I'm Only Here for the WiFi (5 page)

As for the interview itself, this is where all those nebulous-but-oh-so-desired “people skills” come in. And what exactly are all these vaunted people skills? As I understand the term, they include the following:

•
 Shaking someone's hand with the right combination of firm
and welcoming so that you appear to be neither challenging the person to an arm-wrestling match, nor offering the back of your hand to be kissed like some kind of Southern belle at a debutante ball. (It also helps if your palms do not have the humidity level of a terrarium.)

•
 Looking people in the eye when you talk to them, but not so much that you look like an infomercial salesman on hour nine of the all-night telethon.

•
 Being self-deprecating without being a Paul Giamatti character.

•
 Taking charge of situations, or at least appearing to take charge of them while you browse Wikipedia articles at your desk.

•
 Making light conversation that puts others at ease, and never feeling that terrifying need to keep talking when you're nervous that leads you to ultimately reveal the anxiety-induced constipation you've been battling leading up to the interview.

In reality, the interview will probably be pretty straightforward. You'll likely get questions thrown at you like, “What is your biggest flaw?” This is largely an opportunity for that irritating go-getter from middle school SGA to say something like, “Well, I guess you could say I'm a perfectionist,” prompting everyone to projectile-vomit on each other.

You'll also be expected to discuss various aspects of your work
experience, the kind of person you are, what your future goals might be, and other topics that you can essentially tap-dance over with Exactly What You Think They Want to Hear. The truth is, there are no right answers. It's just kind of a feeling that people get—the feeling that says, “This guy/gal is clearly the missing piece to our Accounts Receivable puzzle!” It's an instinct that cannot be explained by science, and is largely responsible for the inexplicable business success of utter toads like Donald Trump.

But what happens when you actually get the job? After clawing your peers' eyes out for the chance at an interview, only to all but promise your firstborn to get the job, it's hard not to feel mystified and more than a little nervous as to what to expect. The good news, however, is that there will be a few constants when it comes to workplace hazards. No matter where you go, you will always find four things: your best friend, your worst enemy, a reason you want to quit, and a reason you are terrified of actually quitting. Every job, in every sector, has these. What will they be? Based on my humble experience in the three major fields of work you might be getting into, I feel more than qualified to take you on a mini-tour of the Carnival of Horrors that awaits you.

Here you will learn to love your drinking buddy. Since one of the major pluses of working in food service is not having to get up until around 2:00 p.m. (with the agonizing exception, perhaps, of Sunday brunches), going out after work for a few rounds is pretty much the professional sport of the restaurant world. Everyone likes to meet at an after-hours place, get shitty on Rumplemintz and whiskey, and get on the merry-go-round of casual sex partners the work environment provides. If you can find your own personal drinking bestie among the crew, you have found your savior. With her, you can gossip about coworkers, bitch about front-of-house bullshit, rag on customers, and cover each other's backs while you eat like a squirrel, crouched behind some refrigerator. In food service, a workplace best friend is indispensable.

One thing that is often notably lacking in office work environments—something which food service tends to have in abundance—are people who can just kind of chill. They don't have to be the weed dealer of the HR department, but they should at least be able to shoot the shit and kick back at a decent happy hour. Oftentimes, the stress of the “let's-gouge-each-other's-eyes-out-to-get-ahead” work environment manifests in coworkers who are
legitimately afraid of relaxing with one another, lest they get Brutus'd sometime in the middle of March when their guard is down. If your office doesn't have a cool person, I recommend suicide.

If there is one thing that you need for a happy life in a retail environment, it is someone who is looking for shifts. It's 9:00 a.m., you went out drinking the previous night, you are too hungover to even look out the window, let alone go deal with eight hours of refolding stacks of T-shirts, and you are supposed to open the store in two hours. If you don't have a trusted colleague who is always looking to pick up some last-minute hours—you, sir (or ma'am, I don't know you), are nobody.

You will undoubtedly encounter, during your time as a food service worker (whether you're spending it as a food runner, busboy, waiter, hostess, or—holy of holies—bartender), the dreaded Evil Manager. This is the person whose entire life is based on making the dining establishment a living hell for her employees, an endless labyrinth of redundant napkin folding and petty corrections over minor errors. For, you see, the Evil Manager has just the smallest, most lethal dose of power over a very concentrated
pool of victims—and she is going to wield it in the fullest.

There is one person who, no matter how much you enjoy your job or feel that you perform to a satisfactory degree in the eyes of your bosses, will make you want to wipe him off the planet with an oversized bottle of Windex: the go-getter. This is the person who consistently comes in way before it would be considered appropriate, leaves later than anyone else in the office, and is deliriously happy to take all that sweet, sweet extra work that no one else wants to do. The thing about an office environment is that it's a delicate balance of demonstrating what you can physically do as opposed to what it is realistic to do. Yes, technically, we could all come in at 6:00 a.m. and leave at midnight while taking some work home—but we shouldn't. However, if someone on the team takes it upon himself to prove that such a workload is, in fact, completely feasible—the rest of you are absolutely screwed.

Your worst enemy here is the customer. You spend your days cleaning up after people who think that a dressing room is their own personal playpen in which to throw things around to amuse themselves, and the products you've so lovingly arranged are there to be destroyed at their leisure.

Because spending all day staring at people eating delicious-looking food that you have zero time to eat, all while living off tips that some customers seem to get a kind of sadistic thrill out of cheating you on, can become grating after a while. It's clear that some people get sucked into the relatively easy money of tips and find themselves, long after they'd hoped to move on to something that doesn't leave them smelling like bacon/a deep fryer at the end of the day, locked into expenses that they can only cover with a good Friday night shift.

Despite all the societal benefits that an office job undoubtedly provides, it also often leaves you with a feeling of perpetually being at work. There is always something more that can be done—a project to polish, an e-mail to send, research to do—and you know that for every minute you just chill out watching TV and eating take-out Thai food, some insufferable go-getter a few cubicles down is efficiently squirreling away lots of extra work to bring in and show the bosses the following morning. The job, in some ways, begins to infiltrate and consume other aspects of your life—as it is often considered “not a job, but a career” (i.e., something that you are expected to sacrifice a normal social/romantic life to get ahead in).

There are relatively few fulfilling aspects of a retail job, to be honest. The money is often decent, but never good. You have few options for upward mobility. The customers, as previously mentioned, are egregious. Oftentimes, stores will give you a discount that is just high enough to keep you spending your whole paycheck on their overpriced products. The daily grind of this tends to wear on you, until you have a hard time thinking of any job in the entire world—including the person who scoops up horse poop at rich people's farms—as less enticing for one reason or another.

The tips. The sweet, sweet tips.

Once you get sucked into an office job—and by that, I mean you've invested enough of your soul to make it seem like a part of your life, the way another human being might be—there is a sense of obligation about it. You've already climbed, say, six rungs up the corporate ladder (and had to step on the faces of some decent people along the way), so why would you bail out now? Office jobs often have a tendency to define you, as they have the unfortunate reputation of being “your real job.” People in the service
industries will often talk about how they're just making money while they wait to find the real thing, and once you get a lock on said actual job, it's hard to let it go. You are no longer just “Sarah, blond girl and skilled maker of pancakes,” you are, “Sarah, blond marketing director for That Company Over There.” Even if we end up hating it, it has often crept into too much of who we are as a person to just drop it.

The discount, though not enough to keep you locked behind a cash register on its own, is part of an overall comfort zone you can easily slip into when working retail. The money is just enough not to be bad, usually, and the job is often so easy that leaving it seems like more trouble than it's worth. The tired complacency that leads us to stay in shitty retail positions for extended periods of time is something that should have its own pharmaceutical to combat.

So, as you see, every job you can possibly hope to have in life is going to have its ups and downs. Sometimes you might feel as though the entire professional world is conspiring against you. The important part is finding a life outside of work that fulfills, excites, and challenges you, because there are few things worse than having an identity entirely wrapped up in and defined by something that you can one day get fired from. We've all had
brunch with those people who are incapable of talking about anything except their workweeks and various interesting things that happened to them with colleagues you've never heard of and/or don't care about, and we know how tedious it is for everyone else, so it goes without saying that this should be avoided.

But having a job is essential to life, and no matter how we choose to spend our working hours, we're going to need to do something. Maybe, in order to maximize the amount of enjoyment we get out of working versus how many nights we go home and bang our heads repeatedly against the wall, we should come up with some kind of checklist for jobs we should be looking for. What is important, though? What are the deciding factors for what is going to make a job both attainable and fulfilling? Assuming that the world is just a sparkly merry-go-round of perfect jobs to pick from, what are the qualities that you could ultimately forgo in order to be happy overall?

There are those among us who put top priority on our social lives. For those folks, it is essential to go out and stay out late, to try new things, to make friends, to be “on the scene” —whatever “scene” that may be. Regardless of who is going to condescendingly talk to you about how you're “getting a little old for this nonsense,” your goal in life is to have a rich social calendar filled with activities and fabulous people and the errant bottle of champagne opened with a sword. Guess what, though? A huge number of jobs kind of cut that lifestyle off at the knees.

We all think, on some level, that we can beat the system when it comes to balancing work life and play life. And, yes, a couple coke-fueled, completely fucking insane traders working at some huge investment bank in Manhattan manage to pull off eighty-hour workweeks and six-hour benders at clubs—but you are not one of them. And, plus, have you met them? Or, God forbid, worked with them? Because I have. (Met one, not worked with one. I'm happy to say that I've never held a job sucking the blood out of little children's dreams at some Patrick Bateman–filled investment bank.) And you know what they're like in person? Horrifying. At least the ones I've met. I was once lucky (?) enough to have an in-depth conversation with one of those fabled workaholic financiers about the circus-esque logistics of his life and the realities of having such immense professional pressure at the age of twenty-five. This was essentially our exchange:

Me:
So you must work really long hours, don't you?

Him:
Yeah, we usually get into work at around 8:00 a.m. and don't leave until at least nine-ish. Sometimes we're there until midnight or whatever, it really depends.

Me:
Damn! How do you have time to do other things?

Him:
We go out and party all the time. I would say at least a few nights a week we go out to a club and stay there until 5:00 a.m. or so.

Me:
And you're not tired?

Him:
I'm tired all the time! Are you kidding? But that's just part of the lifestyle, kind of.