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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The interviewer asked about his experience; she was worried that Jost had never managed a large online store before. He explained that at Team Encounter, he had worked to get as many people as possible to buy the online space kit. The woman on the other end of the line grew quiet. What, exactly, did Team Encounter do again? Jost stared out the window and gathered his thoughts. "It was basically a sail in space," he said matter-of-factly. "It's just a fascinating story, and the vision is just incredible. People around the world purchased our kits." Then Jost reminded her that he had also consulted for Halliburton and Bayer.
Well, the woman said, she was very excited after talking with him. Jost said he was excited after talking with her. "From what I've heard about you guys, there's a lot of room for pushing the envelope in terms of creativity," he said. He paced the floor while he spoke, but his step was lighter. "Yeah, I understand that it's a short-term engagement and you want to be sure nothing goes seriously wrong in that period of time," he added.
The woman on the other end of the line promised to move Jost to the final round the minute she got off the phone. Jost hung up, thrilled. There was just one more hurdle between himself and a job, albeit a temporary one. He would have to meet the executive he was scheduled to replace. "It's up to her to decide how I will fit in," he said. "She's going to decide, 'Is he gonna screw things up for me?'"
Taking nothing for granted, Jost returned to BJM for more networking. He met with about sixty people in one of the Sunday school classrooms, a group of unemployed men and women who could have been mistaken for the PTA of a prosperous suburban high school. This session was supposed to facilitate networking. Everyone stood up and sold themselves in what BJMers call a 30-Second Commercial: "I'm so and so, and I have a proven record of meeting goals," for example, or "I build business solutions for large companies." Then, if someone knew someone at a company someone else was interested in, they were supposed to speak up, and the contact was listed on a white board. That day Jost served as the group's recording secretary.
Their stories were a microcosm of American unemployment: Tech people were out of work because of the industry's contraction. A kid in his early twenties needed contacts at Wal-Mart because he was a toymaker and had heard the corporate giant was going to start making its own. "They'll own that soon too," someone cracked. An out-of-work engineer predicted more jobs in oil and gas. "Now is the time to get positioned in the energy business. Don't give up on it," he urged. A nicely dressed middle-aged woman announced that Halliburton was hiring people to go to Iraq for $100 an hour for six-month stays. Her hiring tip—an inspirational requirement for these sessions—was "to stay open to new ideas," but no one seemed open to Baghdad yet.
Finally, it was Jost's turn. He'd been standing at the board for the past hour, making connections for others. Now he clutched a bright-green marker, pushed up his sleeves, and gave it his all. "I'm Jost Lunstroth, and I develop effective solutions for communication challenges," he said, rat-a-tat-tat. Then he paraphrased a recommendation from a co-worker during the days he'd worked steadily at Halliburton: "I can walk into a room and see that there is one guy with vanilla ice cream, another with whipped cream, another with cherries, and one guy with hot fudge. Each is happy by himself. But I can envision that with the right container, these guys could get together and make a sundae." The group leader nodded approvingly. Were there companies Jost would like to target for his job search? he asked.
"Anyone who has money in the bank," Jost answered.
That night, he logged on to BJM's chat room and posted a notice. "I am a bit embarrassed doing this, but here goes . . . Can you think of me over the next few days? As a Jew, I cannot rightfully ask for your prayers, but I can ask for your positive thoughts and energy. After being unemployed for six months without an interview and the bank account getting very small and the stress growing, I have two interviews this week . . . One job is as an analyst for a local outfit and the other is a fill-in e-business manager for a multinational company. The latter will last around four months, until the person returns from maternity leave. But both have benefits. Be nice to know that I can take the kids to the doctor if they get sick."
A few days later, he was turned down for the Questia job as overqualified. Then, Rebecca called from the parking lot of Emily's school. Their twelve-year-old Mitsubishi Montero had been acting up—the warning lights on the dashboard had been blinking like terrorist threats—and now the car wouldn't move at all. Rebecca listed the symptoms, and Jost deduced that the problem was the fan belt. Like any competent husband and father, he drove the other car to AutoZone and bought one.
He was fine until he got to the school parking lot and found himself surrounded by all those Mercedes, Escalades, and Lexuses, and those thirteen-year-old girls, the exceedingly pretty ones with their impeccable orthodontia and unmistakable, unshakable, out-of-my-way confidence. Jost moved toward the hood, but he couldn't bring himself to open it. If he opened the hood, he would be revealing his underleveraged status to the world. I'm broke and I have to fix this beat-up car in front of my daughter's school! If he opened the hood, the buttoned-down, briefcase-wielding, once competent Jost would vanish. Forever.
He called a tow truck. "Whoa, there's some serious damage here," the mechanic said when he arrived. The good news was that the problem was the crankshaft, not the fan belt—Jost couldn't have fixed it if he'd wanted to. The bad news was that he had no idea how he would pay for the repairs. The trussed, rusted Mitsubishi was dragged away, and Jost, being Jost, spared himself the metaphor.
INTERVIEWING WHILE UNEMPLOYED, JOST THOUGHT, was like trying to pick up a girl in a bar. When you are there specifically to pick up girls, they can sense it and avoid you like the plague. But women can't resist someone who's already attached. Jost ruminated on this notion while he drove the fifteen miles to his final interview, a drive he'd make gladly if he got the job at TI.
The woman he might temporarily replace was in her mid-thirties, and harried. She escorted Jost into a tiny conference room crammed with a table and chairs. A window looked out into a hallway, and her eyes kept darting past Jost's to the people passing by. He felt a slight crack in his psyche, a fissure opening in his confidence. The woman had wanted to meet at 1:30; fine, Jost had told her, but he'd have to leave by 2:30 to pick up Jack from school. No problem, she'd said—the interview shouldn't take more than 45 minutes.
But she was a talker. Jost started sneaking glances at his watch as his departure time approached. She hadn't asked him one question about himself by 2:00. Jost's mind wandered to his worries: Should he stop the interview to call Rebecca to fetch Jack? What if the interview went way past its scheduled time and Jack was left to wander alone on the playground? When Jost tuned back in, the woman was droning on about Excel spreadsheets. 2:30. Politely, he tried to break in but couldn't get her to focus on him. Was she talking about Excel because she was already training him? Or was she just blathering because she'd already decided against him?
It was 2:45. She was still going. "I'm sorry," he said. "But I have to leave." He pushed back from the table, stood up, and tried to salvage the interview with a trick he'd learned at BJM. Jost asked her to list his strengths and weaknesses—in other words, to share any concerns about hiring him so he could address them and leave her with what he called "a positive takeaway." Well, she said, Jost hadn't really managed a large online store before, but he did have every other skill they needed.
He left feeling clueless. It's not like I'm a fill-in CEO, he told himself. It's a middle-management job. Then he realized he didn't know whether the job was even middle management or not.
It didn't matter. By the time a week had passed, Jost knew the job wasn't his; he wouldn't be filling in for the fill-in. The recruiter never called to tell him so in person. "She just sent me an e-mail," he said.
At least Jost had a few new prospects. His neighbor, also unemployed, had started a business selling outdoor lighting. He thought Jost would make a great salesman for the product. Jost also had a line on a Web job at the University of Houston and the possibility of a tech job in Fort Worth, though they wouldn't pay his travel expenses to the interview. "All this good stuff is going to happen at once," he assured me. I sincerely hoped he was right.
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