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CAREER

30 April 2016, 20:54

Let me just say, first of all, I really did think working for Satan’s Noodles ruined my career. FOR A LONG TIME, I thought I actually flushed my career down the toilet. I had to explain to many a potential employer about WHY I left Satan’s Noodles. Explanations that had me cringing and laughing with embarrassment that I worked for a criminally insane ramen noodle company burbled out of me like bad farts. Sometimes I went into detail about the rapey-racist CEO, sometimes I glossed over the fact Homeland Security raided the place. That’s just not even an easy thing to explain. I’m not sure if really working at the Devil’s Ramen factory had anything to do with any of the hesitation employers had with me, but it was easier to blame it on them than my off-putting personality.

Being down south has not been a blessing to my career. Although, I’ve had great opportunities, the starts and stops my poor career have had are almost whiplash inducing. A billion and a half years ago, I moved from the great plains to fucking hee haw and it’s has been a struggle to deal with the culture, the people, the economic shithole that is the south and my truckload of issues that I had before the misguided decision to destroy my life by moving to the ASSHOLE of AMERICA. I’ve tried to just plod on through knowing that at some point, something is going to break for me. There has been opportunities I’ve missed, and some that have missed me. Jobs that I was 10x qualified for I never got, and I ended up competing with folks who dwarfed me in talent and experience for that handful of opportunities that shown themselves. A lot of the time, my location also was the thing that sent my resume to the virtual shredder even before it was read.

So, I’ve been unemployed for a good while now. For what seemed to be a fucking eternity, I’ve been trying to snag a job, and when Doug became injured, I was trying to get ANY job. Any soul crushing job. Any thing that would pay me American currency and gave me the chance to degrade and humiliate myself for a trickle of cash that would keep the lights on and Beeferoni on the table. And for some extraordinary reason, no job was forthcoming. None in customer service, none in administrative assistanting, none in officey goodness. Really, when you can’t get a SECRETARIAL job, you start to doubt your ability to be a productive member of society. Then you sit around, eating Ritz crackers mumbling to yourself “FUCK SOCIETY” and other obscenities. I did find out, though, I type 65 words per minute and found out just WHAT 10-key-blah-blah is. I think it has something to do with the number keypad.

If I had any business sense, I could sell drugs. If I had any interpersonal skills, I could be a hooker. Alas, I won’t be a sex worker or a pimped out dealer anytime soon, as they are two high yielding avenues of income I am sorely ill equipped for – and my aversion to jail is still marginally outweighing my longing to keep the internet on. So, in lieu of grabbing a fast rising opportunity in the food service industry, I went to a temp agency and got the survival job. Anything they offered me, I smiled and said “YOU BETCHA.” This was about three months ago, and if you follow me on twitter, you know that I’ve been toiling away answering phones and filing urine coated glass slides at a Pathology lab. The most stressful of my day is dealing with a woman who is obsessed with where certain carts are parked and constantly witnessing for Jesus aloud every chance she gets. I don’t mind she’s found the lord. I do mind her assuming the rest of us were looking for him as well. It’s hard to be a heathen in the South.

But I was beavering away, smiling, trying to make the best of it. I had met a couple of truly wonderful people, I didn’t have to serve anyone fries, and I didn’t have to interact with large amounts of the public. My day consisted of a lot of Tetris. For a while, in my mind, I was resigned to the fact I could be doing this job forever… until I die… or I killed somebody with my stapler and went to prison. But, even as I had totally surrendered to the realization that the remnants of my career were circling the bowl, I still went on interviews. A lot of interviews. From companies I wouldn’t have looked twice at before. I considered $14/hr opportunities TWO HOURS away. I sat through meetings where they gushed over my talent and resume, and I never heard from the fuckers again. Over and over, I was subjected to reasons WHY I shouldn’t take the job they were offering, and people reminding me “This is an entry level job, you know that don’t you?” or “Do you know photoshop?”. I am aghast at how many slack jawed, dimwitted assholes who call up to schedule interviews with me DON’T have the faintest clue as to what I do, or even worst, didn’t take the time to even glance at my resume. Through my twitter, I had documented the several thousand interviews I had and speculation as to why I wasn’t hired for this or that. Reasons spanning from “I suck hard” to “I’m too awesome for them” crossed my mind. I had compliments on my resume, I had the word “overqualified” bandied about too many times, and I had those close-but-no-cigar moments.

Yeah, if I were allowed around sharp objects and opiates, I probably would have seriously thought to take my frustrations on strangers. More than I usually do.

My goal was to get out of this area. It’s too insurancey and lawyery and the opportunities that exist here I’ve probably exhausted. I wanted to go to a more urban/vibrant area. I’ve been aiming for Augusta, although I sent feelers out to Charleston, Savannah, Atlanta and (UGH) Charlotte. I thought long and hard about if I were offered something in North Carolina. I hate North Carolina with the passion of seven white hot suns. NOTHING and I mean NOTHING GOOD ON GOD’S GREEN has EVER happened to me in NORTH CAROLINA. North Carolina is where HOPE goes to die. North Carolina is where intelligence meets fuckery in the boxing ring and gets it’s ASS handed to it. North Carolina should be fenced in and be used as a giant landfill. Yeah. I was thinking twice about any job offer from North Carolina.

The place I wanted to move to was the Augusta area. It is a bigger city, with a more diverse and colorful ethos and within commutable (a long ass commute) distance from Atlanta, where I get two or three inquiries a week for interviews. If I ended up unemployed again, I had the cauldron of Atlanta from which to grab SOME sort of job. I just couldn’t do it from here because I would have to commute a third of my waking day to any job, and a 6 hour commute everyday would just cause me to have a stroke. But if I lived closer, I am within the realm of possibility of 50k a year and a resurrection of my flailing vocational future. And Augusta looks a LOT like where I came from in Kansas. It has tons to do and experience. It’s big enough to have that city feel but not so big as to crush the life out of you. And it, too, has a good deal of opportunity.

As I have discovered.

I sent a resume to everybody and their mother in Augusta for about the last 16 months. I wasn’t sure where they were going or if they were even reaching people. I have gotten a fair amount of interested from there and ALMOST had a unbelievable opportunity to work for the military. I had sublimated my contempt for the evil behemoth war machine and said, “YESSIREY, let me sell my soul and work for the Army.” But. My brightly colorful and slightly disturbed past may have been a reason that the subsequent background check took too long. So long, in fact, they had to rescind the job offer and the metric TON of fucking money that came with it. Holy shitster, working for the military pays well. INORDINATELY FUCKING WELL. But I wasn’t Uncle Sam material I guess. Bummer.

But as fate would have it, even after the abject disappointment of the government saying I was too poopy to work for them, my resume penetrated the chocolatey shell of a company in one of the lovely historical districts in Augusta. One of those resumes reached a large media company who needed an arty farty to join them. They had me come to their absolutely beautiful offices to interview for a job that I could do in my sleep. Publishing, printing, designing. Although, the reviews of said company by past/present employees on Glassdoor were sucky, I had worked for Beelezbub himself at Roya, and even a sucky regular company probably was better than a company who main goal was not to be shut down by the government and have everybody who worked there arrested on criminal charges.

The job I interviewed for turned out to be an easy peasy cheddar cheesy position that paid about 5k more than Satan’s noodles and 18k more than the survival job. We’ll call this the Media Job. And I wanted this job more than anything. This was about 6 weeks ago. The only reason I thought maybe I’d get this job is that the Publications Director kept emailing me to see if I was still interested. Weekly inquiries as to if I was still out there and if I was still interested. I always replied with enthusiastic HELL YEAHS and jokes about rubbing feet of irate rabbits. And well, about 4 days ago they came back with an offer letter. Would I work for them?

Yes. Yes. A thousand times YES.

But, here’s the part where it almost convinces me there is a god, and he gets a real kick out of fucking with me.

I got a call in for interviews for another Augusta job, two blocks from the Media Job. We’ll call this second one the Dream Job. Yes. It is my dream job. I would be heading the creative department, doing design, video, public relations, media events, etc. etc. for a company steeped in the tradition of public service. Some place with so much history and legitimacy that I nearly wet my pants when I found out they were actually considering me. I won’t tell you where, just because, I, as a rule, will bare my soul on the internet, I just won’t give you any specifics as to identifying what or where that soul is – because, let’s face it, I don’t know who you all are or whether you are serial killers, stalkers, exes, or bill collectors. Best to keep everything close to the vest, as they say.

But, I digress. This DREAM JOB, would make me Creative Manager of a company similar to…. um… to the United Way, if you could play basketball and take dance classes at the United way. I would be all in charge, all creative and having some major fun, whilst having an office again, and two interns to do my bidding to boot. But it seemed way too good of a job for me to get. After interview #1, I didn’t worry about it – didn’t give it a second thought, but was really jazzed that I was even considered. It was interview #2 that made me chuckle that someone had made a mistake and put my name on the list for candidates to move forward with – the thought was WTF? And as I did before, put it out of my mind. Interview #3 was the one that put me in full bore panic mode. Somebody had some serious explaining to do at that company for mistakenly advancing me to this stage. It was a face to face with the Marketing heads, and it was about an hour and twenty minutes long with me babbling almost every bit of that time. It was a total HOLY SHIT moment and I even wore make up and earrings to the interview. Yeah. It was that serious. The job they described was a COMPLETE DREAM JOB. It had just enough challenge to scare the shit out of me. But, I think it was at a level I’m ready for. It had all the elements I had done before in all my other jobs, just wrapped up in a giant package and I felt a desire for this job that was almost overwhelming. The interview, in my mind, went very very well. BUT, I’ve had these feelings and observations before only to be disappointed, so in the midst of being OVER THE MOON with JOY, I was also worried by WANTING it now. Have I just jinxed the shit out of any chance I had of getting it? Remember, I was blowing off my chance at this position up till now, and GETTING the interviews. Now that I WANT it like I WANT to be in a John Cusak/Bradley Cooper human sandwich, maybe that will be my undoing. Yes. I have some serious head issues.

I have maybe an inkling there could be a chance that I could get this job. I’m terrified to hope for it, and wondering if I started wetting the bed, would the stress of obsessing on this job be alleviated? Up until about 10 last night, I was having a little nutty. There was a little bit of time where I just went to the zoo, and pretty much just tracing the rim of my belly button because that’s the only thing that I could manage without having a full blown conniption. So that’s where we are with that job – had interview #3 last week, waiting to see if I advance to the final interview.

Yeah. Somebody somewhere is fucking with me good.

Before I came to the epiphany that I have a job and don’t have to worry about the future or panic about the present, the dilemma that was drowning my brain in stress was that I HAVE to take the Media Job, but what if the DREAM JOB offers me employment. At that point, I would have worked for the Media Job for about a week or two, and I’d be in the position of being that shitty employee that has to go to her Publication Director and explain why she’s leaving this job for another one. I have a big worry of being asshole, just because, unlike others who can go through life living the dream of being a dick without consequences, when I try, I get bit in the butt for it.

BUT (and there’s a lot of BUTs in my life) of all the problems to have, THESE are the ones to have. It’s such a vacation from the “Jesus, the power bill is due AGAIN??” and “I’m just 83 cents short of getting a gallon of gas.”

But, I am the Obsession Queen and I took the opportunity to worry myself sick over:

- Being a shitty employee that leaves a good job for another job
- Being a shitty employee in general.
- Hoping that I get Dream Job
- If I got the Dream Job, could I do the Dream Job
- What if I can’t do the Media Job
- Does working at McDonald’s really suck? They all seem happy when I go through the drive-thru
- Feeling bad that I want Dream Job and I should be pretty happy about the Media Job
which in itself is a really good job.
- What if the Media Job sucks
- Hoping I don’t start hating the Media Job because its not the Dream Job
- Generally wondering if I’m a giant asshole
- Feeling really guilty for being happy
- Feeling uncomfortable for having nothing to worry about
- Feeling guilty for not having anything to worry about
- Wondering if pulled pork is really all that fattening

So, I was driving EVERYONE crazy, asking their opinions about every aspect about this whole situation. Although, I think after knowing me for all these years, my level of cray is old hat to them.

Until I got this advice from my friend Sly:

    “After all you’ve been through searching for jobs, IF you get an offer from the place you want most, go with what makes YOU happiest. Life’s too short and you have to look out for #1. Yeah, it’ll suck to have quit the first job, but better on your terms than theirs.”

Then things pretty much settled down in my brain, and I think I’m going to avoid that inevitable, overdue stroke I’ve been working so hard on. I’m even experiencing periods of… HAPPY.

And I keep having to remind myself. I HAVE A GREAT JOB, that comes with bennies and a buttload of extra money. I can get a car, and nutty bars. I am going everyday to a place I want to be, doing work I like doing, hopefully with great people who won’t be arrested for criminal activity. This is just one more step in regaining some long lost self esteem, building some inner strength, being blessed with all the independence that a job gives one, and being able to fish my career out of the crapper.

I’m in happy mode now. I’m pretty sure something or someone (most likely) will urinate on my mode soon, but right now, its warm outside, my dogs love me, I have a great job, and I have a week off until I start in Augusta.

WHEEEEE….

Oh yeah. I’m treadmilling this week too, so I’m adding a little suck to my time off. Just to balance it all out.