Susan's story

I was married three times. When I left my last husband I was 43. I had to find a way to make my own living, which I had never done. I'd just gone from one man to another.

I got a job in the West Edmonton Mall and found out I could practically starve to death, being in retail. Then I moved to social services, that kind of volunteer work in which unless you've got a master's degree, you're pretty much up the creek. I got my salary up to $15,000 and that's where I topped.

I said, "Okay, enough of these dead-end things. It's time to go back to school and do something that's going to make some money;" I was 46 when I got to Vancouver, and fantastically depressed. I stayed at the YWCA. I walked the streets; I didn't know a soul - I was sort of half here and psychologically blotto.

So I'm in Vancouver and on UI. That's the symbolic point, the crux. I have to make a decision before the UI runs out. I made stabs at finding jobs. I applied where they sold parts for fuel injection. They ask me, what do you know about fuel injection, and I say "not a thing, but I'm a real fast study." They say "you're kind of funny, but we're not going to hire you."

I went through one of those all-day women's re-entry workshops with Canada Manpower (EIC). There's that one first step when you're practically unconscious, you don't know what you want to do. There were lots of women like me there, it was good and I got tested. It turned out that I should be either a funeral parlor director, a systems analyst or the manager of a fish-packing plant.

So I decided I'd be a systems analyst even though I didn't know what it was. I went and talked to one woman who was a systems analyst and said, "What do you do?" I didn't know anything about computers; they scared me. I asked her, "Is that a good job?" Because it could have been something that I could never dream of doing, but it turned out okay. I mean I still didn't understand what she told me exactly.

Next, I investigated programs around town for computer programming. There's one big school that does computer training, but you don't even deal with a person, you just sit down in front of a monitor, and they charge big bucks. I got in there and they said, "Oh we can get you money; we can do anything." When they promised that everyone of their graduates got jobs, I knew from being over 40 years old, that this was not so.

I investigated every kind of program that would help with funding for someone like me, the re-entry kind of woman. I fell through every crack there was. I was too old, too young, too something.