It Helps to Have Friends in High Places…

Wow. That was one lucky unemployed engineer whose wife happened to be hanging out at Google+ when President Obama popped in and, to make a short story even shorter, promised to help find him a job. Details are in this MarketWatch story by Greg Robb.

President Barack Obama jumped into a new social media format on Monday and, as if he doesn't have enough to do, ended up promising a worried spouse to help find a job for her unemployed husband.

Obama got the assignment during a live-streamed interview organized by Google Plus, the online search giant's new social networking site.

The forum was designed to show off Google Plus' new “Hangout” feature, where several friends can video chat together.

“Industry tells me they don't have enough highly-skilled engineers. If your husband is in that field, we should get his resume and I will forward it,” Obama told Jennifer Weddel of Fort Worth, Texas.
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Obama seemed surprised to hear that a semiconductor engineer was unemployed.“I will follow up on this,” Obama said.

Well, hopefully he's a “highly-skilled” (and highly-degreed) engineer and not just one of those folks who call themselves an engineer because they once manned a technical support phone line for Microsoft or somesuch. I can't imagine what it would be like to still be working my old cubicle job – it's coming up on five years now since I left that behind and, as each year goes by, it seems as though it's another three years in the past.