The Great Job Search

As of this writing, I am still without a job. I would not mention this under normal circumstances in this blog as I hate for the content to descend into begging and depressive states of behaviour. Plus experience has taught me that it makes for terrible entertainment, which if not the central focus, should at least be a consideration for any work of public consumption. Therefore, if focusing on personal content at all, it becomes neccessary for me to either lie, stretch the truth, not be totally honest, or just ruminate in a self depricating way about the strange and wonderful journey which so far doesn't seem to have produced much of anything.


And whalla! We have today's topic.

We're going to have a stroll down the good old memory lane where everything was a little bit rosier colored, the grass was greener, and I could still reach for a third funny cliche' to round out this sentence.

The time was early November of 2005. I had just moved into my brand new Brooklyn apartment of hardwood floors, and bad smells with the knowledge that this wouldn't be an easy jaunt. In fact, I kind of had this idea that things might not go so well at first, which is good because it helped me to deal with a seemingly unending string of days involving me getting on the subway to Manhattan, picking a starting location, and going to as many restaurants as it was possible to talk to that day about hiring.

I remember my first interview at Bubba Gump Shrimp clearly. I walked up the stairs of this chain restaurant that was all decked out in wood so polished that you could see your face in it, as well as numerous bright colors and sparkly objects from the sea to tease, and please the easily amused traveling consumer and his family.

I got an interview with the manager who asked me some stock questions about restaurants, most of which involved guest relations, and working with the other "team members". I in turn gave him stock answers, and tried to look as eager and friendly as possible about working in a place that clearly knew a thing or 2 about fried foods. He said they would probably give me a call, so I called the next day to see if they had a chance to review my resume, they said they were looking into all of them, and then I never heard from him again. This set the tone for that whole first month of wandering the streets, reading books on the subway, and going to the library to use the internet.

Anyway, I wasn't too happy, and so I could have been knocked over by a feather when a manager at Pizzeria UNOs told me that he wanted to offer me a job. Training didn't start till the next week though, so I went home and proudly told my friends of my great success and they crowded around the big New Yorker and began offering their accolades and wanted to add their own jokes to my comedy act. Yes, everything was looking up until I went back to go to training and I discovered that I had written the time down wrong and was 30 minutes late. So after a lot of begging, pleading, cajoling, and a one page letter, I was shown the door.

Despondancy was definitely starting to set in and soon thereafter I began scouring the classified ads looking for any job, not just restaurant work. I still can't believe that juice bar didn't hire me. What the heck kind of qualifications were they looking for anyway?

My favorite story of this nature deals with the time I applied at CVS pharmacy. Yes, you heard me right. I was so desparate that I applied to be a greeter at a backwards pharmacy, unfortunately I made the mistake of telling the lady over the phone that I was an actor and I was doing some comedy open mike nights. This surely whet her appetite for a vigorating discussion of the comedy arts and what people used to laugh at 40 years ago.

At the time of the interview I was ushered into the stock room and made to sit down at a cheap plastic table that employees probably used for eating granola bars on top of and forgetting about their problems while reading the ingredients of various cleaning supplies.

The 50 something shrewish woman kept asking me these insulting questions as to whether or not I could smile because it didn't look I was smiling. Why, surely I must have been thrilled at the prospect of a 6.50 an hour job of standing out in the cold and thanking people for shopping at CVS. She insisted that she wasn't sure that I could smile. I assured her that it was a skill that I had perfected and constantly worked on just in case an opportunity like this one presented itself. After a nauseating question and answer session she walked me to the bathroom and let me know that it would be my responsiblity to clean, and then she again wondered aloud if I could do it. I told her it would be fine and began looking at the large bathroom, thinking about all the poop stains which would no doubt be accumulating as we spoke, then she told me to quit looking so hard.

After we got back to the table she tried to ease the mood by saying, "Are you sure that this job won't interfere with your career. The hours are from 11 to 11 at night sometimes. This isn't Trollup you know." She was aghast that with my English degree I had never heard of or read Trollup. It was obviously very important in her life. Then she reminded me that we would be dealing with a very conservative client base and then asked if I could be conservative. I assured her that I was as clean cut and well mannered as the next fellow, so we proceeded on to the letter that I was to write out, explaining to the manager about what a great job I would do there and why I wanted to work at CVS. After this ordeal, she was still unconvinced, and handed me a mirror and asked me to look into it, smile big, and say I love CVS. I love my CVS customers. I almost cracked under the pressure of such an enormous undertaking but I managed it without too much effort.

Fortunately that same day I got a job at TGI Friday's and worked there proudly for 3 weeks and was promptly laid off on the morning of New Years Day when I called in to check my schedule.

Gathering courage, I began sending my resume to all the places mentioned in the classifieds and had to turn down some really skeezy and ghetto telemarketing jobs.

Things were looking up when I strolled into a Philly Cheese Steak shop and asked if I could apply and they promptly threw some plastic gloves on me and had me going through the motions for 2 hours. Then I worked a full day and found out that I wasn't actually hired yet. I was just in training and they would be calling me, and you know how much I hate that.

2 weeks after that I was hired at an Egyptian restaurant and promptly given 20 pages of material to learn the next day. I sweated and sweated over it and was thrown on the floor the very next day just to help out. After making too many mistakes that our gracious host had ran over for 3 hours in orientation the previous day, I was sent home and was sure that I was to be fired. It would have been a better scenario at that point because I was shipped to the Tapas Restaurant next door that had almost no customers and the same gruelling amount of training. During this time I turned down an office interview and a job offer much to my later chagrin as it would turn out.

So after enduring the trials of learning all their information for a whole week I was told that I had finished training and would be put on the schedule. Then fate intervened and the manager's dad died and he left the country for a week and his store was looked at by middle managers from the Egyptian restaurant who concluded that their wasn't enough business to hire me, so I was promptly shown the door again when the manager returned.

But the next week I realized that I had an advantage over most New Yorkers since I had a car and decided to go back to what I knew best - pizza delivery.

And thus concludes our thrilling story and brings us up to the present day. I hope everyone had as much fun reading this as I did writing it.