Have you ever started a new job and thought, “I’ve made a big mistake”? I have done that so many times that it’s embarrassing to bring up (good thing I’m not doing that, huh?) But how else can you determine that a job stinks? My argument is that you should be able to test drive new jobs, just like a car. No, you’re not going to discover what it’s like to drive a car every single day for years with an afternoon test drive, but at least you can pretend. With a job, you really don’t know until it’s too late.
I’ll tell you about one time I made a big mistake when I was headhunted. It was a fun month or so.
I was minding my own business, doing graphic art for a newspaper, when I got a call from some firm in San Francisco who wanted to hire me on the recommendation of a mysterious third party. I said great, I’ve always wanted to pay a billion dollars in rent, when can I move to San Francisco? No, no, they informed me. They were just the recruiting company. The actual company to work for was near me where everything was boring.
Wonderful.
The job was for a printing company and my position would be to set up digital files for Monopoly boards and puzzles. We’re not talking any ol’ puzzles, either. These were puzzles featuring the Golden Girls, Bob’s Burgers, Rick and Morty and a variety of other hip products. “Golden Girls?” I asked. Yes! THE Golden Girls.
So I went to the interview. It didn’t last long. They were all excited and said I could even take over the overnight plate printing machine and really help them out. It paid substantially higher than the newspaper (everything does in this century) and it was sort of a no-brainer. There was only one problem.
I had never printed anything in a professional capacity in my life. I have no idea who recommended me, perhaps they were highly confused, but I decided to wing it. I went into a large, hot, and repulsive factory that smelled like sure-fire cancer chemicals and pretended like I would eventually catch on to whatever they were doing. I remember taking a lot of notes and nodding a lot. I was also loaned a huge nine passenger van so I could drive several hundred miles away and get further training at their other location. The whole thing was surreal. I should’ve driven the van to San Francisco and rented it out as a studio apartment. I would’ve made millions.
Instead, I hung in there for each delicious paycheck until they told me it wasn’t working out. They may have said something about nothing printing out correctly, it’s all a bit fuzzy (like my printing), but the point is that I knew when I walked in there that I had made a big mistake, but it was too late. At that point in my life I was used to big mistakes. Working at the newspaper was the result a previous big mistake, as was the job before that, and I was kind of on a mistake roll.
I was really only there for the free puzzles and I didn’t get any. That was the real loss. They even had puzzles from old New Yorker covers, dang it.
My formula for success is to simply fail one hundred times first, and this story does have the inevitable happy ending. I must have hit my hundredth failure, because my new experience as a printer (right there on my professionally printed resume) got me a job at another printing facility, one that wasn’t hot and smelly. That one did work out. See? I knew I could wing it. I just had to wing it at the right place.
All of the above was written because I was thinking about our newest employee, here. A lot of people have no choice but to organize a job interview while working at their current job. Slight guilt may be involved.
I was actually told this by a manager. Good guy. It occurred to me while writing this that I hadn’t come up with a name for this woman. I thought I’d wait to see if any readers wondered what her name was (and I got tired of waiting too quickly).
Berle exposes my own ineptitude with remembering names. I know there are people who can remember everyone’s names days after introductions are made, but I still contend that those people are freaks.
This was taken from a text message to me from my friend Jim Randall (still trying to get his name up in the Google search results). Jim is smarter than me and he doesn’t instantly remember names either, so there.
Then Jim named Jasmine, saving me the trouble. Doesn’t she look like a Jasmine? Let me also say that caffeine is a very necessary ingredient for training videos. There are some where the narrator is using such a horrible monotone as he is reading endless text that I swear it has to be deliberate. Nobody could accidentally make such a video.
I enjoyed making this one. Once you get comfy, training videos are a pretty nice way to earn money. Watching training videos would make a very relaxing career. You could be fully trained just in time for retirement.
Once the show is literally over with the training videos, you have to go into the actual job. The people who make training videos aren’t there to help you.
We have a brief interlude with Shelby. Never say the S word. I’ve made this joke in varying ways in different strips, but that’s only because it bears repeating.
Interlude two. Why fall asleep in front of the TV when you can keep yourself awake with 30 second videos? What an age we live in!
Isn’t it fun to run into customers from your old job while at your new job? I honestly don’t know, because this is one that hasn’t happened to me. I’ve seen it happen, though. I’ve even been the customer.