[speedy]

Yep, sounds like these two were spending it faster than they made it when the getting was good. It still doesn't make sense to me how you could have the capacity to make a quarter of a million one year and only 25 thousand the next. You don't think the Times would lie to us, do you?

[Poohbah]

Yep, sounds like these two were spending it faster than they made it when the getting was good. It still doesn't make sense to me how you could have the capacity to make a quarter of a million one year and only 25 thousand the next. You don't think the Times would lie to us, do you?

Is "Jill Andresky Fraser" Jayson Blair's pen name?

[Go Gordon]

Yep, sounds like these two were spending it faster than they made it when the getting was good.

Sounds like a couple of coke heads.

[kezekiel]

Yep, sounds like these two were spending it faster than they made it when the getting was good. It still doesn't make sense to me how you could have the capacity to make a quarter of a million one year and only 25 thousand the next. You don't think the Times would lie to us, do you?

I'll withhold comment on their spending, but I can tell you that thirty-fifty something professionals, if their sector crashes as tech did, may find it very difficult indeed to get jobs that normally go to younger or less experienced workers. Employers generally don't like to employ people who are totally over-qualified, no matter how desperate they may be for work. So, paradoxically, it can be just as hard to find a McJob as it is to find a job in your current field.

By the way, when the tech crash wiped out my career (both in components trading, which was my primary income, and tech writing, which was my secondary income), at one point I took a job cleaning grocery stores on graveyard shifts so that I could leave my days open for job interviews. One position I spent six months interviewing for just before the company imposed a hiring freeze.

Being out in the cold changes your perspective. Things are okay for us now--we are making ends meet, thank God--but we are still making only a third of what we were at our peak. Don't flippantly dismiss the trauma if you haven't gone through it yourself. It sucks.