A year ago, Jose Carlos Cavazos was enthusiastic about his new career in telecommunications and his position with Nortel Networks. Now he’s throwing mail on the night shift at a U.S. Postal Service distribution center for $13 an hour.
Katz, who has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from San Diego State University, gave up in October and landed a job shelving moisturizer and shower gels for Bath & Body Works in San Francisco.
“It was quite a contrast from even a year before, when recruiters were swarming like locusts,” said Muldoon, who went to prestigious prep schools and has master’s degrees from Columbia and Harvard. “This time, the phone was just dead–so much so that I checked the batteries on the answering machine whenever I came home because there were never messages…I was feeling bored, and there was this sense of purposelessness. I had no moorings.”
The 30-year-old Lakewood, Calif., resident realized that his network and computer upgrade start-up couldn’t generate enough cash to pay his new mortgage in October, so he took a temporary job several hundred miles away cleaning crud from an oil refinery in Richmond, Calif.
