The Show Must Go On

Well, I know it's been a bit since I've posted an update, but I now have the inspiration to continue posting, so hopefully someone out there is still reading this. I've returned to the states and am fervidly hunting for a job. Any job will do. By the way, anyone know of any openings?

Since the title of this blog is essentially "tomorrow," I thought it might be interesting to analyze the American can-do attitude from the point of view of the maybe-next-Thursday lifestyle I just left. This is no longer an expat blog. It's now a repat blog.

So far I've scheduled two interviews. The first of which was at the ambiguously named company, American Income, which I discovered to be some sort of sleazy, pension robbing life insurance company after looking into them. I didn't even bother to go to that interview. The second was with a company called Max Marketing. I should have been tipped off when I couldn't find a website for them. And the name should have been a dead giveaway. Try googling max marketing.... Did you try it? You'll notice that there are over six and a half million hits. If you actually bother to click on any of the results each link seems to be dodgier than the next. None of them were the company that I interviewed with. No website at all. Sketchy, right?

So I made it past the first interview. So what? There were three hoops to jump through for these assholes and I couldn't even bring myself to leap through the second. At the first interview, the receptionist greeted me with a glazed, automaton look in her eyes. As I waited, I sat reading a three-month-old copy of Vanity Fair while listening to her rattle off the same scripted phone call that I had received six times in a row. Word for word, it was exactly the same every... single... time. When I asked her about her day it was like talking to an answering service. "If you would like to know how my day is going, press one, para español pulsa numero dos." The boss of the company was even more robotic. As I stand here looking down the barrel of something approaching a career, that is the type of person I fear becoming. The Borg. I asked the boss of the office three different times, in three different ways, where he was from, and the only response I got was, "Nine months ago I was sitting exactly where you were," as if that actually explained his origins. He could have said, "my mother" or "San Diego" but it was the same thing every time. Nine months ago he came from where I was sitting. Great.

Trying to be optimistic about the fact that I was asked back to the second round of interviews in such a tough job market, I jumped on the opportunity to come back for the eight hour interview the next day (which was earlier today). I was told that I would shadow one of the "account managers" to get the gist of the job.

As I write this (and this isn't to brag so much as embarrass myself) I'm wearing a sixty dollar tie, a hundred dollar shirt, a hundred and fifty dollar pair of pants, and a hundred and fifty dollar pair of shoes, most of which I received as gifts for graduating college. I felt slick at the start of the day, and now I just feel like an overdressed douche bag. This is why: the opportunity to work for a marketing firm in a fast paced environment that they had offered me was, in fact, hocking coupons for pizza to unwilling passersby. "Anyone in earshot," as they put it. I'm in my best outfit slinging pizza. Motherfucking pizza.

It gets even better. Where do we go to bother people about buying shit they don't want? Their places of employ. And, incredibly, to all the employees of Max Marketing this sounded like a good idea.  Even better than that, the first building that we hit was a medical center. We were selling pizza at an outpatient rehab clinic. The first poor victim of the saleswoman I was shadowing was a diabetic woman in a wheelchair. She was trying to sell pizza to a diabetic. Just wait, there's more. Every day there is a second product that they sell just in case they can't sell the first. Today it was paintball. I shit you not: She was trying to sell pizza and paintball to a disabled diabetic.

After that I thought that things could only get better. Oh, no, they got worse. There was a group of groundskeepers outside the building trimming some trees. My trainer approached one of them and launched into her pitch. He rolled his eyes and with no Spanish accent at all said "no English." Clearly he spoke English and just didn't want to deal with her crappy pizza pitch. Was she deterred? Hell no. She simply pointed to the coupons and said "ten pizzas" demonstrating the number by waving one hand twice, and then "eleven money." Please, he's Latino, not mentally challenged. So we had already crossed the border into veiled racism and it was about 10:30 in the morning. I felt compelled to sheepishly mutter "lo siento."

I believe there to be two distinct types of embarrassment. The first is the type that you feel when you come to class naked, the second is the type that you feel while watching any film staring Ben Stiller. I experienced both simultaneously today. I was embarrassed to be seen with her and embarrassed for her. She had absolutely no qualms whatsoever about walking into a business with "no soliciting" clearly marked on the door and then soliciting. Even when it was the door to a biker bar called Prickly Pete's and her mark was the heavily tattooed, three hundred and fifty pound Prickly Pete himself. The door said "Solicitors will be flogged." He was shaking his head "no" as she pitched her pitch and I was standing right behind her trying to silently mouth "please don't flog me Mr. Prickly, I have nothing to do with this lady!"

Then it came time to break for lunch, thank god. She launched into some interview style questions as we walked, ostensibly part of the second interview. What are the three things that I think make me a good employee? My response was my punctuality, my personable nature, and my honesty, and then I told her "to be honest, this all sounds like a steaming pile of bullshit." As if to confirm what I had just said, she explained that it wasn't, because for every $11 book of pizza coupons you sell, you get four dollars, the boss robot of the office gets four dollars, and three goes to printing the advertising. In turn boss robot sends some of the money to his boss robot, who kicks money further up the line to the king robot. She explained that it was like a pyramid. I asked if she thought it might be a pyramid scheme, and she said she didn't know what that was. Welcome to American economics.

While she was trying to sell the pizza coupons to the bankers at a supermarket bank branch I just walked away. I feel truly sorry for the two dozen chumps being pimped out by Max Marketing Denver.

They told me "we try to keep a positive attitude," but this about sums up my attitude at the end of the day.

In conclusion, I am still jobless, but I still have my dignity, and if nothing else, I'm a little wiser. After all, who offers a management marketing position to a guy with a creative writing degree and nothing but teaching and newspaper experience? Ultimately I can only laugh at myself.