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I am reminded of the song by Miranda Lambert that says, “Come on, let’s take a picture. The kind you got to shake.”
Recently, I have had a few conversations with people about how basic life used to be in the past. How you knew where to go, and how to do something — and if you didn’t, odds are someone you knew did. Not only that but if you needed to buy a used car, check for the latest event or upcoming yard sale and even look for your next new local job, there was only one place to go that had all the information you needed. The local newspaper.
I miss those days. I still remember getting my first job as a teenager and looking it up through the newspaper’s classifieds. If there was anything you needed to buy or a new job you needed to find, the local newspaper was your one-stop shop to do it. Right now, I know several people who could benefit from this simplicity.
Nowadays, in order to find a job, there are countless websites to look for a job on. Not only that, but every site and every employer has different setup criteria for the applicant to follow before even speaking to a person on the phone or face to face. No wonder the jobless people in America are more times than not discouraged and fighting an uphill battle.
The simplicity of opening up your town’s newspaper and figuring out what new business is hiring, going there and turning in a resume is long gone. Now, people spend hours on a computer and hardly ever get the opportunity to talk to someone in order to know if their application was ever received. When people ask you, “Have you been looking for a job?” More times than not you are not exactly sure how to answer. Yes, you have spent countless hours online scouring limitless sites at the hope of landing your next great role in the business world. Although, how many people actually hear back from half the people they spend hours sending resumes to? The answer to that question is probably smaller than we think.
Not only that, when you move to a new town across the United States, or maybe even just in the state next door, how are you supposed to know what businesses are in the new town you moved to, let alone if they are hiring? The simple days of the past seem better than ever before as I watch countless people smacking their heads against their computers and most likely wishing they could just turn to the classifieds like before, pick up the phone and talk to a live person.
The way I came into my current position here at the Jessamine Journal was a lot like this, but has a much nicer ending. After taking a leave from my former position at the Anderson News and briefly debating working as a school teacher, I came to realize all too quickly how much I still longed for the walls of a newsroom. Happening across the job opening in Nicholasville, I was excited and quickly applied. A whole 10 days went by before I received a phone call, and I was honestly starting to think I would never hear from anyone. When I did, I agreed to an interview later that week and was surprised when my now current boss held up a pre-typed out cover letter sent from the online database I applied for stating, “I am interested in this position. Please call me.”
That was it! No resume. Not the cover letter I spent hours crafting. Nothing! Still, he took a chance and made that phone call, and boy am I glad he did. Oh, he got the correct resume and cover letter after our first meeting, but I still think back to that day and the others out there looking for a new job having to apply online and hoping they get a call back, or maybe just that all the information they have spent hours sending online actually gets to the person they are trying to reach.
If that is you, don’t be discouraged. God will put you where you are supposed to be regardless, even if your new boss takes a chance on you from some pre-generated cliche in one of the many job sites systems.
But, oh how nice it would be if things were simpler like they used to be.

Brittany Fuller is the community editor of The Jessamine Journal and Jessamine Life magazine. She can be reached at brittany.fuller@jessaminejournal.com.