College, then the school of hard knocks

In August 2008, three months after graduating from UC Berkeley, I accepted the only job that I was offered after two months of applying: legal assistant at a tiny immigration law firm in San Francisco. It wasn’t my dream job, but with the economy starting to falter, I was overjoyed at the prospect of anything.

Things, as they tend to do, went downhill from there. My perennially stressed lawyer boss, who happened to be the only other person at the firm, blew up because I used a comma instead of a colon in the salutation of a business letter. That exchange sums up pretty well how we got along.

Being new to the mess of paperwork involved in immigration law, I continually made minor slip-ups and was reprimanded for them. I also had real difficulties communicating with some of the clients. My Spanish was good, but I quickly learned it was nowhere near fluent. In short, the job and I were a poor match.

I felt hurt but not surprised when I got fired after a month. By then, the economy had gotten worse. Washington Mutual had failed, and the real estate bubble had burst. It was not a good time to look for work.

I quickly discovered that one of the weirdest limbos on Earth is that of the unemployed recent college graduate who continues to lives in the town where he went to college. I still saw my friends from school on a regular basis, but it felt like our common ground was beginning to erode. They either had jobs or were still students and, well, in both cases I felt I didn’t have much to contribute to the conversation. I felt increasingly old and weird and out of place: Why was I here?

Unemployment exacerbated my worst personality traits: petty jealousy and competitiveness. I saw my friends with jobs and was certain I could do them better. My self-pity grew. I had gotten excellent grades, edited the campus comedy magazine and worked in the college library. I had won awards and learned another language. So why were kids who’d had a lousy, coffee-toting internship or two finding work instead of me?

It didn’t help that I had way too much extra time to stew. Initially, my goal was to submit three applications a day, but I quickly fell behind. Moping turned out to be quite time-consuming. One day, in a desperate attempt to “stand out from other applicants,” as I’d been told to do, I put on my suit and traipsed around downtown San Francisco cold-calling on employers. It was fruitless and humiliating. I wasn’t allowed to so much as leave a resume.

In November, I caught a break. My friend Nichole e-mailed me about a job teaching English to elementary school kids in Spain. I applied and was hired. In mid-January, I arrived in Madrid with a sense of hope and gratitude. I had not only gotten a new job; I was living on a new continent.

The work required a lot of adjustment. Spanish schoolchildren are, to put it mildly, more rambunctious than their American counterparts, and as a result class time was sometimes stressful. My job meant that I went from class to class giving English lessons, so I had several different bosses, each with different expectations. My roommates -- a middle-aged engineer and his lugubrious, chain-smoking Brazilian girlfriend -- were not exactly warm. They spoke to me only when something needed cleaning.

But then things got better. I traveled and saw Roman aqueducts in Segovia and the ancient university in Salamanca and the enormous mosques of Cordoba. I became used to the weird Spanish accent. I found friends. I learned to love the incredibly loud and angry-seeming way that Spanish people address one another. I developed a taste for ham, if only as a survival mechanism because of its omnipresence. I came to enjoy teaching, especially the fifth-graders. And my Spanish is finally fluent.

I guess all this is to say that the recession was good for me. I’d even go so far as to say it’s good for honor students to spend three months feeling worthless, learning the valuable life lesson that You Are Not as Awesome as You Think You Are and Do Not Deserve a Job Automatically. I am much more flexible, more open to trying new things. I never dreamed of teaching before this opportunity came along, but I think I am a better person for having done it. Plus, hey, trip to Europe.

Fred Taylor-Hochberg still teaches in Madrid.