Job Hopping
I have had ten proper employments. Which generally doesn’t seem a lot, and I’m sure that the masses could whup the heck out of that number if they actually sat down and counted up, wrote down on paper, and collectively remembered all the ways in which the money was made. I sat down and thought it out. For an educated woman, who stakes no claim to “acting” or “entertaining” or “selling art” of any kind, and is yet still not thirty, the ten jobs of my history seems a lot to me. I mean, try putting together a coherent resume out of the jumble that follows! On a good day, I bite my lip, cross my fingers and attempt the spin. On a bad day, I forever relinquish hopes of “achieving my goals” and landing that “unique job opportunity” that I “so well deserve.”
I started out as a cashier at the brand new Ultra Mart when I was seventeen. Hundreds of unemployed stood in line in the winter cattle call, because the set-up of a brand new business in a small town is a big deal. I got the job because I smiled in the five minute interview. And then for the minimum wage of $6.85 an hour, for about twelve hours a week, I smiled while the UPC codes booped their way through the laser eye of my checkout. I have to say, it wasn’t a bad way to enter the workforce: brainless and grinning. Often I shared shifts with my best friends, the Dub, her boyfriend, or Dark-Boy, and we could chat away the slow evenings or afternoons. Also, it was in the employ of the Ultra Mart that I first got the nerve to proper ask a boy out, after stalking him for weeks (or months, whatever.) He accepted. I loved him so bad.
After the job at the grocery store, I worked as a full-time nanny for a stint, and then did some time working in a strawberry patch before Mr. Grumpy-pants pulled the nepotism card at the manufacturing plant where he worked. Working on an assembly line is as close to accidental meditation as I have ever come. Eight hours a day, repeating the same four motions. Forcing myself not to look at the clock, like an insomniac begging for respite. I made vacuum tubes for automotive air conditioning parts. I still have one to remind me what repetition does to the brain. A summer student lost a finger to a machine that year. Luckily, it was not me, although I did have my own close call. As the top part of a small vertical hydraulic press came loose and crashing down, I pulled my hands out of the way at the last second. With the noise of the crash still echoing in the air, I stared at the gloves of my intact hands. In its closed jaws, the press held the material of my left glove, but not my fingers themselves. It was that close. The next summer I found a job at a paper mill that was decidedly more challenging and safety-conscious.
Then fresh out of school, engineering degree in hand and iron ring on finger, I still felt something a little less than enthusiasm at the prospect of the “ideal job” that I had landed. Fortune Five Hundred company, excellent pay, top notch benefits, the promise of technical challenges and the myth of time to work on my own projects – they build careers, they invest in their people, they recruit only the top! I had so scored the perfect job on paper. What I got in reality was a standard communist grey uniform, a stale cubicle, a sixty hour work week, plus on-call hours, and the tacit and unspoken understanding that the female engineers were to stay in the lab and off of the machine. Combine with that the fact that I had moved to the middle of nowhere and had just suffered a post-graduate crisis of identity, and you could maybe understand why I spent so many hours hiding in the washroom stall, pretending not to be a drama queen when that was exactly what I was. Dramatically ungrateful for the whopping paycheque. Dramatically unhappy at the prospect of making this my whole life.
ESL teacher would seem the next logical step, wouldn’t it? And from there French-English translator sounds about right, doesn’t it? And from there it’s just a small leap to mutual fund sales before landing at a desk job on the phones in customer service, right? The last jump was made in such a time of desperation, after the savings sputtered out into less than nothing, and six months of searching online yielded zero results. And I’ve given it my all for more than a year, but this job is never going to be enough for me.
I logged onto Monster last week for the first time in over a year – just casually, just to take a peek at what was out there. And moments later I found myself in the throes of a full-on panic attack. The sight of “Company Undisclosed”, or “Only successful candidates will be contacted”, or the dreaded “5 years + experience required” kind of sent me into a tailspin. Head between the knees, paper bag in my hand, telling myself “Just breathe slowly. In through the nose, out through the mouth. You are not going to throw up.”
But what’s a fool, with a beautiful honours degree but a spotty employment record supposed to do? How do you get it right when all you’ve ever done is get it wrong before? What happens when the serendipity that had followed you for so long abandons you less than half-way through the ride? I swear I would rather put a black marker through all I have done thus far in my life, crumple up the paper and start over on a new draft, in pencil, on yellow foolscap, than submit myself to the online employment search once again. Head hunters are vultures. And what they feast upon are the dwindling and dying egos of the dejected jobseeker. Not again. No way. Not me. No siree-bob.
So instead, I’ll be sitting myself down with a personal career counsellor and receiving all the you-can-do-it, we-can-help motivational speeches I can stomach. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I started out as a cashier at the brand new Ultra Mart when I was seventeen. Hundreds of unemployed stood in line in the winter cattle call, because the set-up of a brand new business in a small town is a big deal. I got the job because I smiled in the five minute interview. And then for the minimum wage of $6.85 an hour, for about twelve hours a week, I smiled while the UPC codes booped their way through the laser eye of my checkout. I have to say, it wasn’t a bad way to enter the workforce: brainless and grinning. Often I shared shifts with my best friends, the Dub, her boyfriend, or Dark-Boy, and we could chat away the slow evenings or afternoons. Also, it was in the employ of the Ultra Mart that I first got the nerve to proper ask a boy out, after stalking him for weeks (or months, whatever.) He accepted. I loved him so bad.
After the job at the grocery store, I worked as a full-time nanny for a stint, and then did some time working in a strawberry patch before Mr. Grumpy-pants pulled the nepotism card at the manufacturing plant where he worked. Working on an assembly line is as close to accidental meditation as I have ever come. Eight hours a day, repeating the same four motions. Forcing myself not to look at the clock, like an insomniac begging for respite. I made vacuum tubes for automotive air conditioning parts. I still have one to remind me what repetition does to the brain. A summer student lost a finger to a machine that year. Luckily, it was not me, although I did have my own close call. As the top part of a small vertical hydraulic press came loose and crashing down, I pulled my hands out of the way at the last second. With the noise of the crash still echoing in the air, I stared at the gloves of my intact hands. In its closed jaws, the press held the material of my left glove, but not my fingers themselves. It was that close. The next summer I found a job at a paper mill that was decidedly more challenging and safety-conscious.
Then fresh out of school, engineering degree in hand and iron ring on finger, I still felt something a little less than enthusiasm at the prospect of the “ideal job” that I had landed. Fortune Five Hundred company, excellent pay, top notch benefits, the promise of technical challenges and the myth of time to work on my own projects – they build careers, they invest in their people, they recruit only the top! I had so scored the perfect job on paper. What I got in reality was a standard communist grey uniform, a stale cubicle, a sixty hour work week, plus on-call hours, and the tacit and unspoken understanding that the female engineers were to stay in the lab and off of the machine. Combine with that the fact that I had moved to the middle of nowhere and had just suffered a post-graduate crisis of identity, and you could maybe understand why I spent so many hours hiding in the washroom stall, pretending not to be a drama queen when that was exactly what I was. Dramatically ungrateful for the whopping paycheque. Dramatically unhappy at the prospect of making this my whole life.
ESL teacher would seem the next logical step, wouldn’t it? And from there French-English translator sounds about right, doesn’t it? And from there it’s just a small leap to mutual fund sales before landing at a desk job on the phones in customer service, right? The last jump was made in such a time of desperation, after the savings sputtered out into less than nothing, and six months of searching online yielded zero results. And I’ve given it my all for more than a year, but this job is never going to be enough for me.
I logged onto Monster last week for the first time in over a year – just casually, just to take a peek at what was out there. And moments later I found myself in the throes of a full-on panic attack. The sight of “Company Undisclosed”, or “Only successful candidates will be contacted”, or the dreaded “5 years + experience required” kind of sent me into a tailspin. Head between the knees, paper bag in my hand, telling myself “Just breathe slowly. In through the nose, out through the mouth. You are not going to throw up.”
But what’s a fool, with a beautiful honours degree but a spotty employment record supposed to do? How do you get it right when all you’ve ever done is get it wrong before? What happens when the serendipity that had followed you for so long abandons you less than half-way through the ride? I swear I would rather put a black marker through all I have done thus far in my life, crumple up the paper and start over on a new draft, in pencil, on yellow foolscap, than submit myself to the online employment search once again. Head hunters are vultures. And what they feast upon are the dwindling and dying egos of the dejected jobseeker. Not again. No way. Not me. No siree-bob.
So instead, I’ll be sitting myself down with a personal career counsellor and receiving all the you-can-do-it, we-can-help motivational speeches I can stomach. I’ll let you know how it goes.
posted by nerdifer at 4:14 p.m.
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