Kevin Corkhill readily admits that he has no idea what to do with the rest of his life. At age fifty he feels disconcertingly adrift, not knowing whether to attempt another career, move to another state, or return to college. He has been unemployed for more than a year, ever since General Motors closed the giant assembly plant where he had worked for thirteen years, causing him huge worries about how he, his wife and eight-year-old son would get by. Overnight, Corkhill went from being a highly valued ‘absentee relief man’ at the G.M. plant he was expert at doing more than twenty different jobs so he could fill in for workers who didn’t show up to being a largely invisible nobody, sitting at home day after lonesome day, with no job except washing the dishes. ‘I feel like a dinosaur,’ Corkhill says. ‘I’m only fifty years old, but I really don’t see a place for me.’
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