The work is still out there. The job isn’t.

Somewhere there’s a room you weren’t in. Somebody thirty-four, a spreadsheet open, deciding what your thirty years was worth.

It came different depending on the day. HR already sitting there when you walked in. A package with a date and eleven days to sign. A tool that does eighty percent of what you did, and somebody deciding eighty was enough. Or nothing at all — just fewer things landing on your desk until you understood.

Different doors. Same room.

Then we went looking. Same résumé that worked at forty-five. Except now it goes through a program before it reaches a person, and the program reads the graduation year first. Overqualified is the word that comes back. Too expensive is what it means.

Six months in, most of us quit telling people we were still looking.

Nobody in that chain was being cruel. Somebody who learned the job as a dashboard cannot see somebody who learned it as thirty years of knowing who to call.

They weren’t being cruel.
They couldn’t read it.

Here’s what nobody tells us. That company still has the problem. The tool still gets it eighty percent right, and the twenty percent is the part that costs money. Somebody there is eleven months into the seat and not sleeping. He’d pay a person to come fix it for six weeks.

Not hire. Pay.

No posting. No application. Nothing to get screened out of. A person with a problem finding a person who already solved it.

That’s what we were never shown. Not the skill — the skill still works. Just where to stand so the person with the problem can find us.