Friday, June 1, 2018

Jobs To Nowhere (Take I): The Post-College Comedown



Suggested Soundtrack: "Fast Car" (Tracy Chapman)

<Storyteller's Note: The following account is true, though strictly personal and anecdotal, is true. The names have been changed, masked or omitted to avoid retribution from the guilty.>


<i.>
Fall of '90: You're 26, and starting your first newspaper job out of college. You're not exactly doing cartwheels, having returned from Europe...where you played in a band, for God's sake!...but you cope by telling yourself: it's a means to an end. That's all.

You are working on a music bio, that might punch your picket out of this humdrum small town reporting job that you just accepted. Or maybe you'll find a better, hotter job, in some bigger city. Who knows?

Your boss also happens to be your former college editor, so you won't feel alone. The $250 per week wage isn't overwhelming, but should keep Dad off your back, as he didn't approve of this European lark that he felt certain would turn into you a couch potato for life. Little did he know that, in only a couple years, the mainstream media will seize on this image (I sleep in Mom's basement, so I can do the rock band thing), and package it for mass consumption, with a label to match ("slacker").

Alas, though. Not much will change, except for an exponential increase of crappy movies aimed at this newly-minted demographic, accompanied by a slew of instantly forgettable soundtrack albums, and pre-ripped jeans that can now fetch $25 and up at the mall. 

You duly put your head down, and dig into the job. The first year passes uneventfully, aside from the odd bust-up about this or that assignment...until the unthinkable happens, and your boss quits, just as your first year is coming to a close.


<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/insurance/incomeprotection/8821969/People-who-lose-their-jobs-are-left-with-nowhere-to-turn.html>


<ii.>
She hints darkly at her reasons. From what you gather, the demands of juggling home life against the daily grind have grown too difficult. Oh, and the nearest competitor -- located a half hour south, along the lakefront -- is offering her more money. An offer you can't refuse, as the Godfather would say. 

Now that your boss is flying the coop, she won't miss any of it, judging by remarks like these: "Hell, look at all the time I spend in the darkroom every week, developing all this film every week. When i started, that was never even discussed."

You nod grimly, and go back to work. The novelty of a second shift schedule (I start at 1 p.m.? Wow, I can sleep in!!) has long worn off. You feel your prime years slipping away in a haze of government meetings, the occasionally interesting feature, and plenty of busy work. The only relief comes on Friday, when your boss leaves at 5 p.m. 

The paper is delivered nightly to a printer -- actually, a sister paper in the chain -- some 60 miles away. You quickly suss that the building empties out once the driver shows up, which frees you up to leave by 8 or 9 p.m. It's only a small perk, but one you can milk to the hilt.

This issue surfaces at your last evaluation, just before your boss heads out the door. "I know you're not staying till 11 p.m. on Fridays," she comments, casually. 

You fight the urge to panic (Ah, shit, she figured it out!). Instead, you smile, nod, and before you ask if all is forgiven, quickly change the subject. She doesn't respond, because it's not her problem anymore. 

How much you can enjoy isn't clear, since you typically get home when people are in bed. It's a situation that bodes ill for any social life, let alone a dating one. How do you explain you're still living at home, because you can't afford your own place? That's a real romance killer right there. 




<iii.>
In any case, you don't have time to ponder the finer points of your existence. By years two and three, the atmosphere is sharply deteriorating, The general manager you first met got fired. His replacement is a great photographer and amateur human being whose home life inspires endless office gossip -- especially after he starts moving all his personal items, including his daughter's bed, into the rear storage room, kick-starting a period that lasts several months.

You constantly butt heads, not least because he's a stickler for Prussian-style punctuality -- not a minute late, dammit, or risk getting bawled out, or written up -- and arbitrary decisions, like his sudden decree to show up at 9 a.m. on Sundays. Aside from getting a head start on  the police log, or chasing the occasional fire, this whole thumb-twiddling exercise is largely pointless. To your new boss and general manager, though, it's all about looking busy.

In response, you begin working on your own projects, using the raw materials -- reporter's notebook, folders within folders, and the Recycle bin (a great way to temporarily hide rough drafts) -- to mask those efforts. The $100-400 you're now picking up per freelance article is proving a welcome supplement to your crap wage. Oh, yeah, and after a year of searching, you've finally found an agent for your book. Things are looking up. On that end, anyway.

You receive no raises for years two, three and four, but your bills never sleep. Among other responsibilities, you're carrying a $250 per month car payment, plus another one for your $1,750 college loan. (You're so poorly paid, it feels more like $17,050.) This is why you're still living at home, and putting bigger purchases -- like new pants -- on layaway. That even applies to leisure pursuits like the CD player and dual deck you need to dub, sell and trade bootleg live tapes, which you then sell -- yet another sideline you've developed, out of necessity.

The new general manager fares better. He comes and goes at odd intervals: no 10- or 11-hour days for him. His shirts and pants always look rolled right off the laundry press, and -- like all members of his class -- he drives a tanklike SUV that you always have to maneuver around, to avoid hitting in the parking lot.







<iv.>
The overall mood towards the town you cover verges from bemusement, to outright contempt and distaste, depending on the assignment. There's the series of drug busts that the newly-arrived police chief orders, during the summer of your second year, to burnish his reputation. The total haul is $4,800 of crack cocaine and marijuana, between a dozen arrestees, or $480-something per person. Hardly enough to melt the paper, as Richard Pryor might suggest.

Those subtleties seem lost on the beat cops whopping up their success (small as it is) back at their HQ, where they're chowing down boatloads of pizza and bread sticks that the chief has ordered for them. You don't support the drug war, but there's no point in arguing here, so you just focus on getting specifics on the raid. You're a stranger in a strange land, and that's the end of it.

By the fourth and fifth years, your exit strategy is in full swing. You begin looking westward, to Chicago, which seems a bigger, more inviting target than the Grand Rapids and Lansing job markets you've failed so miserably to crack. The woman that you've met, and plan to marry, has moved there ahead of you, so it's time...at long last, time...to make it official.

Your home life, such as it is, is crumbling. Your father's contracting business is withering. due to a lethal combination of an overextended credit line, his own mistakes, and an equally flatlining economy that's scared people from spending money. Your job passes in a haze of fruitless attempts to form bands, or getting your book up and running, amid the never-ending mind games at work.

There's the memo, for instance, that suddenly pops up on the bulletin board, ordering you not to cash your meager paycheck until the official end of business, at 5 p.m. It's a handy reminder, if you needed one, of the paper's shaky underpinnings. Maybe that's why you're starting to see gaps in your paychecks that don't match the pittance you're used to getting every two weeks.

You feel uneasy, but say nothing. With your freelance career in full swing, you can make up the losses, for now. Being a young man, you're not sure what your rights are, and nobody seems in any hurry to explain them. But the biggest reason for keeping your mouth shut is the simplest: you might lose your job. As crappy as it's gotten, you'll need it to earn some additional money for your long-awaited Chicago move.




<v.>
By the fall of your fifth year, you finally make it official. Even though you haven't lined up a job in Chicago, you resign from the paper anyway. Enough is enough. Being a risk taker by nature, you're itching to move on. You've saved around $1,700, after following your future wife's advice to stop paying all those pesky bills. You'll need money for the move, and you don't anticipate seeing Michigan again any time soon. Your creditors will have to get over it.

Anyway, the money from all those reviews, retrospective articles and short pieces should tide you over for awhile, right?

Wrong. The $1,700 that you worked so hard to set aside will evaporate after your second month in Chicago. The struggles don't stop, although there are consolations. You live only 10 minutes or so from a lakefront ringed by glitzy restaurants, stores and luxury housing that neither you nor your girlfriend could ever afford. Welcome to city life. --The Reckoner



Until Next Time: After a failure to make urban life halfway tolerable, Our Humble Narrator flees back to Michigan, where he and his wife claw their way up out of poverty, and find some measure of hard-won stability. Before long, however, Our Humble Narrator's new job soon finds ways to spoil that old maxim: "The devil you know is the better than the one you don't." As you'll quickly find out, the former can be just as bad as the latter. Stay tuned, then.


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