Resume The Resume

The Ides of March are fast approaching, as are the registered letters that so many of us teachers will be receiving. It is a nervous time, and so I have spent some of my excess energy updating my resume. It's an interesting exercise that I tend to avoid, since it generally means that I am about to embark on that least pleasant of avocations: searching for a vocation. But what I discovered on this last pass gave me pause.
I was filling in the section called "work history," and it became apparent that mine was more of a post-mortem. My last three employers no longer exist. The video store I worked at during college was boxed up and closed down back when there was still such a thing. Last I checked, the Italian restaurant next door had blown through a wall and set up tables where our "new releases" section used to be.
I left that corpse to go and work installing modular office furniture. What was going to be a few months' gig turned out to be a few years, and I ended up leaving when I fell in love and moved to California. A few years later the office furniture disappeared and the motorcycle escort business that had been my boss's hobby filled the warehouse.
When I arrived in California, my first impulse was to work in a video store. When that application got no response, I followed my girlfriend's advice and applied at the book warehouse where her mother's book was being distributed. I took that job with the idea that I would be there until something better came along. That lasted five years, and I moved up the ladder quickly enough to management and even the Board of Directors that my father said this: "It either says a lot about you, or a lot about them." He turned out to be right. That employee owned Berkeley experiment is now defunct. I suspect the warehouse space may be used for a motorcycle escort business, or maybe it houses the leftover tapes of a now shuttered video store.
It was my girlfriend, now my wife, who suggested that I might try out this intern-teaching program. I could get my credential while I got paid to be a teacher, eliminating my biggest excuse about having to go back to school and stop working. Work and go to school while you're teaching school. That was fourteen years ago. I have now been a teacher longer than I worked at a video store, installed office furniture, and managed a book warehouse combined. Have I at last arrived at my career?
Be careful what you wish for, since that sucking sound you hear is the education budget, and the swirling vortex of layoffs is coming for those of us who might be shaken loose. The young ones. The old ones. The ones who were on their way out anyway. The ones who are now considered superfluous. So I'm working on my resume, in case I fall into any of those categories.
And my mind goes back to four jobs ago, when I worked for Target. I unloaded trucks. It was a very zen experience. We sorted items by department and put them on pallets until we reached the back of the trailer. Then we were done. Target just opened a store in Oakland. Maybe I'll drop by and put in an application. But I don't want to be the reason they go out of business.