When it comes to graduating from college and getting your first job, you are often fed these ideas of, if not grandeur, respectability. You will undoubtedly struggle when you emerge from your dorm-room cocoon into the world of work, but your degree means something. It is your ticket to making your chosen career happen. So, even if your first position entails taking coffee orders from an overpaid boss who has relied on nepotism to get to the top, at least you’re in. Just hang in there, buddy. Eventually someone will notice that you’ve memorized everyone’s latte preferences, and you will get promoted to something less demeaning. Respectability. Even if you are slinging coffee, hoping someone will remember your name, you can still tell your family that you work for [insert ideal company here].
I think I was a bit of a snob when I first graduated from college. I thought the only legit route to working as a writer was to have a
full-time gig at a newspaper or magazine. I never even considered freelancing and, when it was suggested, I turned up my 22-year-old nose at it. Why would I waste my time writing for a publication that pays so little, so seldom, and doesn’t have any benefits? That is not what I deserve. Of course, I told myself this as I applied for every single full-time job on Indeed that I might be qualified for, regardless of whether it set me in the direction I wanted to go career-wise.
This set me off on a path of aimlessness that none of my friends seemed to be experiencing in quite the same way I was. Lots of them still had (and have) jobs working in restaurants or at the mall, but they were either applying to jobs in their field or preparing to enter grad school. I, on the other hand, after 6 months of feverish job-applying on journalismjobs.com, had given up. It was then that I started trying out new careers so varied that sometimes it seemed I was trying out a completely new identity each round.*
The list of jobs I’ve had since I graduated is surprisingly long, considering that I am 31. This is a list of those jobs, though some company names have been omitted to protect the innocent. These have been criticized as “not CV-worthy,” but they definitely had that whole “school of life” thing going on - the best antidote to unearned self-importance that I know of.
Customer Service Representative – I worked in the returns department. Well, I was the returns department for an online company that serves the U.S. and Canada. Let me tell you, until you’ve talked a woman in a remote island off the coast of Alaska, who is hoping for timely shipping of her dream kitchen set (it may never happen), off a ledge, or the most impolite Midwesterner I’ve ever heard in my life question your right to a lunch break, you haven’t learned just how mean the public can be when they don’t have to look at your face. It also taught me that I’m kind of good at talking people down (when I don’t let my temper get the best of me). That truly horrid-sounding Minnesotan with the discontinued pillows talked to me a dozen times. In the end, she dejectedly said that we must all hate her, and that I was trying my best. I imagined her life – she’s just sitting there waiting for the perfect design for the perfect pillows that would cover a patio set during the short Minnesota summer, and god-damn it if it didn’t teach me a little something about empathy.
Vintage Shop Store Clerk – One day during my time as a CSR, I walked into a vintage store that immediately made me feel like I had found my people, a tribe of weirdos that made me feel at home. It was a vintage store on Government Street in Baton Rouge. I walked in and found a cool-looking chic behind the counter. She was partially hidden by a chandelier draped with 70s costume jewelry, and I fell in love with the place immediately. I got an application, had an interview during which the owner asked if I would be weirded out by the nudie pics her husband kept in his office, said, “No, I would not,” and got hired a few days later.
I took a substantial pay cut to work at this place, but I found that my ineptitude as a CSR (coupled with the swamped feeling I always had while working there) made it feel like the right move. In so many ways, it was. I went to garage sales and found cool stuff that I could sell there as one of the dealers. I was living my life like someone in that Macklemore “Thrift Shop” video before it was a thing, and it was fucking awesome! It felt right for me, all the way. But, alas, I was so very poor doing this. I had an internal struggle, trying to weigh my love for it with the nagging feeling that I should be more responsible with my career path. Eventually my practical side kicked in and I ditched my job organizing vintage Playboy mags and dressing 40-year-old mannequins to do something with more financial incentives. I did make lasting friendships there, and it was the weirdest place I have ever worked, a statement that the owners would find complementary.**
Sales Associate for a Commercial Cleaning Company – My position entailed telemarketing on Mondays and driving around in my…we’ll call it Cleaning Queen…car for the rest of the week, selling cleaning contracts to business owners. The people who did the cleaning were franchise owners. Every one of them I met were wonderful people, but to talk to some former customers, it was a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes I would randomly drop by a business in my Cleaning Queen button-up and my leather organizer full of pamphlets, only to be chased away by a secretary who claimed we stole their computers.
Thankfully, it wasn’t always like that. I was often invited in by businesses who let me walk through their whole establishment, measuring the square footage with a device that one guy compared to one of those Fisher Price corn popper toys. I got to drive around Southeast Louisiana all day, exploring places I would never otherwise have an excuse to enter, and I liked that part of it. One day the back window of my CQ car inexplicably exploded, so I got a new car. Unlike the last one, it did not have a GPS tracking device in it. I’m not going to lie; I might have driven to some pretty outlandish places where I secretly knew there would be very few businesses.
There are two major impressions left on my memory from my time there. The first one is the time I was driving around in my CQ car and decided to help a turtle across the road. It hissed at me and pissed all over my CQ ensemble. The second thing is doing a new-hire training session at HQ and having to watch a video of CQ-clad actors slow motion running down the street to “Eye of the Tiger.” No one laughed. These were not my people. I also remember that we couldn’t wear boots because the regional director found them whorish. Hm.
This is only Part One of my post-undergrad work decisions. If you are interested in learning more, subscribe to my blog. You will learn about the Bizarro World that could be my CV if I didn’t know how to censor my life for the comfort of others.
* Yeah, I know…a job is not your identity. But, what do you expect when you are asked from the time you enter school what you want to be when you grow up? We are not exactly encouraged to say, “Um, I want to be true to myself and learn who I am as an individual, and to use my talents to best serve my community and my world in whatever way I am able.” You’d be voted Most Likely to Live Under a Bridge in the most fucked-up yearbook ever.
** On my last day, the owner gave me a gift and said, “To remember the weirdness.” When I got home and unwrapped it, I saw that it was the ceramic fish with the face of a baby I had been wondering at for days. Close friends of mine will know it as Fish Baby, and it is still on display in my home.
Comentarios