With increased downsizing and more online options – and now the pandemic – US business places don’t need notary publics like they once did. Unable to find work, over 100,000 of them have been forced to move into a notary shelter
“It’s a desperate situation,” says Norma Halling, of Rescue Notaries of America, an organization that encourages companies needing notary services to rescue one from over 2000 shelters across the US.
In 1998, over 21.44 million notary publics were actively employed. Today there are just 785,000. Many former notaries have tried to make livings in other fields, but few are successful because they find it difficult to adjust to a livelihood where a personalized stamp is not required.
“These are people who dedicated their lives to serving the public as state-appointed impartial witnesses performing a variety of official fraud-deterrent acts related to the signing of important documents,” says Halling. “They don’t know how to park cars or fix toasters.”
Though notaries are treated humanely in the shelters, most long for homes in corporate workplaces. Halling is proud of the fact that over 11,000 have been placed in the past five years.
Tom Winston of Spokane is one of them: “I tried other jobs like mixing cement and cost containment analysis but I couldn’t get the hang of them,” he says. After two years in a shelter he’d resigned himself to living there permanently – until the day he met Winona Harks, HR Vice President of local law firm Peterson-Weeks.
“I saw him behind the fence with this look on his face like the saddest notary public there’s ever been,” she says. “So I paid the fee, brought him back to the office and he’s been happily stamping and signing ever since.”
”
