As a business owner constantly trying to obtain clients, I am active on LinkedIn.

I read many, many posts about editing and about science. I also read many about running one’s own business and about freelancing.

However, in recent weeks, I have seen a new kind of post often showing up in my feed, often near the top when I log in.

These posts are made by people who have been unemployed for a long time and are desperately looking for work because they are down to their last few dollars. Many have families to feed. They are educated people. They are IT folks and engineers and scientists. Many of them describe how hard they have been trying to get a job. They have been pounding the pavement, tailoring their resume for each application, carefully writing their cover letters, and using whatever connections they have. They either hear crickets or hear that they are one of the top five candidates and then are not chosen.

Lately, I have seen such unfortunate souls post links to their GoFundMe pages. This is how desperate they are, and this is how horrible the job market is.

I know how they feel, and I feel their pain.

I was once unemployed for eleven years.

That’s right—YEARS.

I had been a lab technician working for years at a major research university when my principal investigator’s grant funding ended, so I was let go. I knew this was going to happen months before it did, and so I began job hunting early on. I landed a job as a research technologist at a different research university a month after I had been let go from the previous one. I took a HUGE pay cut in the process.

When my three-month probationary period ended, I was informed that the university would not be keeping me around. This was for incredibly ableist reasons (I have mild cerebral palsy), and I was thrown to the wolves.

I went through the process over and over again—the grueling applications, the unsuccessful interviews, the rejection letters—for eleven years before starting Fiedler Editorial. Were it not for my marriage and my husband’s income, I would have become homeless.

Now I have an income again, and I am very grateful for it.

If you come across a post by a desperate job seeker, please, for the love of Pete, repost it. And if you are able, please donate to their GoFundMe page. Nothing in life is guaranteed, and if it’s not you, it could be you someday.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Next weekend will be incredibly packed for me, and so I will not be posting next weekend. I will see you again, dear reader, on March 2.

I often ask myself what I  have accomplished lately just so I can answer that question myself and feel proud of what I have accomplished.

In December and January, I edited two catalogs from an outdoor furniture company. Each one was approximately 122 pages long. One was called “Trade” (it was aimed at institutions, gardens, museums, and such) and the other “Retail” (it targeted residential customers).

The catalogs were sent to me as PDFs and I used Adobe Acrobat to edit them, placing virtual sticky notes wherever there was an issue. I verified the text, the SKU numbers, the prices, and (in the case of Trade) the dimensions of the products. I have to say that the furniture company did an excellent job putting the catalogs together, because neither one had many issues that needed correcting. I finished Trade on January 6 and Retail on January 24 (they were not sent to me consecutively).

Besides putting out its annual catalogs, the furniture company is in the process of revamping the online descriptions of its products. The descriptions for every single product, which are given to me in Word documents, are run by me before they go live on the company website. Besides editing the text, I must also verify each product’s SKU code on the existing website (the codes are not changing). I also have to check product dimensions if they are given in a description.

What is unique about editing these product descriptions is that I was requested to not, repeat, NOT use the Track Changes feature in MS Word, because my liaison at the company believes it makes things too messy. (There’s something to be said for that…) I am currently plugging away at the product descriptions. Some are one or two pages, others 20 or 30, depending on the sizes of the furniture collections.

What have you accomplished lately?