SXSW 2010 
What’s the Big Idea? 
"I Had a Great Future Behind Me"
This winter, as headlines around the country trumpeted the comeback of the economy, 47-year-old Jost Lunstroth entered his eighth month without a job. Like thousands of other formerly successful Texans, he's found himself mired and humiliated in the harrowing new world of unemployment— with no end in sight.
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Adjusting to each other, the Lunstroths, like most couples, fell into a pattern. Rebecca, the pragmatist, became the stable one, the spouse whose corporate job provided financial stability. Jost, irreverent and excitable, was then free to pursue a riskier entrepreneurial strategy, hoping for a big payoff down the road. When Rebecca was transferred to New Orleans, for instance, Jost returned to the college education he'd abandoned in Houston, interned at IBM, and talked his way into a night job with a prominent catering firm. When Shell transferred Rebecca to Southern California, Jost graduated from Cal State, sold computer systems, and became the associate director of the Orange County Medical Association. He kept that job for five years, teaching himself about the Internet on the eve of the tech boom. "We were one of the first county medical associations with a Web site," he told me over coffee one day, with the conviction of a man who had spent too much time reciting the high points of his résumé. In 1998, after a stint in Connecticut—Oxford Health Plans, Bayer Pharmaceuticals—the Lunstroths were happily returned to Houston by Shell. Jost got a job marrying Halliburton's Internet presence with that of Dresser Industries after the two companies merged.
Within a decade or so, then, the Lunstroths had hoisted themselves into the upper middle class. Their daughter, Emily, and son, Jack, wanted for little. They had a lovely three-thousand-square-foot restored home in Woodland Heights, near downtown, circa 1910, with a generous front porch, a modern kitchen, a Jacuzzi in the master bath, and plenty of room for the kids. The mortgage was a stretch, but Rebecca was advancing at Shell, and Jost had an offer that looked even more promising than his job at Halliburton.
It was a pivotal moment, though no one could see it then. At just about the time, in Jost's words, "that things were getting freaky," he jumped to a dot-com. It faltered, so he left to open his own business, called ContractorAccess, which was basically a virtual project manager. (Builders could buy products, financial planning, and so on online.) Jost raised $250,000 in seed money in the first few months of 2000, but then the Internet bubble burst, and the business stalled. Jost paid off ContractorAccess's debts, closed it in the fall of that year, and didn't look back. He didn't think he'd have a problem rejoining the corporate world.
He was wrong. In the time it took Jost to close his business—from late fall to early spring 2001—unemployment in Texas jumped from around 3.8 percent to 4.3. Jost looked for work unsuccessfully for three months and finally had to file for unemployment. The Lunstroths, like most American families, couldn't cover their expenses on one income.
As it turned out, this first visit to the world of unemployment was more like a three-day weekend than an extended stay. Jost was there just long enough to learn that filing for benefits had been upgraded since the tech boom. He didn't have to go downtown to stand in line with the shuffling, defeated poor; he could keep in touch either online or by phone, assuring a bored operator that, yes, he was out of work and continuing to look for it.
Within a few weeks, Jost found work with a small company hired by a division of Exxon to expand and improve its Internet presence. He was back in a suit, back on airplanes, reintegrated into the working world. The Exxon contract was also a lucky break for Rebecca. For fourteen years, she had been the family's economic rock, but she was tired of that role. She felt like a corporate drone and wanted to find a way to make a difference in people's lives. Fortunately—for Rebecca—Shell was trying to cut costs by offering early-retirement packages in 2001. She could take one and find herself while Jost took over the heavy lifting. The Lunstroths met with a financial adviser and set up a budget for living on one income. Their realtor assured them that they could clear $150,000 profit on their house, enough to buy a smaller home in a more modest neighborhood. There was even money to send Emily to private school; they worried that she'd get lost in Houston's crowded public middle schools. "It was the first time in our marriage that we'd ever planned anything," Jost told me, allowing irony to steal into his voice. "We'd just lurched through life and done okay before then."
In April 2002 they put their house on the market. Rebecca left Shell the first week in June, intending to start the University of Texas Medical School's medical humanities program in the fall. Grateful and proud, Jost threw a party in her honor. Very soon after, Jost's boss called him in and told him Exxon had canceled the contract. After a year and a half among the gainfully employed, he was out of work again.
From the summer of 2002 through the following spring, I imagined Jost as a character in a darkly comic sitcom, like Homer Simpson (one of his favorite characters) starring in a Twilight Zone episode. This was because Jost kept up a good front, cracking jokes and telling zany stories at his own expense, a shtick that diverted from the principle narrative, the one in which he was slowly going broke. Because he migrated toward good news, each new opportunity started with great and contagious promise.
Team Encounter, for instance, was a company devoted to commercial space ventures. It had a $6 million grant from NASA and the backing of David Hannah, one of the original space privateers. The company's great innovation was a giant sail in outer space that would be used for various business purposes. Jost was hired to create an Internet identity that would inspire customers to send everything from inspirational messages to cremains into the void—where, for a fee, they would be stored on Team Encounter's football-field-size floating sail, forever. ("Join celebrities and more than 100,000 other people from 565 countries in this mission to the stars," declared the promotional material, "for as little as $24.95.") But it wasn't long—six months—before a major backer pulled in the reins, and Jost was laid off with two weeks' notice.
Luckily, Jost found a new job during that time with a foreign medical researcher who spoke in heavily accented, excitable English. He too had legitimate support, this time from prominent doctors at the Texas Medical Center and the Texas Heart Institute. Jost was hired to create an online presence that would promote the researcher's new technique for preventing heart disease. He had a grand, global vision that included a simple test that could be used in grocery stores, much like the blood pressure monitors available today. But as before, Jost's passion for innovation—"The work was cool as hell," he told me—blinded him to potential problems, specifically that he had landed in a high-tech sweatshop. No one on the staff was being paid to work around the clock, as the researcher demanded. When Jost complained that he had not yet received his promised contract, which guaranteed his paycheck, the researcher responded with angry e-mails questioning Jost's dedication to the cause. After six weeks with no contract and increasingly abusive behavior, Jost quit. (He was paid eventually, after discussing his situation with executives at the Texas Heart Institute. The researcher left the medical center at around the same time.)
It was May of 2003, and Jost had run out of lucky breaks. The tech world he had once loved had turned on him. He had no income, and neither did his wife. The Houston real estate market, like the economy, was slumping, and their beloved home had become an albatross. The realtor hosted multiple showings but drew only one offer, a lowball. Maybe this was a good thing, Jost told himself in the middle of the night; if someone actually bought the house, he wasn't sure they could get a loan for a new one.
He returned to the unemployment rolls, scoured Web sites like Yahoo's Hotjobs and monster.com for work, and tried to avoid the worst recruiters, the owners of "body shops" who'd try to hijack his résumé off the Internet to send to prospective employers, hoping to cadge a fee if Jost got a job. "All we unemployed souls can do is send our résumés electronically to some virtual place and hope that it stands out from the other thousands that have been sent in by others," he wrote in his blog. "No one to call, no one to tell us, falsely perhaps, but better than nothing, that our résumé is on file and that someone will be in touch."
One night, Jost overheard his daughter describing him to a friend as her "computer-geek father who does not have a job." He wasn't sure which hurt more, being a geek or being jobless.
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