As of last week, I have been officially unemployed. This has been something I've never experienced before in my life since I was 16. Even my first year in college, I worked up until my move-in day for the dorm and then had a work-study job that gave me enough money to do activities.

As of last spring semester, I started applying to nearly every place near my signed apartment downtown since I don't have a car; most of the places downtown are restaurants.

My whole predicament is that I don't have a car so I'm limited to where I can apply. Every place told me no. At the time, I was told it was because I wasn't 21 and couldn't pour my own alcohol when serving, and they want their servers to be able to.

Come fall, I start applying to the same places again, and I get told no because I don't have any serving experience.

My loyal five years and my grocery store working the customer service desk means nothing to these people because I don't have serving experience.

It doesn't matter that I know how to sweet talk customers, and how to appease them when things go wrong, I don't have serving experience so they don't want me.

It's not like I can work at a chain restaurant and get that experience easy and then work at a locally owned one by my apartment because I don't have a car.

And it sucks because I am such a hard worker, I learn so quickly; if they were to call my previous employers they would find out that I worked six different jobs at my place of work because I'm a hard worker and quick learner, but they won't take a chance on me because I don't have that experience they're looking for.

It's not even a “career" job I'm chasing after. I'm not complaining about not getting a job in my academic field because I can't get the experience for it. I'm not getting a job that's typically seen as “entry-level" because it's not an industry I started working in during high school.

Our job market is slowly collapsing. Places are scared to hire new people in the industry because they would have to take time to train them instead of throwing them in the first week, and they don't want to waste hours with that.

If I were to apply to a retail store and showed them my resume with my set of skills from working customer service for 5 years, they'd want me in a heartbeat. Because I already know what I'm doing.

These past two weeks to me have made me feel like what I choose to do part-time during high school is what I'm stuck part-timing in for life. It's felt like I'm not allowed to venture off into different industries even if I desperately wanted to.