Central Park

A security guard company on 42nd Street near 5th Avenue.

Don't waste your money at this place on 42nd and 5th.

For the past three years or so, I've been on the lookout for a new job, trying almost anything. Sending resumes and cover letters online, going to job fairs, calling people, calling my old job, all for naught. Usually, when I get an actual response, it turns out to not quite be a real job ... just a commissions thing, or some kind of pyramid scheme where I would never really make any money, and maybe I'm supposed to pay them about a hundred dollars for "training". Craigslist is full of these listings for security guard jobs -- "Jobs available!", "Hiring Immediately!", "No Experience Necessary!", "Will Train!"

I unfortunately became a victim of this myself back in 2009. Desperate to find a job, I signed up for a three-day class at NYC Trailblazers out in Jamaica, Queens. Pay $320, take this class, and you'll be hired by Monday, they said. They were very accommodating to me, very willing to help me out and get me hired, which most of the time is a dead give-away that they're full of it. Any time a company wants to help somebody off the street because he seems like a good guy, that usually means somewhere along the way they're going to ask you for your money.

So, needless to say, I never got hired, and neither did any of the about thirty other people who signed up for that class. The class had all kinds, young and old, just looking for a decent job ... down on their luck. After I had taken these classes, the instructor proceeded to jerk me around for a while, sending me from one place to another, none of which had any jobs. Instead, I was sent from one agency to another, and each one had a deposit or two. Eighty dollars here, a hundred dollars there.

The last one I went to was on 42nd Street near 5th Avenue, right before Thanksgiving. After sitting there for about an hour, a big burly guy with a badge around his neck took me into his office and kept saying to me, "We're in the middle of a recession, I want to put you to work!" and "You seem like a good guy, I want to help you out! There's an ATM upstairs, go get me ninety dollars!" By the end of meeting, he wanted to take over a thousand bucks from me! Naturally, I didn't have that much money in the bank, or what would I even be doing there? He mentioned that I needed to take such classes as "Handcuffing", and "Homeland Security", and more nonsense like that I can't seem to remember.

These places prey on the poor and unemployed, claiming that the security industry is growing at about 500 percent a day or some absurd amount due to 9/11. This is what they do for a living ... take money from unemployed people? That's pretty low. During these tough economic times, a lot of us in the city are struggling to find work, so I just wanted to put the word out to not take these places seriously, and don't waste your money on them. They prey on the poor and unemployed, and exploit the memory of September 11th.