Friday, November 12, 2010
Monday, October 4, 2010
There’s No Such Thing As Free Parking
Actually, that’s not quite true. On weekends while working at The Store, it was possible to sneak into the parking garage of a nearby office building. Sometimes, this included lying to the parking attendants about my parking pass being somewhere upstairs. But often as not, I could smile and wave and drive right in like I owned the place. On weekends.
On weekdays, Associates of The Store had to park in the mall garage. In addition to being unbearably crowded, the mall garage was absurdly expensive. As you entered the garage, you took a ticket that was stamped with the time. You had three hours from that time to exit the garage without having to pay. If you stayed in the garage more than three hours, the charge to exit quickly became $7, then $11, then finally the maximum $21. If you worked an eight-hour shift, you would pay $21, or more than two hours' wages. So basically, the last two hours of your shift you worked for free.
Dodger Stadium also gave The Careerist a free meal, if you will recall. While there was no such thing as a free lunch at The Store, there was such a thing as a regular lunch break. And while there was no such thing as free parking, once again California laws eased the burden. Every Associate at the mall was entitled to a fifteen-minute break after every few hours on the job. With a little luck, careful planning, and watchful anxiety, a Store Associate could time her breaks to occur just as her three hours of free parking expired, allowing her to rush to her car and drive it out of the garage and then right back into the garage before having to pay anything.
The Moving of the Car was a regular activity for each Associate, and each Manager had to help time the breaks so that everyone got a chance to not spend money on their job. (Since we were not interns, we rightly supposed that we should not be required to purchase our employment.) It became a very tricky Game, but before long, I had learned all the Ins and Outs of Parking, even if In and Out Parking was technically not allowed. Should you ever find yourself working at the mall and in need of parking advice, here are some Game Cheats.
If you are scheduled for an eight-hour shift, you get an hour for lunch and two fifteens. Your car will need to be parked for a total of nine hours, counting the lunch break. So if you are really smart about it, you will only have to move your car twice—during your first fifteen and at the very end of your lunch break, leaving you free to (gasp!) actually take a break during your last fifteen. This only works if your lunch break takes place exactly five hours after your shift begins, which the managers rarely allow since they are terrified of giving you a paid lunch.
There are kiosks in the parking garage where you can pay for your parking before you go to your car. This system encourages people to avoid paying at the exits, and therefore keeps the traffic flowing. If you are on the verge of going over your three hours, you can put your parking ticket in the kiosk, where it will be marked as paid. Then you have an extra ten minutes or so to get to your car and exit the garage! If you hustle, you could whirl through the mall supermarket and pick up some string cheese and a Gatorade in that amount of time. Just hope that the supermarket express checkout is clear of people with more than ten items.
I still can’t believe how this could be, but it’s true. Even though the sign says that only your first three hours are free, they don’t immediately start charging you after three hours. I am such a tightfisted maniac that I never risked going over three hours until months into my employment at The Store. The first time I was a minute late and didn’t get charged, I thought I had been lucky. But I did not press my luck, and never imagined that I could have had even more time if I wanted it. I had probably worked there for nine months before someone told me that I could go as much as ten minutes over without getting charged. This was astonishing. But The Associates had to wonder…how far would the kiosk machine let us go? Minute by minute, we tested our limits. The parking system at The Mall allowed us to go up to eighteen minutes over before charging us. Combine Cheat #3 and Cheat #2 and you have just bought yourself almost half an hour of extra parking time, which is extremely helpful in accomplishing Cheat #1.
Sometimes other, more foolish people will leave their parking tickets lying about in a fitting room or on the ground. Check every singe one of them! If the time on the found parking ticket is sufficiently later than yours, you might even buy yourself a full hour-long lunch break by not having to move your car until your final fifteen. Bonus!
If you are one of the foolish people who dropped her parking ticket, woe unto you. A lack of a parking ticket means you have to pay the maximum $21. However, it is possible to sneak out of the parking lot behind another car as it exits, while the arm is still up. Note--this maneuver must be timed perfectly and is generally only to be attempted by ballsy types.
There are alternatives, of course. A couple Associates biked to work. There’s also the bus. But this is only an option if you don’t live on the other side of a mountain, in a place so far away that it is called “The Valley.” And there’s free street parking about half a mile away on Blessed, Blessed Beverly Glen Boulevard. This option requires extra time to make it to work, and extra time to get home. But that extra time in fact buys you two full fifteen minute breaks during which you may eat a snack and use the bathroom (glory!), a full hour of lunch, and an entire shift sans parking concerns. Just be careful about where you park on street-sweeping days. Parking tickets cost far more than $21.
Don’t get in fistfights over parking spaces during the holiday season, no matter how infuriated you are by the Beverly Hills housewife in the Audi SUV. Remember, as an Associate of The Store, you are a professional, and the shoppers are just amateurs. Remain aloof.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Riple
Monday, September 13, 2010
No Paid Lunches Means Always Getting Lunch
I congratulated myself for keeping the job at the Store even when the Hedge-Fund Job seemed in the bag. I had been quite wise, I thought, to hedge my bets. But jiminy crickets, was it tough going when I had to work both jobs at once.
The Store, as I previously mentioned, did not have a lot of work hours to dole out to a poor little noob like me, regardless of how snazzy my footwear was. So they had no problem adjusting my availability and keeping me completely off the schedule until late afternoons. However, this meant that when they did feel compelled to put me to work, they did so until the store closed at 10pm. So I would head down to Santa Monica at 5:30am and work in the cold with no lunch break until 3pm. Then I would go to the mall. On very lucky days, I could sleep in my car in the parking garage for an hour or so before beginning my shift at The Store. Then, I would work until 10pm. Of course, that was only on weekdays. On weekends, I worked longer shifts until 10pm. In this way, I worked something like 20 days straight, often with double shifts, until I went to my friend’s wedding in St. Louis.
But don’t worry, there’s good news too. There was much less traffic at 10pm than there was at 3pm. And because of the mall’s location, I could take Beverly Glen Boulevard instead of the 405 North. Beverly Glen smells like ivy, juniper, jasmine, and rich people, especially at 10pm when the air is cool. It is a delicious drive. Slightly less delicious when you are delirious with exhaustion, but still delicious. So those evening shifts weren’t completely joyless.
There’s also the fact that no retail job will ever let you skip lunch. In fact, nothing made the managers of The Store madder than people who tried to go without a lunch break. The laws in California require workers to clock out within five hours on the job, and if you fail to clock out before five hours have passed, you get a paid lunch break. So if you clock out for lunch even one minute late, The Store had to pay you for an extra hour of work. The Store did not like to pay for extra hours, so lunch was always a sure thing.
And of course, working two jobs means you get paid for two jobs, which was quite a help to me. Especially because I had suffered a Great Mishap.
A week or two previous to my employ at the hedge fund, I went to the DMV to get my California drivers license. Naturally, I got a perfect score on the test. Then, on the way home from the DMV, I ran a stoplight in West Hollywood at an intersection that is monitored by a camera. Because that’s what book smarts will do for you. The ticket that I received in the mail, accompanied by a photograph of me blasting through the intersection in my subcompact, was in the amount of $390.
The total sum of all my earnings at Dodger Stadium that season was $388.
The Great Mishap caused Great Woe. But Great Woe is what credit cards are for, so I survived.
And that’s all I had to do, really. And what better time to go into survival mode than at holiday time? So I went to work on Black Friday and faced doom for five hours. Then I clocked out for lunch.
Jumping Ship
The next day, which was the last day of my two-week temporary assignment, I visited the coffee shop just as soon as Business Hours for Normal People began and called the agency again. The Gatekeeper told me that my recruiter was, again, unavailable. I explained that I needed to talk to her rather urgently, because I did not want to accept permanent employment at my assignment and expected them to offer. “I need some guidance here!” I cried.
“What’s the job?” asked the Gatekeeper. I told her who I had been working for over the past two weeks. “Oh, no one wants that job,” said the Gatekeeper.
“Oh great,” I said. “So you have done this before.” She put me on hold and came back with another recruiter, who is also the president of the company.
“You don’t want the job? Why not,” he barked.
“Because it’s not related to entertainment,” I replied.
“They do film financing, don’t they?”
“NO!” I snapped.
I was instructed to demure as much as possible and tell the hedge fund that I would need to think about any offers, and that they would also need to talk to my Recruiter before I could give any answer. But as the day wore on, I started to realize how dumb this plan was.
So when the Junior Hedger in Charge of Administrative Hires brought me up into the lofty conference room to talk to me about how the job was going, I made bold to tell him I didn’t think it was for me. He didn’t seem surprised. I guess someone had also told him that no one wanted that job. Probably all the dozens of temps from the agency that came before me. So I gave him my parking pass, and headed home on the 405 North.
I didn’t know how I was going to stay afloat, but I was buoyed up by the thought that the very next day would be Thanksgiving. And the day after that, the holiday season at the Store would begin. I tightened my belt, slipped on the Sperrys, and hoped that those extra holiday hours would pull me through at least until January.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
If There’s a Bustle in Your Hedgerow
A very old friend, and a very good friend (the best and rarest type of friend) got married that fall, and it was very important that I went. My acceptance of the temp assignment was, in fact, contingent on my ability to skip work for a couple days towards the end of my two-week temporary assignment. So, with maybe eight of my required ten days of the job under my belt, I left Los Angeles for the first time since I have arrived and flew to St. Louis.
Missouri was cold, not at all to be confused with cool. It was a midwestern fall, grey and plain, but it was lovely. I visited the Anheuser-Busch Brewery on a rainy day and spent the free evenings watching football in the TGI Fridays adjacent to the hotel with people that I have known for more than half my life. As a military brat, such friends are luxuries beyond price, and to be frank I have no idea what I have done to deserve them.
I was so broke that I had no way of paying for my own hotel room, and the bride is such a kick-ass gal that she let me stay with her. Until the night of the wedding itself, when I crashed with some other friends. Obviously. I hadn’t even been able to send a gift, and I promised to if and when I got a job at this finance company. In any case, my friend was aware of my lack of funds, and at one point during the weekend crossed her fingers for me while I checked my balance at an ATM. I had enough to withdraw, luckily. I guess those hours of lunchless overtime paid out after all.
While we stood at the ATM, I confessed to being embarrassed that, at my age, I didn’t have my shit together. I promised my friend that I wasn’t really the hapless flake I appeared to be, and confessed that I was so in awe of her stability and happiness. I shouldn’t have been so worried about looking like a wreck, though. She was an old friend, after all. And she told me that she was proud of me. She told me that she knew I was going after my dreams.
But this didn’t allay my fears. Instead, I felt more ashamed. Even guilty. Because I wasn’t, not really. I felt like I had already given up, been used up. I felt like I had spent all my luck, as well as my money, on those stupid internships. I wanted to tell my friend that my dreams were a mistake, that she shouldn’t be proud of me for wasting my time. But I held my tongue. And by the time I got back to balmy Los Angeles, I had made up my mind.
I had moved far away from any family, halted a steady career just as it was getting started, left all my friends, and put up with hours and hours of brutal workshop at the hands of professionally disappointed professors. And for what? So that after four months in Los Angeles I could sign up for a job that made me miserable tired, hungry, and cold?
If my oldest friends believed that I was skipping out on their wedding presents and bunking in their hotel rooms because I was following my dreams, then damn it, that had better be what I was doing.
By the time I made it back to Los Angeles, I had made up my mind to stop hedging. I decided that if I was going to take a job that would make me unhappy, it should at least be related to entertainment. Even if it was in the mailroom at some agency.
My second day back at work, which was my last day as a temp, I called the Recruiter from the coffee shop across the street.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Fern Coolly
People think that Southern California is always balmy. But during the winter months, it can be quite cool. Not cold, I won’t go that far. I did live in Boston for a while, after all. But Los Angeles is a desert climate, and desert climates can get very cool when the sun goes down. It’s even cooler on the coast. And really quite cool at 6am when you’re standing on a downtown Santa Monica street, waiting for someone to unlock the door of the hedge fund.
The office was in an old and pretty building on a pretty street. And the building was very quiet. And though I didn’t ever really feel cold when I was there, I always felt rather cool. I think maybe my toes were actually cold. But it was hard to tell. In the winter months, even a mere two blocks from the beach, tedium can have quite a cooling effect. In any case, there was little to warm the place.
The office consisted of one Big Room with three big glass tables, each of which boasted several big computer monitors. The walls of the Big Room were exposed antique brick, and the high ceiling far above boasted huge wooden beams. Everyone who worked for the hedge fund sat in the Big Room. The Head Hedger usually did not arrive in the office until after the sun rose, while the rest of us were there, warming up our computers in the dark before dawn. But when he arrived, the Head Hedger worked in the Big Room with us.
There was a kitchen, of sorts, tucked into the corner of the big room. It was only a kitchen of sorts, because it lacked most of the things that make a kitchen a kitchen. Namely, food, and the things used to prepare it. There was a sink, but bathrooms have sinks. There was a fridge, but there was nothing to keep cool in it. There was no coffee pot, no microwave, no stove or oven. My first day on the job, I brought a microwaveable lunch. Halfway through the day I realized that I had no way of heating it up, and, furthermore, that no one else stopped working to eat. Occasionally, one of the traders would step out to buy a cup of coffee. But no one ever took a lunch break, and no one ever told me I could have one. While I’m not sad to collect an hour of overtime, I am generally a sad not to eat.
There was only one other room in the office, which served as a conference room. It was only a normal-sized room, reachable by a staircase, but it overlooked the big room the way a screened in porch would sit above a big back yard. From our glass tables below, we could look up at the blank windows of the dark conference room and see a row of potted ferns on a shelf below the windows.
The woman training me told me that the Plant Guy was an entertaining weekly event. He was far from entertaining, but he still drew the gaze of everyone in the Big Room every time he came as he clattered in with his tall ladder. He was everything the hedgers were not. While they sat sober, peaked and pale over their computers, the Plant Guy was tanned and jovial, and perhaps a little stoned. But he was stymied by the ferns, which were dead and drying in the cool afternoon light that shone through the opposite window high in the brick wall of the Big Room.
The Head Hedger asked the Plant Guy the first week of my employ to do something about the dead ferns. But when he came back the next week, nothing had changed. The Plant Guy had not talked to his boss about getting new plants, and had no remedy for the dead ones that sat looking over our heads. So the Head Hedger asked him to take the dead plants away. Better to have a blank space, he said, than to have dead plants in a place of business. And then he said it again, as if the dead ferns intended to do his hedge fund harm, “it’s a bad idea to have dead plants where you do business.”
We were all quiet after this, even the Plant Guy. And while work never stopped for lunch, it stopped long enough for everyone to watch the Plant Guy take down the dead ferns. He climbed his tall ladder and took them down from the shelf, one by one. They were so dead and dry that their brittle leaves broke and crumbled at his touch, and the pitiful dead fronds drifted through the watery winter light from the window to the settle on the concrete floor.
The Head Hedger, I knew, could teach me a couple things, if I wanted to learn. About music, about money, and about the dangers of allowing a living thing to wither in a place of business.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Futures, Phones, Finance, and Philistines
I used to like data entry. In the fall of 2003, when I was fresh out of college, I had a temp job at a title insurance company. They needed extra help because everyone and their mother was taking advantage of the reduced interest rates and refinancing their homes, and all the lawyers in Massachusetts were sending them brand new title insurance policies that had to be processed. My job was to look at the check that the lawyers had sent to the insurance company, look at total amount of the policy attached to that check, and derive what kind of policy it was from the way the two numbers related. Then I would enter the policy into their software system and endorse the check with a stamp. I did the same thing all day, every day, and I didn’t mind it. Each check and policy was like a little puzzle, and I liked figuring it out.
Not surprisingly, data entry is a lot less interesting when you don’t understand the data you are entering. I entered some very complex stuff into spreadsheets at the hedge fund, and I had no idea what any of it meant. The woman training me told me to look at a website called investopedia.com to help me figure out what was going on. This was enormously disappointing. I read the definition of a future and an option over and over again and I still had no idea what they were. This was the first time I had ever really come up against a concept that my brain simply did not get. It was as though the synapses refused to fire, refused to communicate such abhorrent and base concepts. I admit it; I found the whole thing a little distasteful. Even in the face of certain unemployment (or at least certain underemployment in a retail setting) I regarded the world of finance like a sophomore English major regards econ classes: strictly for philistines.
In short, no job has ever before made me realize that I am, in fact, a creative person. This was, in many ways, a positive thing. It buoyed me up. Justified to some degree all the choices I had made in my life so far. And, I thought, justified those disdainful thoughts I had towards econ classes when I was a sophomore English major.
Worse than the data entry were the phone calls, and not just because they were phone calls and I don’t like phones. It always started with Bloomberg TV. Someone would interview the hedge fund’s famous stock Savant, also a famous author of texts that would, presumably, make my brain hemorrhage if I ever attempted to read them, and this Someone would go on and on about how clever the Savant was and how his hedge fund was the best. What this Someone on Bloomberg TV didn’t mention was that the Savant’s hedge fund only invested for “institutions,” and rarely for individuals. (Although, when I did get a look at one of the funds, it looked like a whole bunch of individuals to me. But what did I know. I was above it all, anyway.)
That’s when the phone would start to ring. Always an individual, never an institution on the line. Always someone claiming to be a Qualified Investor. Always someone wanting to know the minimum investment. My job was simply to take down the contact information of the person calling and forward it on to the person who worked in investor relations. I was never to tell them anything about the company, so I couldn’t tell them that they were not nearly as qualified as they thought, since they weren’t an institution, and I also couldn’t tell them that no one would ever call them back, because they weren’t an institution. This was an incredibly tedious process. Because just about everyone who left their name and number with me expected a phone call, and when they didn’t get one, they would call a second time. The second round phone calls were generally less polite than the first round calls. And I had to answer those, as well, and take down the contact info a second time. And lie, again, and tell them someone would call back eventually.
At some point, people would give up and stop calling. And then, Someone Else would interview the Savant on Bloomberg TV and start the whole process over again.
When I asked why we couldn’t just tell people up front that they weren’t going to hear from us, I was told that they wanted to make sure they got contact info from everyone who called in case an actual billionaire called one day. Evidently, individuals become institutions as soon as they have a billion dollars.
While I hated the work, I didn’t mind my coworkers. In fact, I liked a couple of them. The Head Hedger, for example, was quite a likeable fellow. And he made me reconsider my secret conviction that finance was for philistines. When we weren’t watching our Savant on Bloomberg TV, he often played classical music in the office, and once pointed out to me that we were listening to a famous aria from Tristan and Isolde. He asked me if I knew anything about opera. I admitted that I didn’t.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
We'll Hedge Them Off at the Pass
I prepared for the interview at the hedge fund the same way I would for any interview. I went to their website, and I read all the press on the company. But after I did all this, I felt even less prepared than before, and a good deal more intimidated.
The Recruiter told me that the company did some film financing, but I could find no evidence of this on the website. However, the verbiage on the website was so impenetrable to me that perhaps, I thought, they could be talking about film financing.
I did understand a few things. For example, that these people appeared to know what they were doing. The press made clear that this was a very successful company, and they had at least one famous guy working for them. Some kind of stock savant. And they were one of very few hedge funds which had managed to make tons of money in the recent and ongoing economic meltdown.
I also got that a hedge fund is sort of like a back-up plan. It’s the investment you make in case all your other investments go belly up. Which seems to me sort of like placing two opposing bets at the same time, and therefore somewhat unfair. Or at least gutless.
But if I’ve learned anything as a Careerist, I’ve learned that you’ve got to take some risks. Take a risk on an odd job, and you might get free parking at the ballpark and all the Dodger dogs you ever wanted to eat. If you’re skeptical and decide not to show up, you can be certain of only one thing; that you won’t make any money and your life won’t change.
So I braved the 405 and went to the interview. And if I wasn’t devastatingly beautiful, I definitely looked as gorgeous as the Recruiter could have asked from a writer on a budget. It didn’t hurt that by this time I had a serious discount at the store and wore a new black wool dress that was both professional and uniquely alluring at the same time.
Somehow or other, I managed to convince these finance types that a woman with an MFA in Screenwriting was capable of gaining an interest in finance where there currently was none, and they hired me on a temporary basis for two weeks. I sincerely believe that I nailed the interview when I mentioned that I wasn’t afraid to try anything when it came to my career and even sold concessions at Dodger Stadium when I needed to. No joke. I think they were impressed.
The only snafu occurred when I mentioned that I was interested to hear about their film financing. I was told quickly and without any equivocation that there was no film financing whatsoever taking place at this company. In this moment, I was grateful for the professional and uniquely alluring black dress, which was the only thing making me feel like something other than an ass.
Driving home, Northbound on the 405, I wondered why the Recruiter told me that they did film financing. Had she been misinformed? Was she confused? Or had she lied to me in order to create a link, however tenuous, between my ambitions and the functioning of this company? But it occurred to me how stupid it was to think that a hedge fund could have anything to do with film financing, because no one whose primary function is to lessen risk for investors wants anything to do with something as risky as film. In any case, I was happy that they forgave me for my misinformation and happy to have the opportunity.
And yet, I hedged. An opportunity is one thing, and a sure thing another. I decided to keep working at the store while I worked at the hedge fund, knowing that nothing was in the bag yet. And I also balked at telling my parents that I’d had the interview, that I even had the temporary work. I told myself at the time that I kept the good news from them in case I didn’t get the permanent job, so that I could limit the disappointment they might feel. But I knew, and wouldn’t admit, that I wanted the ability to call off all my bets without having to explain myself.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Southbound on the 405
I grew up in Oklahoma, where it is possible to have sixty miles of highway between two buildings, without any other buildings in between. You could assume that this would be a beautiful landscape. I might adjust your perception by mentioning that the same stretch of highway is completely straight and completely flat, and then you would have to admit that this landscape is incredibly boring. Unless you are driving down the highway during a huge tornado. Which does happen, and is not boring.
Another thing you might ponder, after some more thought, is that such a lonely highway does not support the need of public transportation. And then you might surmise that the towns, which are sixty miles apart, are probably not densely populated, but are in fact rather spread out. In short, you might deduce that there are plenty of open spaces and only one way to traverse them: by car. You would be correct. The good news is, when there are plenty of open spaces, there’s lots of parking.
So while I grew up with cars as a part of my life and feel comfortable driving one, driving in Los Angeles is not the same as driving in Oklahoma. This has to do with a general lack of open spaces. So, in addition to feeling anxious about parking, which (horrors!) sometimes must be done in parallel, I am generally anxious when other cars are present. Which is, in fact, all the time.
Highways are not called highways in California. They are called Freeways. This is, presumably, because they are always gridlocked. Because that makes sense. And the worst of the worst, the most abysmal Freeway in existence, is the 405.
I experienced Interstate 405 for the first time when I drove to the Store for my interview. I had unintentionally managed to avoid this odious stretch of Freeway for the first four months of my residence in Los Angeles, but google maps finally betrayed me when I searched for directions to the mall. I spent forty minutes crawling along between the bare hills in the baking sun, and forever afterwards have hated that freeway. I have spent the year or so since devising ways to avoid this freeway, and I wasted no time finding out how to cut it completely out of my LA life. In fact, when the hiring manager at the store asked me if I had any questions about the job, I asked her how to get to work without setting a tire on that blasted free way. She told me to take Beverly Glen Boulevard. Best advice EVER.
Unfortunately, there’s really no way to get all the way to Santa Monica without using the 405. And that’s exactly where the Recruiter wanted me to go (looking gorgeous, of course.) The Hedge Fund, while located in Santa Monica, was operational during the hours that the New York Stock Exchange is open, which is from 6am Pacific to 2pm Pacific. One would suppose that driving from the Valley to Santa Monica at 5:30 am would be simple and easy. There are a couple reasons this was not true. One, driving on the 405 is never easy. Two, 5:30am is never easy.
I’m not used to hurtling along at 70 mph on a dark freeway before dawn, tailgating the guy in front of me and being tailgated by the guy behind me. I’m an Okie, and when I learned to drive, if I felt like pushing the speedometer up to 80 and continuing at such a speed for 60 miles, I only did so when I couldn’t see any cars in front of me, nor any behind. And this was on a straight, flat road. Sans tornado.
But Southbound on the 405 I went, in the dark and half asleep, hoping I looked gorgeous for the Hedge Fund.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Tinseltown
The hiring manager at The Store had promised that hours were always available and that speedy advancement was practically guaranteed. She told me that acting was her passion, but that her retail job had allowed her to survive while she pursued the acting career, and she said that The Store could be the same sort of salvation for me. But when I arrived on my first day of the job, she handed me the paperwork to be filled out and announced that it was her last day on the job. She was gong to go work for some other company in the same mall. This was not a good sign, but I tried to ignore this fact.
Then I got my schedule for my second week with The Store, and the signs got a little harder to ignore. It indicated that I would only have eight hours in the coming week during which I might prove to the bosses that I was their next personal shopper or outstanding key-holder to be. I discovered that eight hours was, in fact, just enough time to convince the store managers that I was really not good at sales. The outlook was dim.
Luckily, my extensive craigslisting from the previous weeks was about to pay off a second time. One afternoon, I received a voice message from a staffing firm that specialized in entertainment. They wanted to see me for an interview.
I was overjoyed. I have had previous success with staffing firms for only one reason; they test their applicants.
Most people hate tests. Some people even go as far as to say, “I am not a good test taker.” It stands to reason that an equal number of people would be able to say the opposite, but I suspect that this is not the case, since each time I say that I am an outstanding test taker I get dirty looks. While this deters me from bringing my own bubble sheets to cocktail parties so that I may astound my friends with my standardized test-taking prowess, it has not stopped me from admitting without shame that I am a truly terrific test-taker. For example, each time I go to a staffing firm and take their little typing test and Microsoft Office test, I impress the recruiters. Some people are just lucky, I guess.
You, dear reader, may wish to suggest that my luck is rather limited. You might think that I would want to trade in my test-taking capabilities for some other qualities, like being born at the top or being devastatingly beautiful. You might suggest that I would be a more cheerful individual since such charms would take me much further in the realm of social interaction. You may be right. Especially since networking is everything. Nevertheless, I cling to the few footholds that I have.
So, I eagerly returned the call to the staffing firm, and, woe! There was one unforeseen obstacle in my way. The woman who answered the phone when I called to schedule my appointment was quite rude. Unhelpful even.
She refused to schedule an appointment when I called. “I schedule appointments from 1pm to 3pm. Call back,” she said. It’s one thing to covet a sorority girl’s ability to drive a stick shift. It’s another thing to realize that the Gatekeeper of All The Real Jobs has a job that you could do better but that you will never get the chance to prove this. My patience was bolstered only by remembering that there were tests to be taken here, and I imagined what kind of horrors were revealed when, during the fall of her senior year, the Gatekeeper opened the envelope from the College Board and saw her woefully unamazing SAT scores. I agreed, though scornfully, to call back when it was most convenient for the receptionist at the other end of the line, and finally scored an interview.
This employment agency, being a super special entertainment industry agency, has its office on Sunset Boulevard. But nothing on Sunset Boulevard is ever clean, pleasant, or hopeful. Hollywood is, in general, a nasty place. No, I’m not referring to the American film industry. I’m talking the part of the City of Los Angeles that is actually called Hollywood on the map. It’s not a nice place for a number of reasons. It’s dirty and crowded, the parking is sparse and expensive, all the single men are pick-up artists without an ounce of sincerity in their bodies, and so forth.
Furthermore, it’s crawling with tourists, and while we’ve all been tourists at some time or another, we all hate tourists when we’re being normal people in our own town. My abhorrence of fanny-packed, sock and sandal wearing men who feel it necessary to take pictures of the sidewalk is hardly unique. But, then again, I have to feel sorry for the tourists who come to Hollywood. Some of them are clearly from foreign countries, and even the American ones look like they might have traveled a very long way to see Tinseltown. And when they get there, they don’t find anything worth taking pictures of except for the sidewalk. Because the names on the Hollywood Walk of Fame are just about the only thing in Hollywood that has anything to do with the film industry. That, and the adult bookstores that look from the outside like they haven’t been dusted since the advent of VHS.
No one actually makes movies in Hollywood, and there’s actually nothing to see there except a couple of famous theatres and some seedy-looking movie museums. Though “Hollywood” is a word synonymous with entertainment, there’s nothing there to entertain, and the physical place itself has become irrelevant to the entertainment industry.
So it stands to reason that the reception area of this entertainment staffing firm located in Hollywood would be less than appealing. It was, in a word, wretched. The California sunshine filtered through one large window that had been coated with something to keep the heat out, but the heat came through anyway, and the sunshine was dull and illuminated only the dust filtering through the air. While the other half a dozen or so applicants and I sat and waited for their interview, we entertained ourselves by avoiding the sight or touch of a dirty, shaggy, smelly dog which weaved his way around the legs of our cheap chairs.
But I got in my car, shut the door and looked around at the bland, sun-baked buildings in Hollywood and wondered. Did I really want a job in entertainment? Maybe it would make more sense if I worked outside of the industry while I wrote. Maybe finance was actually a good place for me. Still, I couldn’t understand how I’d managed to sign on with an entertainment staffing agency in Hollywood and walk out with an interview with a hedge fund. Except for the fact that Hollywood really doesn’t have a lot of entertainment to offer these days.