2.0somethings

If you’re like me, you feel inadequately trained for your job. In fact, you feel even less trained for other peoples’ jobs. Well, Watercooler Films has done us the favor of posting a series of 80’s training videos from the supermarket chain Publix. And they are amazing.

There’s nothing quite like listening to eight solid minutes of old people chattering to each other about their boring trip to the store, and, luckily, that’s exactly what “For The Older Customer: YOU Can Make The Difference” provides. As the old crank says, “I like the girls that pass out the free samples.” That’s a sentiment we can all get behind.

But then there’s “A Day in the Life of Maxwell Cart,” embedded after the jump. Listen in as a group of anthropomorphic cash registers and shopping carts unwind after a stressful day, and then get confronted by the fact that Cart Related Accidents caused $13,691 worth of damage in 1981, $15,172 in 1982, and a whopping $??,???.?? in 1984. The truth is powerful. Read the rest of this entry »

Someone has been stealing books from our store. I mean, it happens all the time, but I’m not talking about high school kids trying to sneak mangas out in their backpack. Specifically, I’m talking about this one guy, who’s a pro. We’re talking making off with entire shelves. He may just be an evil genius.

At least that’s what we’re telling ourselves. Because it probably shouldn’t be so easy for someone who isn’t an evil genius to steal from us, especially when there are so many of us walking around the floor all the time.

The guy’s working with an M.O., which is how we were able to connect a number of robberies over the past few weeks to the same perp. I first noticed a couple Mondays ago when someone asked for a Milan Kundera book and I noticed that there were none there, even though our computer told us there were plenty. Someone had just walked up to his spot on the shelf and apparently just shoveled them all into his bag and split. Then a few days ago, I noticed that it looked like someone had done the same thing to Camus.

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Last weekend, two of my friends from Boston made the long bus ride to New York to stay at my place. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing — they were on spring break and had called me at 11 Friday morning asking if it was ok if they came down that night.

One of them had already been to my apartment once. It was an accident, really — he had missed his connecting flight from New York to Utah and there was nothing for him until the next day, so he gave me a call. This was his fourth year in Boston, and one of my coping mechanisms when I first moved here was to say “I’ve lived in a city for the past four years, and this is really no different; it’s just bigger,” so as much as I felt the differences in culture between New York and Boston (and missed the latter), I guess I had intentionally ignored any differences in scale.

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Here is the only way I can envision myself getting a job at this point: I get another unpaid internship, plug away at that for a few months, let my supervisors see that I am good at and genuinely untroubled by the tedious, thankless tasks they give me and impress them enough that they make up some job for me on the lowest rung of the ladder for a tiny salary and I stay there for much longer than I should because it’s easier to just stay than go through the process of looking for a new job. But the problem with that is, how am I ever going to find that internship?

I’m not sure how I’ve ever gotten any jobs, to be honest. It must have been magic — and I’m not using that word as a sentimental way of describing the way circumstances come together perfectly; I mean it must have been actual literal magic. Like spells and cauldrons and shit. My resume is uninspiring (and unaccented), my cover letter banal, my interview dismal. The cover letter is the worst part, I think, because I am (ostensibly) a writer of some kind, and yet here’s my cover letter, and it’s about as boring a document as you’ll ever see. You’re supposed to talk about all your accomplishments, I guess, but the only accomplishment that sticks with you after going through my cover letter is how I accomplished to string together so many identical declarative sentences one after another. I did this. I did that. I learned this. I worked there. And I don’t know how to improve it, because talking about your successes is kind of hard when you think you’re a dumb kid with a lot to learn and not much success to his name just yet. (Which is not to say that I’m worse off than any of my peers. I think we’re all dumb kids with a lot to learn and not much success to our names, except for maybe a few exceptions. It’s just that many of my peers don’t seem to realize this the way I do, or at least they aren’t consumed by it.) I really am honestly a smart guy, I think, and a hard worker, but you can’t just come out and say that in a cover letter, because no one will believe you, and “I am smart” is probably just about the stupidest sentence in the history of language. My most valuable contributions to my employers are the kind of things you can’t really quantify or talk about without sounding like a complete bullshit artist. I do what I’m told quickly and without complaint. This is something, but go to an interview with just that and see how quickly it sounds like nothing.

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Here in good, old LA, there are two types of days I have: fun and not so much fun. The fun days usually involve going to a meeting or, even better, an interview in some industry stronghold. On these days I feel connected and encouraged. I return home, enthused, and bang out a script, outline or revision. Sometimes the fun days even involve hiking and/or running through pretty wilderness. The fun days also involve sun light and typically end with the preparation of a delicious family meal. The not so much fun days make up the rest of the time in between fun days (and the third kind of day: sensory depravation days spent watching entire seasons of The Wire on DVD). Not so much fun days usually involve me sitting near my phone (even though it’s a cell phone there is still something to be said for the sedentary lifestyle of waiting by the phone) waiting for it to ring. The phone calls I am waiting for are typically the people that I had met with earlier during the fun days. Not so much fun days typically occur on overcast days.

As I type this in my apartment in Los Angeles, the strike is over and done with but even though I’ve been here for over a month, this new post-strike environment is basically like starting over. Starting over in the same way that if you were the kind of person who really enjoyed watching elephants run and you move to Africa to pursue this hobby, and while you’re about to disembark en route to the tusk and trunk laden planes, a bunch of harmless but mischievous poachers pop out and pump the elephants full of tranquilizer darts. So now here you are, with the stub of your one way ticket to Africa getting soggy from your palm sweat (it’s hot in the desert) waiting for the sleeping behemoths to finally wake up and gore the poachers. That’s what things are like right now: waiting for the the industry to kick up some dirt and go charging up to full speed once more, giant, dripping penis flopping about in the arid, dusty wind. Eventually the current television season will collide with pilot season, causing a thundercrack of opportunities (or phrased differently, a solar flare of work, or a human spontaneous combustion of employment). And even now, in the still smoldering wake of the strike, options are beginning to shyly show themselves, like coy elves selling arboreal patchwork to humans on the roadside.

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