Too Tough to Let Go of a Life Spent Working : Jobs: Once, they were easy to find. Now we grovel in faceless packs at personnel offices.

I don’t remember times like these.

I’ve been working since I was 11. Seems I always had a job. First it was delivering papers for the Citizen News, then at 13 I was a box boy at Ralphs Market. Summers were full-time. I learned it from my mother. “Don’t think you’re going to sit around the house all summer,” she said. One year I worked at Marquardt Engineering, another it was at KTTV. After college, I joined the Marine Corps just days ahead of being drafted. The point being, there was always work. There was always something to do, somewhere to go.

I did not care much what it was. Personnel people would ask about my career goals. I would ask what was open. Anything where I could come each morning, do whatever was told and once a week would get paid. I was not particular.

And then I worked 30 years for L.A. County. It wasn’t planned, it just sort of happened. I was fresh out of the Marines with a wife and two children and the County Sheriff’s office was hiring. When I looked up I was staring into the mashed potatoes at my retirement dinner.

There was a seminar on retirement, which taught that a person’s worth was not in a job or a paycheck but something more. Something inner, I suppose.

Maybe that’s so, but working sure fills up the hours. There are people who need to see you. People to reason with. Summer picnics and the office Christmas party. And the paycheck. Volunteer jobs are nice, but the fact that someone is willing to pay for your time has a calming effect. It gives a sense of inner worth.

I got the house clean, the car tuned, the oil changed and the lawn mowed. A man gets restless just planting flowers and pulling weeds.

Looking for a job is not what it used to be. Work is no longer plentiful. Career goals have more meaning. Barker Brothers is out of business, Northrop in Newbury Park is shut down and Security Pacific will be swallowed up next year. Crowds of people swarm around the few open jobs. How does a personnel person choose?

I answered one ad and there were 200 applicants in line ahead of me. Young men in T-shirts, old men wearing business suits, all of us scrambling for work.

I said something cheerful to the man next to me and noticed a quiet terror in his eyes. “The company moved to Texas,” he said. “The owner asked me to go with them, help set it up, but the kids were in school. We got a home here.” His hands trembled slightly filling out the application, and I sensed that if they asked him today to go to Alaska, he’d have the car packed in an hour.

It took more than a year of answering ads and groveling to people younger then my children to find a job. I don’t know if there’s any meaning to it, but the man who finally did the hiring was six years older than me.

So I go to work again. I have a job. I get up in the morning, worry that there is a clean white shirt, pick up things at the laundry and am a willing ear at the office for my new friends.

Am I so shallow that my self-worth can be validated by a paycheck? Damn right.

Am I going to the office Christmas party? You bet!