January 2010
2 posts
5 tags
Without a Big Garden
“One time they picked me up and wanted me to go under a big elevator because the cylinder wasn’t working,” Pablo told me. He is 47, squarely built, with a creased, ruddy complexion and a sharp, elfish beard that shoots out from his chin at a 45 degree angle from the floor. ” [The guy] said he needed someone to go wipe off all the oil because he was going to pour new oil...
8 tags
Lip Serviced
The low-point of Josh Whittemore’s last job search was at a chain restaurant somewhere near Fresno “at the exact moment of the economic downturn, just when America was freaking out.
“I went to this open interview at one of the nicer restaurants, and it was just this super-long-line of slutty-looking chicks and douchy-looking guys and when I saw the guys that were doing the...
December 2009
4 posts
6 tags
'A Man With Brains Can't Starve'
Well, now that you know I’ve been working, there’s no point in keeping my vacation a secret. Tales of joblessness in LA to resume in 2010. In the mean time, here is an excerpt from Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. This passage, from Chapters five and six, is Orwell’s account of looking for work with a slovenly Russian friend in 1930s Paris, harder up than I...
2 tags
Coming Clean
This week marks six months of job interviews on Help Wanted. It is a good time to confess that not every one of these interviews has left me crestfallen and without a prayer of paying rent.
I could have four jobs by now, or if you include the scams and pyramid schemes, potentially as many as nine. Even so, it took me almost three months to get a job as a “paid audience participant,”...
6 tags
The Advocate
The office smelled strongly of pot—not of pot being smoked but of pot as potpourri, piled generously in invisible bowls somewhere. The floor was covered in astroturf and the walls painted with cartoon-like macaws and howler monkeys. It seemed a marvel that there was any work being done at all. But the Green Alliance was in the early stages of a spirited advocacy campaign, and I was...
9 tags
A Carless Majority
“With their cars, Angelenos go places,” Cees Nooteboom wrote in a 1973 essay called “Autopia”: “They travel infinite numbers of kilometers in a world that continuously remains Los Angeles.”
“For a Californian, leaving his car means leaving his own humanity, consigning himself to another power, abandoning his own will.” That is how Umberto Eco...
November 2009
5 posts
6 tags
Flashover
We met in a windowless, bald eagle-themed conference room. At one end was a bookcase where jugs of flame retardant stood as in a display case. “You pick a city” read the dry-erase board, alluding to a pushpin-riddled map of the Lower 48 on the adjacent wall. This represented U.S. Safety Inc’s upcoming wave of expansion. I spent a few minutes with another young man filling out...
6 tags
The Pursuit of Luxury
“TELEMARKETING—$200 Commission per sale” Click. “DP Exclusive design” said a screenshot at the bottom: “The pursuit of luxury.” “Requirements: Must be a hard-working and serious individual. Must be pleasant on the phone. Preferred experience in home improvement telemarketing.” I had to fight my way into an interview on the phone, playing...
10 tags
Ultra Fine Dining
“Do the forks go on the left or the right?” “Left,” I said. The fellow sitting across from me went back to work. A few minutes later, he looked up again: “What’s in a Cuba Libre?” “Rum and coke,” I said. Do you know what’s in a Cosmo or a Manhattan?” No answer, then, “A Manhattan is vodka and sweet vermouth.” It...
6 tags
Prepare For Revolution
Stepping in from the coastal fog of a Santa Monica morning, the hallways smelled of paint and plaster. This gave the impression of offices built and occupied hastily in the 11th hour, but the place appeared to be deserted. The internet flyer I’d seen said to “come early to avoid the lines.” Taped to a fluted glass panel on the door of Suite 200 was a printed sign that said:...
6 tags
Making Change
Canter’s Deli is a West Hollywood landmark, a stretch of three conglomerated storefronts on Fairfax where oversized signs hark back to an era when “Open All Night” was an anomaly. Today it seems like a pillar of the neighborhood—an establishment sort of place where politicians come to shake hands and earn blue collar credibility. Professional athletes smile down beside...
October 2009
4 posts
5 tags
Not a Bad Offer
One of the more difficult aspects of applying for jobs through classifieds in Los Angeles is that the people doing the hiring are often deceptively far away. Last week, I called a phone number for a promotions job in Hollywood and landed in the offices of Blue Ocean Theory near Camarillo, some 90 minutes up the freeway and on the far side of six state parks: LA’s metropolitan area is...
7 tags
Of Onions and Confit
On a wide plastic counter in a food court somewhere downtown is a 12 dollar slab of duck confit on whole grain bread that proves there is no ceiling to what people will spend on a sandwich. 300 S. Grand St., One California Plaza, Lower Level, to be exact: an address that suggests very large buildings. On the way there, I narrowly avoided a moving violation—“Bikes stop at red...
8 tags
Another Wave
There is a heavyset, ruddy man who stands like a bouncer at the entrance to the Wilshire Worksource Center. Gelled crew cut, gold chain dangling over his shirt and tie, he amicably nods visitors through the doors or down the hall, flush complexion and soft eyes conspiring to make him seem pleasantly drunk. Inside, 40 heads peer into the screens of 40 computers arranged along the shores of a sea...
6 tags
The Recessionaissance
According to the good people over at Goldman Sachs, “Two recent surveys of newspaper help-wanted advertisements and of employers’ inclinations to add workers were at their lowest levels on record.” It’s time to reconnoiter. Not too long ago, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke earned the perplexed disapproval of more than a few Americans when he declared the end of the recession:...
September 2009
4 posts
8 tags
60 Words, 120 Degrees
Gusts of hot wind swept up the block as I opened the door and stepped into a bath of air-conditioning. The placard at 611 S. Catalina bore the names of companies you might think existed only in the Yellow Pages: Links & Loops, Metrocon Co., Prime Consulting, Weddings in Mexico—the hidden cogs in California’s economy. Trusting the number over the name, I walked into...
6 tags
The Bajeezers
Even for the most menial positions, it is seldom that an interview does not tacitly enforce some kind of dress code. But this being a phone interview, I took the opportunity to leave my hair untamed and slouch in a bleach-spotted shirt and bare feet in an armchair by the window. The phone rang within a few minutes of the appointed time and a bubbly man named Julian introduced himself over the...
6 tags
Success
I stood before a linoleum and wood-panelled hallway whose spokes shot out in several directions, pairs of waiting room arm chairs placed at intervals throughout. To my right, a pony-tailed old man with jeweller’s glasses stood in a shop offering “reweaving.” To my left, an open door marked “Success Casting” and a generous dose of pomade, and below that, a man about...
5 tags
Moving Forward
A New York Times Travel article that hung by the bathroom put Alcove in the heard of “Los Feliz Village”. Like the designation of the surrounding neighborhood, this cafe and bakery full of eponymous nooks and spaces is best described as self-consciously quaint. Platters and tea kettles from your grandmother’s silver stand next to wooden cherubs on a shelf below the ceiling....
August 2009
5 posts
6 tags
The Comeback
“Come in,” Ray said. “What are you looking for?”
“Work. A regular job,” I said, wary of seeming like an actor.
“Well we don’t have any of those,” he told me. “This is all commission-based.” Ray Kender is a large man with a jolly nose and bulging arms that taper evenly into round, uniform fingers. He wore horn-rimmed bi-focals...
7 tags
Pick a Color
I found a spot next to a fellow named Sam who had an easy smile and a modern-day pompadour. He held a clutch of posters for his band, the Don Quixotes, on his lap. Should the front-desk opening at USA Hostels pass him by, he reasoned, he’d put up a few in the lobby anyhow. ”So are they going to take us one-by-one,” Sam wondered, “or just do some kind of a pow-wow?”
...
8 tags
Promote Yourself
I applied for an interview via text message after reading a particularly anonymous Craigslist posting about promoting LA’s hottest parties. “This is Anthony Rayes from ipromoteclubs.com,” the reply said. “Can you come to our offices at 1:30 tomorrow?”
The lobby and every inch of the elevator was gleaming black and chrome. Welcome to Beverly Hills. Three house...
The Choice is Yours
I entered the behemoth blue headquarters of the Church of Scientology through the bookstore on L. Ron Hubbard Way.
“Are you hiring?”
“We are!” chirped the young woman at the register. She handed me a thick application form printed on legal paper and a series of young men shepherded me to a wrap-around couch in the building’s vaulted lobby. Twice I knocked over a...
7 tags
A Room With a View
It had been ages since I’d ridden a good old corporate elevator. ”No elevator music?” I thought. I shuffled into place with my fellow passengers as we spontaneously organized ourselves along an invisible grid like toy soldiers on a factory conveyor belt. In the office lobby, a receptionist with a thick Slavic accent offered me water. Before I could decide, Kevin emerged...
July 2009
4 posts
7 tags
Perfect Score
Below the heading “Boston Educational Institute” on that company’s webpage are several blocks of Korean script. The whole would be utterly incomprehensible to me but for the words “IVY league,” “AP,” “Plan,” and “Alumni Interview,” which appear in English. These gave me an idea of the company’s marketing, and together with...
6 tags
Strip Mall Undercover
A recording on the listed phone number said that applicants must be 18 years of age and “in very good physical condition, as handcuffing is part of the job.” I jotted down the address, in a part of the Valley where street numbers stretch into five digits. I had to borrow my brother’s moped to make it to the interview, but the ad—“UNDERCOVER STORE DETECTIVE TRAINEES...
6 tags
The Mobile Office
Mr. Singh, his manager told me, was not hiring at this time. Yet an hour later, I jumped off my bike to answer the phone and made out a thick Indian accent over the whirring traffic of Silverlake Boulevard.
“I’ve taken a look at your resume. I would like to speak with you.”
The next morning, the same voice greeted me when I showed up a few minutes late to our appointed meeting...
6 tags
Masterminds, Slave Wages
Lately, as I scour craigslist each day, it seems I’ve been casting my net more widely than I should. So after responding to a posting for a minimum wage opening at a ceramics shop 8 miles away, I biked down to the interview at Songbird Ocarinas. It was far, and the pay was bad, but the woman on the phone had called her boss “a mastermind.”
Past downtown, past Korea town, past...
June 2009
1 post
June Gloom
Three weeks ago, I picked up and moved west to Los Angeles, following on the heels of generations of fortune-seekers since the Gold Rush. Only I didn’t pick the right generation. At 11.2%, unemployment in California is now approaching record levels, up 70% from a year ago. The state’s non-farm economy lost more than 60,000 jobs in each of the last three months, and 114,000 before...