as cracked a hint of a smile.

Now this phenomenon is what I like to call Flatlining Corner of the Mouth Syndrome, or FCMS for short. One would expect that standing in line to prove you aren't working, so you can have the privilege of taking home less than 1/3 of what you used to make isn't on the top ten list of things that make you smile, and I wholly anticipated that my fellow disenfranchised would not be in the smiling mood. But the workers there were like monotonal robots, unable or unwilling to make the slightest of gestures to lighten the surely despondant mood of those throwing their humility to the wind and waiting for a handout from the state. I mean, they have a job. And we don't. You would thing that fact alone might entice them do voluntarily ditch FCMS, but maybe the unrelenting stream of the same thing day in and day out has sucked the joy out of their faces.

Or maybe working for a government agency just does that to a person. Ever see anyone at the DMV smiling? Or any other government agency for that matter? I mean, aren't government jobs supposed to be coveted? And if they are so coveted, why does everyone walk around with a surly expression on their face that says, "I hate my job, I hate my life, and most of all I ain't smiling for you!" Maybe when one goes to work for the government, they catch FCMS like a cold that never goes away. Maybe it's a pre-requisite for being a government employee. Check this box if you don't smile. EVER.

Well, it's apparently working. Despite my attempts to seem not entirely unhappy but actaully pleasant by smiling at whoever came my way, no one smiled back. I can just hear Dean Wormer screaming at the top of his lungs, "No more fun of any kind!" But would it kill someone looking into the eyes of a despondant unemployed citizen and offering up the slimmest of hope by cracking a little smile? Apparently so. I know now there are three undeniable truths in this world: there is no crying in baseball, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and there is no smiling at the IDES. Maybe they just need a coke.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD6j_7bgrtA

(DISCLAIMER: Bandzoogle in it's infinite wisdom has stripped me of the spell check, and I had to do it the old fashioned way, by re-reading this 7 times. Let's hope it didn't need an 8th.)