Tuesday, March 4, 2008

The Job Hunt

Posted by Chris in carnivals, chris sartinsky, internships, jobs, vomit

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.

And maybe the biggest problem standing between me and another internship is that I don’t want another internship. I have been out of school for more than nine months now. I think it is about time to move on to salaried employment. I mean, how many unpaid internships can a person possibly have? What if this stretches on for years and years and I never break through that wall separating chumps and real employees and I’m 40 showing up two days a week at some magazine or advertising firm or something wearing jeans and a polo shirt, refreshing cnn.com all day because my supervisor (an Ivy League grad, 25 years young) can’t think of any busywork to invent for me? And hell, is it any better a year after college than it would be at 40? Maybe, but I am anxious to be past that. An unpaid pretty-much-anything wouldn’t just be running in place. It would be a step down. And “I’m taking a step down and hoping for the best” isn’t the kind of thing you’re ready to say at 22 in a new city that you’re just getting used to that still scares the holy hell out of you sometimes.

When I was 19, I spent the summer interning at a magazine in Hartford. And then the summer after that, I applied to ESPN for an internship there and also at the local amusement park, just in case the ESPN thing didn’t shake out. Well, the ESPN thing didn’t shake out and the amusement park thing did, so I went from Editorial Intern in summer ‘05 to Ride Operator for summer ‘06. Because if I tried making jokes with the whole parallel structure thing it would become unbearable pretty quickly, I’m just going to embrace the artifice and list things that were true about each job (if you have more tolerance for the parallel structure than I do, feel free to construct your own sentences with the format “I went from _____ to _____.”)

editorial internship:

AIR-CONDITIONED OFFICE

VALUABLE EXPERIENCE

GETTING BYLINES

ride operatorship:

EXPOSURE TO SWELTERING HOT SUN/COLD RAIN AND WIND

$7.65 AN HOUR

CLEANING UP VOMIT

So I was afraid, as that summer approached, that I was doing something very stupid and regrettable. You’re supposed to progress from low-wage summer jobs to internships to full-time professional work; I was going backwards. At this rate, my first move after graduation would be to start a lemonade stand.

I spent about half my time at the park working in the Skycoaster tent. The Skycoaster is most commonly known as the bungie-jump-type ride-thing, even though it’s more like a giant slingshot. You put on the flight suit and are hooked up to all these wires and get taken (very slowly) to the top of a big tower, 180 feet tall. And then you pull the ripcord on your suit and you freefall for something like 60 feet before the wires kick in and send you flying out over Kiddieland and you swing back and forth for a little while. It is terrifying the first couple of times, but it is great fun. Whenever there was down time, us Skycoaster folk would fly each other (ostensibly “advertising,” since the general public had to cough up $20 to ride), so I got to go on this thing (which I never would have paid for otherwise) over and over again that summer.

There were days, of course, when the park was packed, and we were pretty much working all the time, strapping people into suits and sending them up there and then catching them and bringing them down and hooking up the next crew at the same time. But there were also days when the park was almost empty or no one was coming on the ride for whatever reason, where the four or five of us young adults aged 16-30 would just sit in the tent and mess around. Because if adulthood is being set someplace, then we weren’t young adults, really, but children who-through some incredible oversight-were authorized to inspect and operate heavy machinery and ensure the safety of thousands and thousands of people that summer. And calling it an oversight is not to say that we weren’t pros. Just that everyone there was in their own strange, unique place in life-some were adults who were just looking for an extra paycheck, others were legitimately kids getting their first summer job and then there were those of us who were in college and hanging awkwardly between big-C Childhood and big-A Adulthood. But from top to bottom, we all shared a couple of things, which were 1) a relief to find others who were just as confused and misplaced as we were, and 2) a joy that — for a few months out of the year, anyway — confusion and misplacement were OK and-in fact-really fucking fun.

We poured ice water on each other (sometimes with permission; mostly without). We made up games whose sole purpose was to get an opportunity to punch someone else on the arm. We had a huge fan called King of Fans (this was its brand name, and it was well-earned, I must say) and so we put things like flowers or pieces of paper through the back into the blades and watched the King of Fans just slice through and obliterate them. (A fly once went through the King of Fans, somehow got flying again, went through a second time, was still crawling around, went through a third time and finally crawled away into the grass. That bug became the King of Flies.) And we teased each other mercilessly, which was always fun.

The first question anyone asks when I mention that I worked at an amusement park is the aforementioned vomit thing. To answer that question: one of the rides I worked was called the Twister. So, yes.

The only vomit (or “Rainbow,” as the phenomenon is known in amusement park walkie talkie code) story worth telling took place when I was operating the Twister. The line of the Twister is right below the Skycoaster’s tower, so when you’re at the top of that and just about ready to pull the cord, you’re hanging right over that line. The park was pretty crowded that day, and the ride was going and I was watching it when I heard a loud smacking sound behind me, near the Twister’s line. And then I heard the dozen or so people waiting to get on my ride yell things like “Aah!” and “Ugh!” in unison. I turned around and saw that people were jumping back from something, and then I saw someone coming from the Skycoaster tent with a broom and the Rainbow Kit (which is basically a bottle of Windex and a sack of kitty litter). The kids at the top of the Skycoaster had thrown up, and their vomit had plummeted 180 feet and had come within a yard or two of landing on all those people. They were white and shivering and asked one another if they were OK, as if they had just survived a plane crash.

What did I learn that summer? (Besides what vomit sounds like hitting the pavement from 180 feet up?) Nothing, maybe. And it’s not like it was a blast for 32-40 hours a week all summer. It was exhausting, and the weather could make the job awful, and working Kiddieland was — more often than not — a nightmare I wouldn’t wish on anyone. But if you gave me that summer back and let me choose between some ESPN internship and working at that park again, I’d take the park again in a second. Wouldn’t even have to think about it.

Now, does this mean that I am wrong to be worried right now? I don’t think so, for a lot of different reasons. For one, I had nothing but time that summer, and the longer I go right now without nailing down something permanent, the more time works against me. That and I had the luxury of living rent-free back then (and oh how I pine for those days). And while it is possible that I’ll have a lot of fun at some new internship, it can’t possibly be as unique an experience as that amusement park was-no matter how good your best office story is, it’s probably still pretty boring. But maybe I just need to remember that it’s not always that obvious, and that if you get a good time and some good stories out of something, no one can tell you it wasn’t worth it.

Chris Sartinsky is a writer for the Onion News Network and keeps a fine blog of his own. Read his previous 2.0somethings columns here.

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