I came across the old refrain of “What have you done for me lately” yesterday, but not in an employment situation. Rather, it was in the usually routine process of getting a prescription refilled.

In this case, it didn’t involve my family physician but my eye doctor, who refused to renew the prescriptions by phone since I had switched (by dint of being laid off) from a PPO plan to an HMO plan. I plaintively asked what I was supposed to do, and the answer was “find a doctor in your HMO.”

This seemed like a take on “What have you done for me lately?” But in this case, it was more like, “What has your insurance company done for me lately?”
So much for the Hippocratic Oath, eh?

Wouldn’t you know it? Mr. Unlucky strikes again. I went to the Web site containing the copy of Poor Richard’s Almanac that I was using, and I got the cursed “404″ notification! I guess Poor Richard has deserted me. What else is new? I’ll check back later to see if the site comes back up. If not, I guess I’ll be shopping on Amazon.

I opened, on the Web, a copy of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac to begin my journey of discovering wisdom old and, if possible, adding wisdom new to it. Now, wisdom by definition must be old and time-honored, so today what you have is repackaged wisdom, whereby the hucksters doling it out for the big bucks (Anthony Robbins et al.) are merely disguising it with modern jargon and marketing magic. That being said, how does ol’ Ben open his Almanac.
Several different versions exist, as Franklin kept rewriting (and reselling) Poor Richard’s observations, so the one I stumbled on was the 1758 edition, showing that Franklin was well known and successful even twenty-plus years before our nation’s birth.
His musings begin with a discussion of trying times and high taxes, wherein a wise old man, doubtlessly Franklin’s mouthpiece, notes that taxes are indeed bad, but that idleness taxes a person twice as much, pride three times as much, and folly four times as much. Amen. When I look back over my long period of unemployment (still unabated), I think I spent a least a majority if not most of my time caught up in those traps.
After some more ramblings and musings, Franklin makes the interesting observation that: “He that lives upon Hope will die fasting. There are no Gains, without Pains.”
Now, my being a writer, I can criticize the grammar here fairly severely, but we all get the point. However, in this modern-day, shallow, materialistic world of ours, “no gain without pain” now refers almost exclusively to building one’s abs and other bodily parts in the very pursuit of idleness (showing off at Starbucks), pride (bragging about how much one can bench press) and folly (impressing the babes with our flesh). So today, when times are bad—either individually or collectively—it’s much simple to play the blame and litigation game.
My modern interpretation: Franklin is still right, but today you’d better pass it by your lawyer or agent before acting on it. It kind of runs counter to modern times. Instead, for today it should say: “He who lives upon hype will thrive and survive, and there are truly no gains without other people’s pains.
Ouch! Herein lies the perverse and symbiotic relationship between work and entertainment. At work, you get screwed over and pained endlessly by the ambitious, greedy minority, so by the time you get home, you need TV, sports, movies, whatever, to recover from it all. Now you know why, in the absence of the boob tube and sporting events and stupid comedians, our founders turned to hard work and religion. Besides, they didn’t want to be branded with an “A” for fooling around. Sober and straight ruled. Put in that light, I’m not sure which is better.

Some of you may have rejected my observation that those of you gainfully employed and thinking the horizon goes forever into a sunny retirement should realize, “You’re next.” Look at what’s happening at Ford Motor Co., which in its rosiest projections can’t predict a profit until 2009 or later. Ford’s remedy? “Lay ‘em off!” Some 40,000, including 10,000 white-collar folk, are getting invitations to retire early or face the axe.
The auto industry, with all three domestic manufacturers bleeding red, is just one example of the cyclical nature of our economy. Who even predicted the dot-com bubble burst of 2000? Where are those people working today? So, even if you’re lucky enough to work until retirement age, most of you will face unwanted career changes at some point, or points, in your life. Then what?
The problem is, the last time it happened to me, I was at the age when prospective employers look at you and say, “He’s too expensive and too old and set in his ways,” none of which is true in my case, but I get shackled with it anyway.
Besides, who would hire someone dressed in green who looks like a leprechaun trying to escape a “forbidden” sign?

By the time I had been unemployed for something like 14 months and rejected by hundreds of potential employers, I had lost so much respect in the eyes of the world that dogs quit barking at me. I couldn’t even get a reaction from them if I rattled a neighbor’s door or window. Needless to say, the phone had quit ringing well before that. People who had praised my friendship and extolled my skills at work forgot I existed lest they somehow share in my fate. I guess unluck can run off on others. Either that, or a lot of people were just whistling past their own graves as usual.
Ah, cruel irony of life—being forced into retirement with no way to pay for it. Those of you smugly sitting at your desks at work thinking life is grand and someday you’ll sail into the sunset of luxurious retirement, I’ve got two words for you, “You’re next.” Welcome to the United States and the American Dream in the 21st Century. Find a way to survive on your own, or don’t survive at all.
That’s why I’m penning Mr. Unlucky’s Almanac. Herein you’ll find the ways and wisdom, time-honored and new (if there is such a thing), that will help you navigate past the shoals of a man-eat-man economy that no longer offers a gold watch after 40 years. In fact, if you have a gold watch, hold onto it for the day of reckoning (downsized and out!), for it could be worth something at the pawn shop. Believe me, I unloaded and raided everything I had—stocks, bonds, retirement plans, bank accounts, credit cards—when I was supposedly downsized. Name it. If it could yield money, I used it, bankruptcy court be damned!
Now I say “supposedly downsized” because I don’t believe most layoffs are even necessary. Where I worked, there were a least one or two million dollars in wasted expenses for consultants, outsourcing, needless printed documents, junkets, tchotkes and the like in each year’s expenditures, and I’m speaking just of my department. I could’ve cut half of that with no effect whatsoever on what was going on at that particular place of work; nor would the cuts have affected a single desired outcome. Sad but true. I bet thousands could step forward with similar tales.
However, reality is reality, and that is what we must cope with. Hence Mr. Unlucky’s Almanac. Let’s now rename Poor Richard for what he has become in 2006—plain old unlucky. Is there a solution to unluck? Read on.