Fuck Work, Unless You’re Hiring

Weeeeeeeell, I’ve got some good news and some not-so-good news. And then some more not-so-good news. Let’s go in reverse order:

I did not get the job I thought I was going to get. During my interview, it was strongly implied that I would get a second interview. Instead, they’ve elected not to acknowledge my emails. So, there’s that.

So now, having run through all my friends who have friends who might be hiring, I’m ready for the next rite of passage for this generation: I’m moving back in with Dad after Giant Camel’s and my lease in Philadelphia is up at the end of July. So, there’s that. I’d talk about how I feel about all of this, but since most of our readers are within five years of my age, I’m going to assume you know how I feel.

Now, the silver linings:

-       I’m going to keep looking for jobs, mostly so I can say I’ve been looking, BUT having already mentally processed the defeat of having to move in with family I’m going to concentrate on writing during my last while in Philadelphia. I have my eye on a couple of moneymakers (greeting cards and the much-discussed romance novel), but I also plan to do more blogging, and I have a few more projects in mind. This will be good for me, in that a) I won’t go crazy, b) one of these might make money, and c) then I can hold my tattered little manuscripts out to my father, stepmother, readers, and potential employers and declare, “See? I wasn’t just playing Playstation and crash-dieting and crying! I created.”

-       I get to go to the Texas State Fair in the fall, and to the Chickasaw Indian Casino for my birthday. I’m pretty sure that for my eighth birthday my father took me to an arcade and gave me some money to feed into loud machines covered in blinking lights for a minimal shot at reward. Twenty years are as an evening gone…

-       I get to dish about the crappy temp job I had last winter. I withheld it because I didn’t want prospective employers to find the blog, read me aggressively sassing a job, and decide I was unfit. Now I am exponentially less sanguine about prospective employers even looking at my resume, let alone my cover letter, let alone checking to see if I even HAVE a blog and wrote three books, so what the hell. For months I’ve had little bits of paper floating around with notes about that job, and now I can throw them away.

So, as you might remember from my post about Dawn Davenport being my spirit animal, I worked at a large, poorly run tech company. To cover my ass I won’t name it, but the name is as stupid as “CompuCom,” so should you draw any conclusions from that… My job was to load mobile phone apps onto mobile phones, see if they crashed and were in the correct language, rinse, repeat. Theoretically, this might have been a fun job, but. Most of the apps weren’t in English, resulting in a lot of “fun” with Google translate trying to find the keyboard shortcut for those letters only one language uses, a la “Ѭ.” Even before I began, random layoffs raged – the guy who trained me went a week before I did, which is incomprehensible. So there was a strong slasher-movie aspect – every day you’d show up and someone else would be gone. And most of the remaining people were either assholes, lunatics, or some new and exotic combination. So imagine me getting up at 4:30, taking a two-hour bus ride, then sitting quietly in a freezing office writing up, in extreme detail, why an application (we did not test APPS on PHONES but rather APPLICATIONS on DEVICES) to find a nearby bus station in Stockholm didn’t seem to work, but I couldn’t be sure because it was all in Swedish, all the while having no job security and the worst English-speaking coworkers I’ve ever had. Also, we had to flag things that might offend Islamic sensibilities or annoy the Chinese government. I can honestly say I find both of those things extremely difficult to predict. So you can see why I needed to try to mine it for humor.

Some of the best apps:

-       A body mass calculator that, if you typed in the information wrong, gave the reading “INFINITE BMI LOL YOU ARE OBESE”

-       An ovulation tracker that you could set to text your husband when your eggs were ready: “Honey, get home quick!” I got in trouble for not flagging this as potentially offensive to Islamic sensibilities.

-       A numerology “thing” that told me that, according to my name’s numerical value (verbatim), “looks like you should be peep-year-old aunt bath bar next door.” No clue about Islamic sensibilities, as usual, but this offended the hell out of me.

-       I plugged something in wrong and got an error message reading “OPERATION ATTEMPTED ON SOMETHING THAT IS NOT A SOCKET.” Of all the metaphors for my sex life…

-       A soundboard of clips and sound effects from “Young Frankenstein.” I thought I had my headphones in while I was testing it – turns out they weren’t pushed in all the way and Madeleine Kahn was just screaming away for fifteen minutes. The fact that no one mentioned this to me tells me all you need to know about that office.

And my co-workers: One guy wore a purple-and-leopard-print Santa hat around all day, indoors, in January; on guy ostentatiously backed into a parking space in a VOLKSWAGEN JETTA (if you’re parking in a LOT, your car isn’t good enough to do that); and my supervisor typed interoffice messages in this font. Everyone was queer for sanitary wipes and used them many, many times daily – on their hands, on their workstations, on each other for all I knew – as though they knew I was deliberately not washing my hands after I peed. A poster in the breakroom (it had no chairs in it, but hooray for posters!) advised us that we could donate blood at the nearby Fluid Processing Center.

Fluid. Processing. Center. That’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? Crazy John’s Discount Fluids. Flow-n-Go EZ Fluids. Fluids r’ Us. And then when it gentrifies: the Fluidry.

So in short: fuck work, unless you’re hiring in the North Texas area. I’m available August 1^st.

That’s Why It’s Called Work

So, I got a day job, and I have a bad attitude about it. The ultra-abbreviated version is that between when I interviewed and when I started, Giant Camel got fired over some bullshit. (He worked at the same place.) Aside from my natural partisanship, the whole situation was objectively bullshit, so by the time I started at – let’s call it CompuCom – I was already tired of it. I was genuinely going to try to be thankful and have a good attitude, because I’d needed a job for a while and because so many other people need work, but – fuck it.

I hit my first personal hurdle before I even technically started. There were four of us in the orientation group, and wouldn’t you know it? We got The Office Conversation Guy. You know that guy who insists on having a conversation during lag time instead of letting everyone sit quietly with their own thoughts? He’s sitting there just going on about operating systems, and how no one makes palm pilots anymore, and he has two monitors on his home computer, and “the cloud,” and data encryption… I can’t add to any of this, but since I’m in the room, I’m In The Conversation, and for some reason it’s rude to say “I’d rather dread orientation in silence, please.” Then the office manager comes in and – lo and behold! – Office Conversation Guy reveals his other personality, Office Humor Guy. You know that person you work with who constantly makes “jokes” using one of the four work punchlines: “Is it Friday yet?” “That’s above my pay grade!” “Coffee break!” or, sarcastically, “I love work!”? Him. So not only are we filling out paperwork about how CompuCom owes us nothing, but if we invent something, they own it, and don’t nickname your coworkers things like “Tits” or “Towelhead Dennis,” we have to have it narrated by this guy whose sense of humor is the result of Cathy getting knocked up by Dilbert and then drinking during the pregnancy.

Of course, my name was wrong on the paperwork: “Oh, we have you down as Chris Turner, is that fine?”

No, it’s not fine. My full name is right there on all the paperwork I filled out. Do you just quit typing in the middle of other words because you feel like it, as in “Fou sco a seve year ag, ou forefat…” Can I call you “Mary Smith” because it’s simpler? People never realize that – just maybe – my full, hyphenated name is, I don’t know, on my Social Security card, birth certificate, and bank account and maybe it would be nice to, I don’t know, have my actual name on my paycheck? After trying to make this point politely, I was treated to a short holier-than-thou lecture about how someone else in the office has an apostrophe in her name and she just omits it because it makes everything easier. Had I not needed the job, I would have shouted “I’ll omit you!”

Do you think that being given three PowerPoint lectures to read on your own counts as training? Me neither.

About this time, I started thinking, “Wow, I need a new spirit animal for this job. Someone who scowls. Someone who doesn’t take bullshit.”

Ladies and gentlemen, my spirit animal for the duration of this temp job… Dawn Davenport, central character of John Waters’ film Female Trouble.

Dawn Davenport knocks down the Christmas tree when she doesn’t get what she wants. Dawn Davenport eats meatball sandwiches in class. Dawn Davenport screams obscenities because it makes her feel strong. Dawn Davenport will cut you.

 Something about the stance – the fat-and-angry posture of her – really speaks to how I feel about things right now, probably because I’m fat and angry.

So now, whenever I’m annoyed at work, I ask myself, “What would Dawn Davenport do?” So far, what I’ve decided Dawn Davenport would do has included:

-       Taking extra pastries every time they appear in the break room

-       Going ahead and gnawing on the bone of the pork chop I brought for lunch, because who the fuck am I trying to impress, whereas an animal died so I could eat that meat

-       Smoking clove cigarettes right by the door

-       Not washing my hands after I pee, so everyone I touch is, in some small way, touching my penis

-       Refusing to make small talk with a coworker who wanted to talk about his pirated DVDs (let me tell you, you feel differently about intellectual property once you have some)

-       Refusing to pretend to be sympathetic when the above coworker was laid off

-       Refusing to give a flying fuck about long-term corporate goals

-       And I ALMOST talked myself into licking the office doorknob of someone I don’t like when I had a cold, but I was afraid I’d be seen

So, of course, my plan has succeeded too well, since now I really like work because I spend all day imagining that Divine is sitting next to me, keeping up an extremely foul-mouthed commentary about my workday.

Which brings me to my appeal. If any of you readers still know how to make this little woven string “WWJD” bracelets, I will pay you a modest sum to make one that says “WWDDD?”* I’ll wear it next time I don’t give a fuck.

*I’m totally serious. I really want one.