Tag Archives: I need a job

Don't mind me, I'm just trying to figure out what to do with myself.

Decisions, Work,

In which I flail around a bit more because apparently I’m a bit of a moron.

When you’re fourteen, you go to high school. That’s just what you do; everybody knows this. When you’re eighteen, you go to college. After college, you go to work and strive to pay off your student loans.

Eventually, you meet someone and form an alliance that involves bodily fluids at the least, and generally laundry and motor vehicle titles as well.

If you’re a breeder, you then proceed to breed. The expectation is so pervasive that you probably take a few stabs at it even if you don’t really want to. It’s just what you do.

After that it’s less clear what’s supposed to happen, or when, until the age of 65, at which point you’re supposed to be able to stop working. Beyond accumulating objects and thickening dramatically about the middle, there really isn’t a very clear action plan for people between, say, 30 and 65.

Hi! My name is Mush, I’m 41, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing!

I’m freaking out because I’m divorced with debt and no assets, and I have no job, no savings, no retirement fund, no car, no belongings, and no health insurance. A quick look at my UI paperwork confirms that I am mere months away from becoming a financial burden on my family/society. I have a lot of debt. I have no great skills or talents beyond a quick mind and a decent singing voice, and neither of those things have ever particularly made me much money.

I guess I’m supposed to be working a day job, engaging in hobbies on the side, and saving money for my old age. Sadly, I am not particularly good at this, and require many and varied vacations to keep me sane.

I am of a generation that thinks it should be happy more than responsible.

Right now, I’m having a crisis. I’m wondering if I should move so that I can find a day job… except that I don’t really want to move. Hell, I don’t even really want a day job – I want income. I have friends who fill my head with talk about doing music for a living. I have the idea that maybe I’m not finding a day job because it’s time for me to make money some other way. I have years and years of exposure to alternative ways of thinking that tell me sometimes it’s important to follow happiness rather than logic. I also live in a culture full of self-indulgent fuck-ups, so I have to consider that maybe the happiness-before-all-else approach lacks depth and creates debt. I also have a heart full of doubts about the kind of person I actually am because it seems to me that if I were the kind of person who lived in the city and gigged a lot, I’d already be doing that and clearly I’m not. I haven’t lived in a city for a looooong time. Honesty compels me to admit that I want to think of myself as a city girl, but I am not, in actual point of fact, able to call myself a city girl. Anyway, blah blah blah, I need to figure out if I’m going to stay here or go somewhere else, and to that end here are some bullet points, because who doesn’t love bullet points?

I should stay here because:

  • I can afford to pay off my debt and travel. Well, when I have a job, that is.
  • I’m in a good band, with good gigs lined up. I’m gaining recognition.
  • I have friends, family, community.
  • As the childless spinster in the family, it’s basically my duty to be here for G’ma.
  • There’s no good reason to throw out the life I just spent the last three years building.

I should move away because:

  • There’s no work here.
  • There is greater chance of doing more music in a major metro area.
  • Challenge. Pace. Exposure. Art! Culture!
  • The life I’ve built here is common and can be duplicated pretty much anywhere, really.

I think that I don’t want to move away, but I can’t tell if I sincerely don’t want to move away or if I’ve convinced myself of the overwhelming difficulty of doing so and/or the likelihood of my failing to accomplish anything but abject poverty and fatigue.

In other words, am I failing to appreciate what I’ve got here? Am I romanticizing city life?

Yes, and yes. I’m playing four blues festivals this summer, and I’m meeting lots of great players as I get around more. I can get any old job if I have to, and it’s not like I’ve ever really been career-oriented anyway – if I was, I’d have a better skill set by now.

In the city I’d be bitching about loneliness, commute times, and constant poverty. Cities are fun when you vacation there; when you live there it’s high rent, late busses, and so much social churn that it takes a great deal of time and effort to meet the right people. You’re working 40 hours a week just to cover rent and utilities and your fucking debt settlement program, and you find that every week you’re a little more tired and a little less likely to go out and meet musicians. (When I lived in San Francisco, everyone I did meet, on those rare occasions when I had the energy to go out, was just trying to save up enough money to move away.) If you lack discipline, you end up buying all that cute shit you see all over the place to pad your nest with, and you never take another vacation again. Five years later, you still have no equity, no savings, and you could have stayed in your grandmother’s attic for $150 a month and at least gotten to play some blues festivals. Your boyfriend is still a stoner because all of your boyfriends are stoners, you’re like a goddamned stoner magnet, and don’t forget that wherever you go there you are.

Or maybe not. Maybe you move to the city, get a job, meet awesome people, and have a gig in a couple of months. Maybe you’re so engaged and challenged and invigorated that you don’t actually just hole up in your apartment when you’re not doing your day job, maybe you finally blossom because you have access to the things you need. Maybe you finally meet a nice vegetarian Hindu boy, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Maybe it’s rural and small town living that makes you so weird, and your gut desire to get back into the city is a real impulse and not a daydream and it’s just a goddamned shame that it’s taken you this long to even be able to seriously consider it.

Being alone means that nothing keeps me anywhere; I could try anything I wanted.

Of course, there’s the question of where. Portland? Seattle? Chicago? DC? New York? And the question of how much: I don’t have any savings right now. I could probably move to Portland on a couple hundred bucks. New York would require, what, fifteen hundred minimum? Not to mention that not all cities are created equal; after you’ve been to Chicago and New York, most left coast cities barely qualify for the description.

Except I don’t think I want to move. I want to go on an extended vacation, but I can’t afford to because I don’t have a goddamned job.

And then there are the things I know about myself: I’m not particularly driven. When I have the time, space, and resources to do stuff, I don’t do it. One can only blame lack of stimulation so much before she has to admit she’s fucking lazy by nature. Right now I’m not getting my CCNA and I’m not working out and I’m not playing guitar and I’m not writing and I’m not meditating. I didn’t do those things when I was a housewife, I didn’t do those things the last time I was unemployed and had free time, and why would I be any different somewhere else?

But there’s no work here and I need a job! I have bills to pay!

Gawd! I am having such a hard time figuring out what I want to do, and where I want to do it. I couldn’t possibly waffle any more than I am. Why do I have to be such a fucking Libra all the time?!

A disappointing interview.

Work

In which it was really exciting there for a minute, but then my hopes were dashed.

I found a job under Tech Support on craigslist. It looked good. I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and clicked the link to apply for it. After I finished the online quiz – five fairly interesting but slightly dated tech questions I answered with the help of my boyfriend, Google – but before I was able to upload my résumé, my netbook halted and I had to reboot. I tried to finish the job application afterward, but the site wouldn’t let me back in nor would it let me start over.

Fast forward a week, and I get the following email:

Your name and email came through on our JobVite system notifying me that you applied for our Solutions Center Engineer position and have passed our initial essay quiz; however, your information is incomplete in our system. If you are still interested in this position can you please complete your profile on our site or send me a copy of your resume?

Oh boy, can I! I get all excited and email my résumé. It’s a telecommuting job; I’d get to work from home. The main company’s in Seattle and I’d have to go there for training, but that’s no biggie. Tech support from home! Talk about an excellent solution to my employment/location issues! Before the day was out I had two phone interviews scheduled for today.

I went and read through the employer’s entire site. I learned they’re solvent and growing and in desperate need of technicians. I even joined their forum and answered a bunch of support queries. For free.

I went to bed early and got up early. By nine o’clock this morning I had dressed, eaten, and even made my bed. I had a mug of tea and I was sitting in front of my computer with my Bluetooth headset on, ready to go.

First thing the caller says is that I need to be in front of a computer, ideally with a headset on, so that I can search for answers. Since I hadn’t been told any of this, I was pretty thrilled with myself for being so insightful. Then he proceeds to start off with a question I don’t know the answer to (“Name at least five ways programs can autostart with Windows, in addition to the Startup folder”), followed by two more (“What does it mean to back up the registry?” and “Are you an expert in msconfig?”) to which I have to answer, “I don’t know,” and “No, I’m currently not.”

viruses

There are five ways Windows starts applications? Okay. I didn’t know that. I figured there were two: launch the app at startup, and do not launch the app at startup. I mean, an app’s either in the startup list or it isn’t, right? I told the interviewer that while I was furiously googling “how does Windows launch applications?” and giving great phone (“Typically, when I’m looking something up, I chat with the customer so they don’t have to listen to dead air, but in this context I don’t really have any small talk,” I say. The interviewer says, “We just put them on hold,” which tells me they don’t give a shit about customer service and are probably metric-oriented. Hmm).

I’m not a registry jock; I’ve spent ten years working for ISPs telling people to take their virus-infested shit someplace else for removal. I’m in my own computer’s registry maybe twice a year, and in customers’ registries, like, six times in the entire past decade. Pretty much every employer I’ve ever had has considered registry edits to be a liability nightmare and consequently I haven’t learned much on the topic.

I tell the interviewer all this, admit that I don’t believe that I understand the gist of his last question, and then qualify that I can learn whatever I need to know pretty much right away. He brusquely tells me that I can’t. “There’s a three-day training for this position, and it presupposes a deep knowledge of registry issues,” he says. “To remove viruses that are so new AV apps aren’t defending against them, you need to understand how programs start with Windows and cut them out surgically.”

Ah. It’s a full-time virus removal job. Yuck.

While the job description does say, “Troubleshooting Windows XP platform to registry level,” it doesn’t emphasize that quite enough, IMO: there’s a bunch of other stuff on there that I’m actually really good at. I think it should say, “We do massive quantities of zero-day virus removal and we need registry phreaks. Your apprehension of TCP/IP is pretty much irrelevant to us because people call their ISPs for that shit.”

The interviewer somehow managed to make me feel stupid – I’m not! I p0wn support! – when he said, “Well, we really need people who actually know how Windows works, so I see no reason to continue this evaluation. I thank you for your time–”

“Your job description,” I interrupted, “says that you’re looking for responsible phone techs with networking skills and the ability to set up and troubleshoot LANs and peripherals. But what I’m hearing now is that you actually just do remote virus removal all day? Is this correct?” He affirms. I really don’t want to remove viruses for a living, but I’d been really excited yesterday and now I feel uncomfortable and belittled, like I’m wasting his time when his company called me for an interview. He starts to conclude the conversation again. I childishly interrupt again and invite him to have a nice day. The interview terminates.

Oh, well. At least I don’t have to remove viruses for a living.