Everyone has some idea of what unemployment is like, especially those who have actually experienced it… But explaining just how deep a mess I was in requires a little background.
By the end of 1997, without my knowing it, my fate had been sealed… Good grief, I have already run into the boundary of my chosen starting point. I will try to keep this short.
I had lost my job, but more importantly I had lost any chance of finding another one that continued my career. A change was more than necessary. Whether it meant a slight change of course or a radical upheaval, I seemed at first to have countless options within reach.
But coming up with something concrete and motivating enough to heal my wounds without diminishing my status, and then finding the energy and resolve to pursue it, proved far more difficult.
Little by little, I was backing myself into a dead end. The life of a stay-at-home father, which I had been forced to lead during those long months without work, brought me little fulfillment, and it gradually deepened my distress.
So when my brother asked me to help with his upcoming renovation, I jumped at the chance despite my lack of enthusiasm for masonry, plastering and plumbing.
His girlfriend’s father had given them a property, a good-sized workshop space that needed to be completely transformed into a proper apartment. The man was well past retirement age, yet no serious buyer had come forward for his mattress-making business.
As the owner of the building, he had begun dismantling the mattress-making business, intending eventually to close it for good.
Before making this gift to my brother and his future wife, the workshop occupied two levels:
- the ground floor
- the first floor
The entire operation first had to be moved to the basement and ground floor. Only then could my brother and I begin laying flooring, fitting drywall and plastering…
Between the Paris I had known as a child and the one where I lived as an adult, there was a particularly striking gulf in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine neighborhood.
Only ten years earlier, every courtyard had been a hive of bustling craftspeople. The decline of the local economy, already underway since the postwar years, was accelerating.
After all, a fashionable restaurant promised far greater returns than keeping an old varnisher’s workshop alive; the prevailing logic of the time always won out.
As we hauled materials, hammered, demolished and drilled, ran yet another extension cord, borrowed the tall stepladder or some other tool, we came into contact with the busy mattress workshop every day. Little by little, it became familiar to me.
One day, the contradiction between this profitable mattress-making business operating at full capacity and its planned disappearance struck me as utterly absurd.
At the end of the road, the employees faced nothing but unemployment, while the owner would lose all the value he had built up.
Then an idea took root, though I cannot say when or how: what if I did something to stop it? Yes, why not? It was a perfectly honorable way out, after all.