Why is going to a place always the worst?
Greetings, slaves. This is a dumb blog where I will be posting angry stories about my hard life, for fun. The stories will specifically concern themselves with the moribund pleasures of job hunting, because that is of interest (to me and my mom.) So here we go:
The coolest thing that has happened to me, job interview-wise, happened about a week ago. In a fit of desperation I had applied for a customer service job with an e-cigarette company in Ferndale. If that sounds incredibly depressing–well, it was. But sometimes you are like, “Fuck it, I can sell some fucking electronic cigarettes. I don’t know what they are, or how they work, or where our culture is going, but I want to have a money so I can buy some goddamn yoga pants that fit, and if that means participating in online sales strategies with people who doubtless own ferrets, SO BE IT.”
So I sent in my resume with a dumb cover letter about how I “really wanted to utilize and enhance my current skills by working with [their] company”* and “th[ought] I was an ideal fit for the position,”* and lo and behold! I got a call from a lady with a low-class English accent, asking if I could make it to their Ferndale offices on Thursday where we would HAVE A TIME.
(I knew it was a low-class English accent because sometimes I watch “The Apprentice UK” because I am in love with Lord Allen Sugar and also because it awakens faint twitching memories of actual employment in my left nut. And they talk about accents a lot on that show because British people are almost as classist as Americans. Yes, this is a sad story, couldn’t you tell yet?)
This is what your heart does when you realize that you've applied for a job at an e-cigarette company . . . and you're excited about it.
I prepared for the interview by putting on my weird version of grown-up clothes (mid-length black skirt, purple turtleneck sweater, child’s size blazer (IT FITS, OK?), uncomfortable black leather wedges, and my least creepy stockings.) Then I Googled around on their weird site for five minutes or so. It appeared that they sold e-cigarettes AND e-cigarette accessories. I didn’t understand any of it because none of it made any sense. Then I ran for the bus.
To get to Ferndale, you have to take two buses, which takes forever. I had mapped the location and figured that I could probably hoof it from the “downtown” Ferndale bus station without too much trouble. This turned out to be a lie.
I had spent so much time “prepping” for the interview that I hadn’t remembered to eat, so my stomach was gurgling and my head ached abominably. The first problem was ameliorated by the scent of some of my bus mates; the second was exacerbated. It was a wet day; everybody smelled like dogs (except for me! I smelled like cheap conditioner!), and in the close humid quarters of the bus, you could smell it way down in your soul-pit.
In addition, I had strained my neck trying to do a new sit-up routine the night before (DON’T ASK), so every jounce of the bus vibrated up my shoulders and into the base of my skull. After a while, the rhythm became almost soothing, except for the part where I wanted to throw up. “Is this adult life?,” I thought. “Paining around on buses? This doesn’t feel much different from third grade.”
When I had to switch buses at the Cordata station, I took the opportunity to do two things. First, I bummed a light from a high-school girl with painted-on eyebrows (she asked me for a cigarette, but it was my last one). She was kind of gothy and great, and I wished that I could be in high school with her so that we could cut classes together and try to bum cigarettes–NOT E-CIGARETTES–outside the mall. I thought very wistfully about this as I puffed on my cig behind the Dairy Queen, trying to keep it from breaking in the heavy rain that had erupted.
The second thing I did was approach the sort-of-cute ginger dude at the bus station help desk. I asked him where I should get off on the Ferndale route in order to get as close as possible to the the e-cigarette company, which had looked so convenient to downtown Ferndale on Google Maps. He explained that it was five miles into the county, akshully, but that there would be a bus out that way in four hours or so. I just looked at him for a minute, and then he suggested that a cab ride from downtown would cost a mere ten bucks, IF the freeway was taken.
Feeling rather crushed, I dorkily stomped onto my bus. I had had fantasies of nonchalantly getting off at the downtown station, leisurely purchasing some kind of bland pastry, and then strolling all fancy and calm to my interview, enlivened becomingly by my brisk encounter with the elements. Instead, it was RAINING BALLS and the interview was FAR AWAY and SOON and I would have to get a WEIRD CAB and probably NO SNACKS and my hair was wet and all I wanted to know was WHO THE BITCHES WERE at that one goth girl’s high school, and O THE PAIN, O THE WHITE GIRL PROBS.
WHITE GIRL PROBS
So as my bus hurtled deep into the county, I felt very sorry for myself. I thought about Ferndale and how I didn’t understand it, how it might as well be another country. And I thought about all those white houses by the highway, flanked by waving pines that bent beneath the rain, and what it would be like to live by the highway, how you would never want to be on your porch because then people would see you. And I thought about how I didn’t really have the money for a cab, and I wasn’t going to get to eat until dinner, and I didn’t have anything nice for dinner anyway, and likely I wouldn’t get this job, and how even if I did I would hate this bus ride, and the whole thing seemed like a joke about futility and Modern America and BEING PLACES and this was not how I pictured my life in college, I never thought that e-cigarette mercantiles would be something I’d be aspiring to. And what would I say when they asked me why I wanted to work there? “BECAUSE I DO, OKAY?” How would I control my face?
Then I thought the right thought, which was “SACK UP HO. FOLLOW THROUGH ON WHAT YOU SAID YOU WOULD DO. GO DO THIS DUMB THING YOU CAN’T WIN. FOR HONOR AND BASEBALL AND SEAN CONNERY, JUST DO IT, AND THEN MAYBE LATER YOU CAN EAT BEANS OUT OF A CAN AND FEEL SELF-RIGHTEOUS OR SOMETHING.”
Then an amazing thing happened. The bus stopped on a weird corner in the county. And the worst girl in the world (plus her friend) got on, and I can’t even . . . So this girl was screeching, and she was also deaf, because she had a deaf accent, and she was about 15 and wearing flip-flops and a jean skirt and a polo, so of course she was screaming and shaking and carrying on, because she was cold because of her CHOICES, and she started monologuing and never really stopped for the twenty or so minutes we shared that tin container together, and it was awesome. Because I hated her so much–but she was deaf–but she was the worst–but she was also really, really cool. Like self-assured and full of life force. And her friend, a stocky stolid dirty blonde, was also awesome, because she kept saying these cool deadpan commonsense things whenever the deaf girl paused for breath. Like the deaf girl would talk forever about how cold she was, and then the dirty blonde would say, “Why didn’t you wear your coat?” and just give her a withering stare. And the deaf girl never knew quite what to say, so she’d pretend that the friend hadn’t said anything, and you could just tell that they had some kind of strange symbiotic relationship that only existed because they were both in high school and probs not too popular, but for now, it was working.
I found out a lot about them, and most of it was sad. Like there was some twenty-something dude courting the deaf girl, and he was a dick, and had refused to give her a ride home from the gas station once. And also they were both pretty hungry, just like me, and the deaf girl kept talking about Slim Jims. At one point, the dirty blonde piped up and said that there was food at her house, but her parents wouldn’t let her have any, because they were mad at her for quitting her job at Alcoa, where apparently she cleaned industrial machinery. And what would that be like? To go to school in the county, and then go clean a refinery, and wander the fields with your slutty deaf friend and have nobody notice you and be sort of hungry all the time because your parents were dicks?
This is a picture of the real Alcoa Intalco facility. The girl is not in it.
I loved those girls a lot, and I was sad to get off the bus when we got to Ferndale. But I did. There was about half an hour before my interview. I went to the ATM and then I tromped around looking for a coffeeshop to gather my shit in and call a cab from. But of course there was no coffeeshop in Ferndale. NO COFFEESHOPS IN FERNDALE, ASSHOLE. So I went into a weird bar and I called a cab and I threw five dollars at the waitress so she would get me some goddamned toast and I thought about answers to questions like, “What would a former supervisor say about you?” And I ate my damn toast, with its damn margarine, and then a man came into the bar.
He was rangy and wearing a weird necklace with hemp in it. He asked if anybody had called a cab and I said I had and then he proceeded to yell at me hella for not waiting outside and I almost started crying because he wouldn’t stop yelling at me, he was really incensed and it was really weird and I didn’t know what to do, because I couldn’t antagonize him because there was only fifteen minutes before the interview and also my feet were wet and I wanted to be in a car. So I just let him run on for a while until he shut up, and then I told him where I was going and asked him to take the freeway and he WOULD NOT, and I kept feeling more and more nauseous and before I knew it we were driving by lots of cows looking for a strip mall (for thence was the glamorous e-cigarette mercantile quartered), and it was all wrong and the meter just kept running up and up, way past where I could even afford it anymore, and he was calling the dispatcher to Google Maps things for him and my neck hurt from all the sit-ups and the interview was in five minutes and I knew, VERY HARD, that it was time for a yellening.
So I made the dude pull over and went WTF for a million years. “Like, WTF, you are a cabbie and the whole point of ordering a cab is that cabbies know how to be places, because that is like their entire job, and I don’t appreciate your yelling at me WTF unprofessional, and I’m also not paying for this whole thing because you fucked up, and now I’m late for my interview because of your dumbness, and also WTF you should have taken the freeway instead of relying on your instincts, which are terrible, WTF DIE.” And then he felt a little bit bad and the dispatcher got back to him and we were able to drive sort of close to the place (though of course I had to tell him how to actually turn off and get into the right place), and then he cut the cab fare in half. And my phone was shuddering and I knew it was the place and I knew I was seven minutes late but I didn’t care, I just threw some money and a tip at the guy, and he had the nerve to say, “At least things couldn’t be worse,” and I just looked at him and thought very dark thoughts until he looked down. Because that is how jobless bitches get it done (because we have no other resources.)
DARK THOUGHTS
I locate the e-cigarette store, and it’s exactly what you’d expect–thin carpets, broken bits of display cases, lots of licorice-scented tobacco flavorings, a weird young man bro crouching around in the background being the secret owner, a trashy girl who can’t get enough payments, a British woman who seemed liar-y, chairs that didn’t work, a dog, some exercise equipment, late-model Dells with way too many tabs open. This is how all e-cigarette companies are–you can tell, even though of course e-cigarettes are a New Modern Thing. And I said the things I usually said, and the British woman said what she was supposed to say, and we both knew that it wasn’t going to happen, but we were trying to stay energetic anyway and it was awful. Like she took me on a tour of nothing, and I found nothings to say about it, and we were full of nothing, big balloons. And then I said I had to be going, and she asked if I wanted to wait inside while I called my cab, and I couldn’t say that my cab had already taken all my money, so I said I’d be walking, and she was like woah, and then I made up a long thing that was true but sounded like a lie about how I walk everywhere in all weather and I love it, and it was so true/not true it was amazing, and the rain was a hard rain and I walked out into it, falsely cheery and in nine kinds of pain and wondering how the fuck I was going to get across the freeway. And I found a weird gas station, out there in nowhere with the grass and the sedge and the grass and the dead raspberry fields, and I trudged towards it, getting mud all over my stockings, and I bought cigarettes there and then . . . it is possible that I maybe hitchhiked a ride with this man.
He was a handsome man and he was buying Gatorade and as I wandered around the store, thinking of buying chips and also of how, exactly, I was even going to get into Ferndale, I noticed myself sizing up the people in there, who were: this handsome man, a cranky owner, an old man, and a disappointed lady. And I noticed myself knowing that maybe the best person to talk to was this handsome man, because he was young and had that U-shape between his eyebrows that nice men have because they worry about things. What I’m saying is, maybe I knew that the best person to ask for directions into town would be this man, because I knew before I even talked to him that he would give me a ride. Which he did.
Like, it was ridiculously easy–I asked him the best way to walk into Ferndale, and he looked at me and sighed and said he’d give me a ride, and that was that. His truck smelled nice and we talked about California and India and I felt a great relief. Like, maybe I should have been worried that he would murder me, but I knew that he wouldn’t, and also I wasn’t outside anymore.
He dropped me off at the bus station, where there was little shelter, so when bus came I got on it even though it would just be circling Ferndale for an hour before even going into town. Because I wanted to be warm. So I rode the bus for another two hours, and then I walked home, and I had blisters on my feet but at least there were beans there.
And the e-cigarette company never even called to formally reject me, but that’s okay. I think we both knew what we were, and sometimes it’s better not to pretend.
*HINT: I did not think either of those things! First off, I don’t want to enhance any of my skills by working; I just want them to naturally develop; secondly, unless the job involved pelting dancing oiled-up horse lords with e-cigarettes and torn Sharpied dollar bills, I didn’t believe that it would be an automatic fit for my skill set! (Those are my only marketable skills, dawgs.)
Tags: county problems, cute boys, humiliation, job interviews
