I searched for a career, and found that I was unemployable. I shouldn't have been surprised.
Before I was fired, I had worked in the industry primarily responsibile for causing the Great Recession. Then I spent a "gap season" in Colorado driving guests for a ski resort. (Not to mention my gap year after college, when I worked as a deckhand on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.)
Consequently, the few job interviews I had were like interrogations. "Tell me about your time working in the mortgage industry." "Why did you choose to go to Colorado?" "What were you doing in the Virgin Islands?"
Out of luck, and running out of time, I decided to go back to what had worked before. I returned to the same seasonal job site I used to find work in Colorado. This time I applied for summer jobs and got hired for a position in Alaska as a Commercial Salmon Processor (whatever the hell that was!). The trash cans and discarded pizza crusts would have to wait.
The pay wasn't great, the hours were long, and the work was described as physically demanding. I didn't care. I had no overhead to worry about, since room and board were covered—including three hot meals per day. My employer even offered to pay for my flight from Seattle to Naknek, Alaska (wherever the hell that was!). It sounded too good to be true.
And it was.
